The intel-to-newsroom pipeline is both nauseating and dangerous.
The intel-to-newsroom pipeline is both nauseating and dangerous.
T he current relationship between the intelligence community and major media is not just uncomfortably chummy, it’s dangerous.
We’re in a bad place when the “watchmen” of our republic are apparently at the beck and call of professional liars, dismissing the worst abuses by intelligence officials and platforming them with plum newsroom “analyst” gigs.
Under John Brennan’s leadership, the CIA spied on the United States Senate.
Brennan’s flunkies created a fake online profile to access the network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Democratic members were at the time investigating the CIA’s torture program. Once inside, CIA agents read emails written by Senate investigators. The spies then made criminal referrals based on bogus information. During this entire ordeal, Brennan lied repeatedly, both publicly and behind closed doors, about the spying.
Brennan currently serves as a national-security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.
Elsewhere, a 2018 report by the Justice Department inspector general found that disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe had leaked sensitive information about the Hillary Clinton email investigation to members of the press. According to that report, McCabe lied to his boss, then–FBI director James Comey; lied to members of the FBI’s Inspection Division, sometimes while under oath; and lied to agents for the Office of the Inspector General.
McCabe currently serves as a senior law-enforcement analyst for CNN.
As the director of national intelligence, James Clapper testified under oath before a congressional committee that the National Security Agency had not, in fact, collected data on millions of Americans. It had. He lied.
Clapper currently serves as a national-security analyst for CNN.
Despite their egregious lies, these men have gone on to have successful careers in news media, serving as supposedly trustworthy and reliable “experts.” Never mind that they had no qualms about lying for personal, professional, and/or ideological reasons. Never mind their exceptional abuses of power.
Despite having every reason to distrust these agencies and the men who head them, the press has adopted an almost reflexively pro-intelligence-community position in both its news coverage and commentary. Indeed, it’s not just hiring these washed-up spooks; it’s also promoting the intel communities’ preferred narratives. This latter trend especially reached absurd heights this past week when the New York Times went to bat for a CIA warrantless spying program opposed by Republicans and Democrats.
“G.O.P. Threatens Spy Agencies’ Surveillance Tool,” reads the headline. The subhead adds, “With hard-right Republicans attacking federal law enforcement agencies and unwilling to extend their broad powers, a major warrantless surveillance program targeting foreigners overseas may face new limits from Congress.”
Remember, in the Times’ framing, it is the Republicans who are the bad guys, not the agency with a “warrantless surveillance program.” The story’s framing is even more comical when one reads the opening paragraphs:
An intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the F.B.I. with charges of political bias has imperiled a program allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool and amplifying demands for stricter limits.
The once-secret program — created after the 9/11 attacks and described by intelligence officials as crucial to stopping overseas hackers, spy services and terrorists — has long faced resistance by Democrats concerned that it could trample on Americans’ civil liberties. But the law authorizing it is set to expire in December, and opposition among Republicans, who have historically championed it, has grown as the G.O.P. has stepped up its attacks on the F.B.I., taking a page from former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.
You’ll note that Democratic opposition to the surveillance program does not inspire similarly negative coverage by the Times. The paper’s ire is reserved exclusively for Republicans. Also, let’s not forget that the Times won a Pulitzer in 2006 for its efforts to uncover the scope of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which surveilled a rotating list of both domestic targets as well as “about 5,000 to 7,000” individuals overseas “suspected of terrorist ties.” The Pulitzer committee even gushed at the time that the paper’s “carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping” had “stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.”
The Times article also includes the following lines (emphasis added):
But far-right lawmakers have embarked on a louder and more politically loaded effort to fight the measure. They have seized on official determinations that federal agents botched a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser and more recent disclosures that F.B.I. analysts improperly used Section 702 to search for information about hundreds of Americans who came under scrutiny in connection with the Jan. 6 attack and the Black Lives Matter protests after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
This is such a generous and charitable retelling of the wiretap scandal as to be near-identical to state propaganda. For the record, the FBI, which had good reason to believe that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign fabricated the Russian collusion story from thin air, submitted inaccurate, incomplete, unsupported, and even intentionally falsified information to justify its surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign.
What are we even doing here, folks?
The press’s reverence for the intelligence community is precisely why we had the multiyear Russian “collusion” news cycle, which turned out to be a shameful waste of time. The idea that the Kremlin installed Donald Trump in the White House lasted for as long as it did precisely because credulous journalists kept repeating bogus “tips,” “leaks,” “scoops,” and “bombshells” from supposedly in-the-know intelligence operatives. We know that members of the intelligence community are not above lying. Indeed, when it comes to spycraft, lying is as much a part of the job as is filing reports. Worse, we know members of the intelligence community have historically played the press as political pawns, using a number of propaganda tactics including “stove-piping.” (For those unfamiliar with the term, “stove-piping” is a laundering technique whereby state leaks to the press are used later by the state as justification for further action.)
The press’s deference to current and former members of the intelligence community, whom it treats as objective and honest brokers, is an ongoing scandal. This relationship is a danger to an open and free society. If any part of government deserves particular scrutiny and distrust, it’s the intelligence wing: agencies such as the CIA and the NSA, which rely on subterfuge and sleight of hand, and the officials who lead them. Left unchallenged by the so-called Fourth Estate, these powerful agencies will do what every powerful government agency does when left unchecked: amass more power, at the expense of the common man.
If spying on Senate staffers wasn’t scandalous enough for our media — scandalous enough to earn agencies such as the CIA permanent, unswerving scrutiny from the press — then what is?