They just can’t help themselves. The media and the commentators, that is. As the Ukraine-Russia conflict drags on, talk of ‘disinformation campaigns’ continue.
Sure, there may be campaigns directed by the Kremlin which solely focus on discombobulating their adversaries, but that framing misses the point. Disinformation is baked into the creation, strategy and the existence of the Russian state.
To understand why this is so important, let’s revisit the death of Stalin. After the Soviet leader passed away in 1953, a power vacuum was formed and by mid-1957 Khrushchev and his allies had seized control of the party and the state apparatus.
A reorganisation of the Soviet government was ordered and Alexander Shelepin, an ally of Khrushchev outside of the existing state security apparatus, became chairman of the KGB in December 1958.
Drawing on the Soviets’ long history of defection and penetration operations dating back to the 1920s (Operation Trust, for example), Shelepin championed active measures and saw disinformation as a key strategic pillar for the Soviet Union.
A Directorate D or ‘Dezinformatsia’ was subsequently established within the First Chief Directorate of the KGB in 1959. Leninist political warfare principles would help reform the Soviet Union and the KGB — the sword, the shield and the disinformation.
Active measures remained at the heart of Soviet strategy throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when, infamously, the KGB decided to spread a rumour that the US had invented the AIDs virus.
The plot was only a success because the KGB had been able to plant a fake story in an India newspaper. The Soviets were facing their own PR issues at the time after using chemical weapons in Afghanistan.
Yuri Andropov, KGB chief between 1967 and 1982, apparently once described the Soviet Union’s political war against the United States as “the final struggle for the minds and hearts of the people.”
That partly explains why the world was so surprised when the Soviet Union did eventually collapse in 1991 — economic and social metrics were well within the ‘Dezinformatsia’ playbook.
Likewise, one of the few things we do know about Putin’s KGB career is that he worked in the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) and was stationed in Dresden, East Germany.
The ‘little green men’ popping up in Ukraine (link), the Salisbury novichok suspects appearing on state TV (link) and the denials around the downing of MH17 (link) — it all sounds a bit familiar.
Sow dissention, exploit ‘wedge issues’ and attempt to cloud what’s really going on. Disinformation is the strategy.
The media’s shady behaviour in support of the Biden administration is slowly catching up to it. ‘It won’t go away’, was this newsletter’s warning in early 2024 (link). That was after the findings of the investigation into the President’s handling of classified documents were published.
Fast forward more than a year and now Axios has got hold of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview of Biden from 2023 (link). The audio vividly bolsters the allegation that Biden’s inner-circle were attempting to cover-up his mental defects, he wasn’t fit to be President and the 25th Amendment should have been triggered (link).
For his part, Hur warned the world about Biden’s fragility:
…Mr. Biden's memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting wilfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires.
Democrats and some elements of the established media simply dismissed Hur as a Republican goon. Others in the Fourth Estate practiced self-censorship, deciding not to point out the obvious to the public or pursue any investigations of their own.
Perhaps the ‘threat’ of another Donald Trump presidency willed them on. Whatever their motive, they look awfully silly now. Here was my take from July last year, following Biden’s miserable head-to-head performance against Trump on CNN:
Moving away from the US Constitution, and towards the media’s lack of curiosity on the matter, it is thought that President George H. W. Bush is the first President to establish a contingency plan for his disability. This plan has also allegedly provided a framework for future Presidents. But for whatever reason there is little if any mention of this in the US press.
Even before The Department for Justice’s Hur Report, which raised serious concerns about President Biden (I wrote about all the unanswered questions at the time), there were red flags. The CNN debate showed Biden’s fragility up.
The current narrative framing is around the general election and Biden’s potential successor. But, with some history behind us, what if it turns out that the most powerful nation on Earth had someone “unable” at the helm for more than a year?
I’m sharing this now to make a very simple point: we knew at the time that Biden was in a bad state. Don’t let others attempt a ‘narrative whiplash’ on you. This type of revisionist history won’t hold up.
So what should we make of the Axios/Hur tape? It’s rather convenient that all this information is coming out now long after the election and, ultimately, to help a book launch. Episodes like this only erode trust in the media.
The below was originally published in February 2024.
He’s a First Amendment violator who has lied to their faces, but some influential journalists still want to censor themselves, and their colleagues, when it comes to Joe Biden.
The logic — at least from former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan — is that the President’s age, 81-years-old, should not be a strong focus of their election coverage.
“It would be great if he were 20 years younger. His age really is a legitimate concern for many voters. But for the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice,” Sullivan has argued.
It’s a courageous stance. Not least because many journalists will be wincing at the idea of Donald Trump returning to White House and some may even be quietly rooting for Biden. At least Sullivan is being honest about her own position.
But her plea to temper it down on the old Commander-in-Chief doesn’t stack up. Outside of economic concerns, ‘the government/poor leadership’ is the top issue for Americans. And that is something that the report from Special Counsel Robert Hur has put into full focus.
The lie
Though many outlets concentrated on Hur’s commentary about Biden’s mental state, which the White House and the President’s official and personal lawyers have pushed back on, they didn’t focus on Biden’s lie in relation to his handling of classified information as a private citizen.
In a press conference following the publication of the report, he made this very precise and unscripted claim to reporters and the US public: “I did not share classified information [with my ghostwriter]...I guarantee you I did not.”
Now, though the Hur investigation lasted around a year, with 173 interviews of 147 witnesses, it can really be boiled down to two men, one silver laptop and a load of transcripts.
A selection of ‘evidence’ in the Hur report, including the Zwonitzer recordings
The other man who was investigated in relation to a potential breach of the Espionage Act was Mark Zwonitzer, who worked on two memoirs for Biden, 2007's “Promises to Keep” and 2017’s “Promise Me, Dad”.
It is the latter book that landed both Biden and Zwonitzer in hot water. In researching it, the Hur investigation found that Biden had read to Zwonitzer from his Vice Presidential notebooks, sometimes “nearly word-for-word”, when the writer visited his rented home in Virginia in February and April 2017 (Biden had left office on 20 January 2017).
This included classified information and accounts of Situation Room meetings as well as briefings from the CIA, the Department of Defense and foreign policy officials, the Hur team revealed.
At one point on 24 April 2017 Biden even showed Zwonitzer one of his notebooks:
“Mr. Biden read aloud from notes summarizing a range of issues relating to a foreign terrorist organization, including specific activities of the U.S. military and views expressed by the intelligence community, including the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director.
“While reading these notes, Mr. Biden struggled to read his handwriting, and he showed part of the handwritten passage to Zwonitzer. The two then had the following exchange:
Mr. Biden: Do you have any idea what the hell I'm saying there? Less on the number of what? Isn't that awful?
Zwonitzer: Something. Number, something - quality. I can't.
Mr. Biden: Some of this may be classified, so be careful.
Zwonitzer: Okay.
Mr. Biden: I'm not sure. It isn't marked classified, but.”
The Hur team were able to find this evidence after Zwonitzer voluntarily handed over transcripts and later his laptop and disk drive to the FBI.
The writer had previously deleted the audio files of the interviews, partly because he was worried that his devices could be hacked, so the Hur team had to extract some of the audio files, others were corrupted in the process.
The main floor area or ‘the library’ of the rented Virginia home where Zwonitzer interviewed Biden in 2017, when he was a private citizen
Notably, in their punchy reply to Hur’s report (page 384), Richard Sauber, Special Counsel to the President, and Bob Bauer, Personal Counsel to Biden, did not seek to counter or push-back against the account of the readings to Zwonitzer.
And, in of themselves, a lay reading of the US’ vague and arguably outdated Espionage Act would have it that Biden didn’t seek to damage his country by sharing this information. Instead he was trying to provide important context information, as he saw it, relating to his personal policy positions on foreign affairs and defence.
But that doesn’t get away from the fact that Biden has now lied on camera to the US public about the incident. And it is probably only to get worse for the President as Hur has been asked to testify before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on 12 March.
Hopefully this hearing, and other public scrutiny, will help answer more questions that arise from Hur’s report, some of which I have outlined below.
The unanswered questions
Timeline and interviews
The President’s official written statement and other comments around the report stress that he was voluntarily interviewed on 8 October and 9 October 2023, “even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis”.
The interviews lasted five hours. These facts are not explicitly mentioned in Hur’s report. In fact, Hur doesn’t provide any broad timeline of his investigation.
But even though Biden and the White House are making much of this, they fail to mention or address the claims that interview negotiations allegedly began sometime in July between the parties.
“Attorneys for President Joe Biden and the special counsel appointed to investigate his handling of classified documents have been negotiating for about a month over the terms under which he would be interviewed, two people familiar with the matter said,” NBC reported on 11 August.
Why did Team Biden decide to go ahead with the October interviews? Could they have been moved?
The Hur leak
One of the major outcomes of the report — that Biden wouldn’t be charged but would face “harsh criticism” — was leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
“The prosecutor investigating why classified documents ended up at President Biden’s home and former office is preparing a report that is expected to be sharply critical of how he and his long-time aides handled the material, but the probe isn’t likely to result in a criminal case, according to people familiar with the matter,” a 16 November report read.
Who was behind this leak and what was their motive?
Memory claims and recordings
Though the media has made much of Hur’s claim that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” during his team’s interview with the President, the report states this is also related to the recorded interviews with Zwonitzer in 2017.
Will Hur be able to properly define “significantly limited” and will redacted recordings of the tapes be made available to the US public, even through a presumably lengthy freedom of information request process?
Here’s what Biden’s lawyers said on the matter:
“The President's inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual, especially given that many questions asked him to recall the particulars of staff work to pack. ship, and store materials and furniture in the course of moves between residences.
The same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation. Yet unlike your treatment of President Biden, your report accepts other witnesses' memory loss as completely understandable given the passage of time.”
Beau Biden
It is still not clear why the investigators asked Biden when his son passed away or the context of this exchange, with the Special Counsel claiming that he struggled to remember the date (30 May 2015).
We know from the Hur report that pictures of Beau campaigning were found alongside some classified Afghanistan material in Biden’s Delaware garage and “Promise Me, Dad” partly focused on the passing of the President’s son.
More clarity is needed around this inflammatory claim.
Secure locations and classified documents
The fact that secret materials were left in a damaged and open box by synthetic firewood and a broken lamp seems to have flown under the radar, owing to the other claims in Hur’s report.
But the investigation does show the messy nature of Biden’s documents, which go all the way back to 1973 when he became a Senator and was privy to some classified information.
Secret documents were found at the University of Delaware, his home and garage in Delaware and at The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at The University of Pennsylvania.
The Hur report crucially concludes on this matter that: “...the evidence suggests that Mr. Biden did not wilfully retain these documents and that they could plausibly have been brought to these locations by mistake.”
But the whole episode does raise questions about how the White House and the Senate maintains strong information hygiene practices and why Biden’s documents weren’t fully vetted by the likes of the US National Archives when he stood down as Vice President.
How many more open boxes with the US’ secrets are sitting in suburban garages across the country?
This newsletter is deliberately short. Like, extremely short. Why? I don’t want you suffering a case of memory interference (the concept’s been around since the 1960s, look-up Leo Postman).
Anyway, here’s the point, you need to do this: go onto your YouTube homepage, pick a video, and now scroll down.
Thanks for reading Tech, Power & Media! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Once you hit the bottom of the page, scroll back up – do you remember the first video you selected? If you have, well done. But don’t cheat.
Now do the same task – select a video, and then scroll down – but this time refresh the page. Can you find your video? Good luck.
YouTube never used to be like this. The Google-owned outlet has had to keep up with the other video platforms, most notably TikTok.
The overwhelming tiling of thumbnails is the best it can do to achieve a news feed-style flow for desktop devices.
On mobile, it’s a different story. YouTube Shorts just auto plays videos. You’re onto the next one, then the next one and the next one before you know it.
I like YouTube, but I’ve used it as an example because many people who have been knocking around on the internet for at least a while will recognise these changes too.
The other reason is that sometimes the past is a very helpful measuring stick which we can compare the present against.
Talking of the past, there was a time without screens and cameras in our pocket, a constant connection to the internet and the news feed (patented in 2006).
Social media was usually about private networks, and the content you generated was shared exclusively amongst friends or loved ones – occasionally that also extended to colleagues.
Everything’s changed and now we’re really worried about what Web 2.0 is doing to ourselves and our children. We’ve got news feeds, we’ve got screens, we’re always connected and all of this engagement is being super-charged by algorithms.
What does the algo want? More clicks, more likes, more engagement. We would never now call the internet the ‘information superhighway’, but that’s how it used to be described.
It’s more of a maze of content now. There is an end, but it’s masked by parlour tricks, changes of digital dials which can even impact your emotions.
Social media firms have known about these effects since at least 2014.
Back then Facebook experimented on its own users (689,003 to be precise), finding that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”.
“In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed.
“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.
“These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
There was an apology of course (link), but the work proved a point: the news feed and the algo could really mess with people’s heads.
That was more than a decade ago. It might have got worse.
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