The Role Of Our Broken Media In Russia's Propaganda Campaign For Trump

Eric Chenoweth, co-director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, has a must- read op- ed today excoriating the media for its role in catapulting propaganda into politics:

Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has posed many challenges to U.S. media. In at least one frightening respect, it has failed: News outlets are actively abetting an authoritarian and imperialist foreign power’s attempt to manipulate a U.S. presidential election to aid its favored candidate, Trump, and sanctioning an assault on the individual and civil liberties of all American citizens.

Chenoweth goes through examples of the media abetting Russia in its campaign to undercut destabilize the American political system through its agent, WikiLeaks' Julian Assange,  neo- fascist useful idiot Donald "Rump" Trump, and his network of advisors (past and present) with direct and indirect ties to the Russian government.  This is accomplished through the time- tested approach of floating a story in Republican media outlets, which is then "out there" and fodder for "mainstream" media:

The full fruits of this effort can be seen daily on Fox News and Breitbart, the leading propaganda organs of the Trump campaign. Every offhand remark is turned into an offense by the DNC, Clinton, her husband or her aides. Nothing needs to be proven. It is sufficient for the emails to be published and accepted by other media. 

What we are being introduced to — and what the free media is not defending itself against — is the confabulation of state propaganda and intelligence organs of the Russian government. Russian state television and other state-directed media frequently report actual and fake information all blended together with the intent of promoting fear of the West and of the civilizational collapse that Western democracy supposedly brings. As Post columnist Anne Applebaum has warned, such propaganda is being channeled even through Trump himself (for example, doubting that a Russian missile took down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and asserting that the election of Clinton would mean the start of World War III).

Added to this, of course, is an intelligence agency of the United States Government -- the Federal Bureau of Innuendo Investigation -- which is populated (at least in the New York field office) with Republican partisans and headed by a Director who (at the very least) is subject to political pressure from within and outside the agency to damage Democratic prospects next Tuesday.

History will judge these players harshly, but only if we get a win at the ballot box.  The bigger the better.