The Media Can’t Quit Chasing Republican Snipe Hunts

Brian Beutler has an excellent piece about how the Uranium One non-scandal won’t die:

Though the nominal subject of Wemple’s piece is The Hill, the lead may as well be that Republican House investigators are participating in a demonstrable propaganda campaign for the protection of their scandal-plagued president. The fabrication of the scandal, not the scandal being fabricated, is the scandal itself.

That is not how most media outlets have framed the story.

“Obama-era uranium deal yields new questions, new accusations and new investigation,” blared a CNN headline.

The New York Times’ version read “Courting Democratic Ire, Republicans Open New Obama-Era Inquiries.”

Wemple’s access point to the heart of the story was granular criticism of a bad piece of journalism, and it’s understandable that national political desks didn’t have the benefit of his specific perspective. Moreover, when a congressional committee launches an investigation, oftent the news is that something is coming under scrutiny. But here’s what makes this uranium pseudo-scandal a perfect case study in how the sticky norms of political journalism are ill-equipped to expose a single party’s deep rot of bad faith: Republicans already hoodwinked the political media with the exact same uranium story before the presidential election, and everybody knows it.

About two and a half years ago, as the 2016 presidential campaign was ramping up, the New York Times published a curious piece about a Russian atomic energy agency that swallowed a Canadian uranium mining company known as Uranium One. As the transaction unfolded, the company’s chairman made multiple donations to the Clinton Foundation, which made the story interesting to the Times, because the acquisition could not have happened without the permission of the U.S. national security apparatus, including Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Here was quid and quo, laid side by side, on the front page of the nation’s paper of record. The following year, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, would rest his ludicrously false claim that Clinton “handed over” 20 percent of American uranium to Russia on this central insinuation in the Times’ story. Upon mild scrutiny, though, Trump’s attack, and the broader implication of corruption, collapsed.

“The State Department was one of nine [U.S.] agencies…that approved the deal,” the Washington Post noted in its debunking. “The deal was also separately approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” which is politically independent from the White House. The suggestion that Clinton approved the deal as a favor to a donor was a crock.

Innuendo-driven exposés of the Clintons’ vast financial and geopolitical network formed their own genre in 2015 and 2016, but what made the Times report uniquely puzzling was a two-sentence disclosure, nine paragraphs into the story, that it was the fruit of a partnership with Peter Schweizer, a right-wing muckraker who presided over a think tank bankrolled by anti-Clinton billionaires. Eventually, the political press developed a healthier skepticism of the uranium story, and other anti-Clinton stories Schweizer seeded. But this was all too little, too late for Clinton. “The effect on Clinton’s popularity was profound,” wrote Joshua Green in Devil’s Bargain, his biography of Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon. “The percentage of Americans who thought she was ‘untrustworthy’ shot up into the 60s.”

[…]

Today’s credulousness is so frustrating because it’s a case of fool-me-twice: This deal, and the deal House Republicans are now investigating, are the same deal. Warmed over, picked apart, digested, and, of course, completely sideways to the conduct of the current government. 

The purpose of the propaganda has changed from defaming Hillary Clinton to blurring the truth about Russia’s subversion of the election, but the underlying content is the same. The facts of the matter are all out in the open, as are the ways and reasons the right manipulated those facts and has now returned to them a year later. But the press, once bitten, hasn’t yet learned to be shy.

This bullshit really has been a remarkably successful bit of propaganda. And as Brian says, there was no secret about its origins, and yet the facts that 1)it was created by Brietbart and 2)there was obviously never anything to it didn’t stop the mainstream press (as well as some of the more gullible or cynical corners of the nominal left) from treating it was serious news. And the New York Times was still falling for the same crap during the heart of the campaign.  Hey. if Steve Bannon is waving his hands frantically there’s got to be a five-alarm fire somewhere!

At least none of this led to Donald Trump becoming president of the United States or anything.