Russians Under the Bed Again? Did Russian Propaganda Undermine Hillary?

If you believe The Washington Post, a Russian propaganda campaign infiltrated, influenced, directed, or telepathically took over hundreds of independent right-wing news websites and deluged the American political landscape with a flood of “fake news” stories designed to undermine and defeat Hillary Clinton on election day.

The source of the Post’s revelation that Russians ran a sophisticated propaganda campaign by using these unwitting or, perhaps, willing website editors to spread false and damaging news about Hillary Clinton is rather murky. Their source, or sources, may have very well been interviewed in a Washington, DC parking garage, as they seem determined to remain anonymous. The source for the Post story is described as “two teams of independent researchers.”

One group of researchers is from a relatively new website called PropOrNot.com, but the Post article does not make clear who owns the site or which organization is behind it. You can only guess whether this site is being run by an unemployed twenty-something from his parent’s basement or if a political group is behind it.

The Post article mentions that the concern over the proliferation of right-wing “fake news” sites have led Facebook and Google to monitor their own pages that may be promoting false stories and having them removed.

But stories of alien abductions and bearded babies who smoke cigars have been around a long time and could often be picked up at the checkout line at your local grocery store. Why all of a sudden are we seeing such a frantic effort to stamp out these types of stories? And why blame such a predictable villain, albeit one from the dark days of the Cold War?

One motivation in blaming the Russians and the right wing websites that are accused of working with them, either knowingly or unwittingly, is that Trump’s surprising victory embarrassed many in the corporate media who gave him no chance at all of beating Clinton. To say they underestimated his chances of winning the White House would be putting it mildly as this short clip from This Week back in July of 2015 makes clear.

The pundits and political analysts who confidently predicted a Clinton victory in November are desperately looking for some explanation as to why their predictions were so far off the mark.

This is an important question for them to answer and explain to their audience because they realize that their credibility has taken a severe beating. If they fail to restore it by persuasively explaining to their audience that it wasn’t their fault they were so wrong about Trump, they may have to give up that plush job at CNN and go back to selling insurance.

So to explain the mocking and laughter about the prospect of a Trump presidency, we are now being told they had it right, and would have been proven right on election day if only a sophisticated Russian plot hadn’t hijacked the process and handed Trump the White House.  See, it wasn’t our fault. The Russians did it.

This desperate attempt to retain any credibility they have left seems to have fallen on deaf ears. While the Clinton campaign tried to push this angle early on, it never really gained any traction with the voters.

Seeing the press and pundits now scramble frantically to come up with some explanation to make sense of how a candidate most of them mocked and laughed at became president of the United States. This is question many of them feel they must answer to restore any of the credibility they lost with their audience.

But blaming their inability to accurately predict the outcome of this election on “false news,” feels a little late. The danger of “false news” being spread as a form of propaganda from a state power should have been seriously discussed in the months and years following the Iraq War, a war that never would have been launched if not for the corporate media’s willingness to serve as the Bush Administration’s propaganda wing.

The choreographed song and dance routine of the Bush White House planting stories in the New York Times and other media outlets about Saddam’s nuclear program and then appearing on the Sunday political talk shows to cite those same stories to build their case for war, was the ultimate use of “false news.”

Yet, even after this sophisticated propaganda program was revealed, when it became known that the entire premise of the war was based on false intelligence and sold to the American public by using such propaganda tactics, we did not hear much about the menace of “false news.”

Only now are we lectured about the danger it poses to our democracy by the very people and organizations that utilized such tactics it to sell us something far more dangerous and costly; an unneccesary war.