by Brian T. Lynch, MSW
James Clapper of the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies announce that Russia is taking active measures to interfere with our Presidential elections.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/64-hours-october-one-weekend-blew-rules-american-politics-2-162827162.html
It was Friday, October 7, 2016. There was a rapid series of news dump that day that changed to course of our Presidential Election and our country.
If corporate (for profit) news outlets based reporting on the gravity of events rather than a stories public appeal, the top news story on this one day during the campaign would have been that US intelligence agencies announced that Russia was actively messing with our election. Media manipulations by powerful people behind the scenes took place in the hours that followed the announcement, burying the biggest news story in a decade. Who was behind the release of that shocking Access Hollywood tape that stole our attention?
The video doesn’t say. It could have been Hillary friendly sources, neutral sources or even Russian cyber-ops. It doesn’t matter. The corporate media released the tapes and then fed the blaze of interest that followed.
Then, an hour later, the first of the Podesta emails were released These emails that had been stolen by Russian based hackers and the content was used to strategically selected emails for release that maximize damage to the Hillary campaign. The Podesta email release blunted the impact of the Access Hollywood tapes. Both stories dominated the news for days. The two stories combined completely eclipsed the Russia story. And so the biggest story in a decade, That our democracy was currently under attack by Russia, got buried and erased from our collective conscious until after the election.
Go figure. The bogeymen of my childhood are suddenly not newsworthy. Neo-Nazis are marching in America, chanting, “Russia is our Friend,” and nobody notices. Is this the end of “small d” democracy? Not because of oppression but because of entertainment over-stimulus? I don’t understand the new normal. Would somebody please provide the roster so I can distinguish who is who?
I know. I just had a Facebook dialogue with a very conservative friend of mine (yes I still have a few) and he won’t listen to any reasoning or evidence (clear evidence) of Russian active measures to influence our political debate. Nothing I say can make him feel at all concerned about Russia.