Western media have collectively mistrusted Russia for over a century; since the Russian Revolutions of 1917 the country was treated as the West’s bête noire. In his final published article Edward Herman (2017) addressed this mistrust, noting that between 1917 and 1920 the New York Times’ zealous opposition to the new Bolshevik government caused it to predict the imminent collapse of the regime no fewer than 91 times as journalists uncritically relayed statements from unidentified official sources.
The successes of the Russian, and later Chinese and Cuban, Revolutions created great traumas for Western elites, fearful of losing their class positions, and anti-communism became something of a national religion in the United States. The 1950 National Security Council document NSC 68 laid out this new official secular religion, accusing the USSR of being responsible for a global communist conspiracy to subvert and infiltrate the pure and righteous nations (most notably the United States) with communism. This carefully crafted official paranoia was used to justify military expansionism abroad (where any insufficiently subservient state could be labelled “communist” and attacked or overthrown) and a witch-hunt on “communist” subversives in the United States that came to be known as McCarthyism. In practice, this came to mean any leftists, social democrats and independent liberals in positions of influence in education, entertainment and politics. The purge had the effect of shifting politics and culture to the right and was a highly effective mechanism of control as those not sufficiently loyal to state and business power could be tarred as communists, thereby potentially ending their careers. Herman and Chomsky (2002: 29) noted that the national religion had the effect of keeping liberals permanently on the defensive, causing them to behave like reactionaries. So strong was this technique of control that the authors described it as one of the five principle filters that shape news media.
Yet by the early years of the twenty-first century, the USSR and most other communist states had turned capitalist and relations between the West and Russia had completely changed. Boris Yeltsin was seen as America’s man in the Kremlin, the United States having legitimized his power grab and interfered in the 1996 elections, including filling Russian media with what would now be called negative “fake news” about his opponents to ensure he won. This was reported on with pride in the West; Time Magazine ran with the front-page headline “Yanks to the rescue.” His successor, Vladimir Putin, supported the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and became a close personal friend of President Bush. Chomsky therefore suggested the fifth filter was outdated and should be replaced by the belief in the “miracle of the market” (Herman and Chomsky, 2002: 17–18), anti-terrorism (Mullen, 2009) or whatever pretext the United States invents to justify further global ambitions (Chomsky, 2016). Others (Boyd-Barrett, 2004) argued that the fifth filter was now an agreement in the supposed superiority of neoliberal globalization. As such, it felt for a long time as if the fifth filter had become the propaganda model’s weak link.
The receding of the anti-Moscow sentiment was plain to see in politics and media during the 2012 presidential election campaign. Senator John Kerry mocked Republican nominee Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia was still America’s enemy, stating at the Democratic National Convention, “Romney’s even blurted out the preposterous notion that Russia is our number one geopolitical foe. Folks, Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from Alaska, Mitt Romney talks like he’s only seen Russia by watching ‘Rocky IV’.” Kerry was forced to stop speaking as the crowd erupted in laughter. Hillary Clinton noted Romney’s remarks were “somewhat dated” and backward-looking while President Obama, during the third presidential debate, bluntly stated, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back … the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Romney’s assertion was considered a major faux pas and mainstream media pundits framed him as a political dinosaur. MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow claimed he was trying to copy Reagan while Chris Matthews wondered, “What decade this guy’s living in?”
Yet this good relationship was already showing signs of strain. Putin balked at NATO’s eastward expansion to Russia’s Baltic border in 2004. Previous Russian leaders had been given assurances that the organization would not expand “one inch to the east” of Germany. Despite this, NATO tripled its military presence on the border between 2012 and 2017. The United States also placed first-strike-threat missile systems in Eastern Europe, supposedly to counter a non-existent Iranian threat. During the Ukraine crisis, the United States supported the anti-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych. Furthermore, the United States and Russia were on opposite sides again in the Syrian Civil War, with the former supporting groups euphemistically described as “rebels” in the Western press against the Russian-supported government of Bashar al-Assad. The United States even bombed a military base manned with Russian troops (for more on Syria see Chapter 5).
However, it was the accusations from the Democratic Party, and later, the US state, that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, causing the victory of Donald Trump (and the loss of Hillary Clinton) that propelled US–Russia relations into perhaps the primary international media story of the modern era. One consequence of this is the reawakening of the dormant anti-communist filter as an anti-Russian filter, where those who question not only the extent or impact of Russian involvement in the election, but even the official line in foreign or domestic policy can be successfully smeared as Putin’s puppets. This negative feedback has quickly become an extremely powerful filter shaping media but could not have become so successful without the deep levels of fear, mistrust and resentment towards Moscow built up over the past century. There now follows a short history of the evolution of the Russiagate story.
After the well-publicized machinations of the Democratic Party elite to skew the process in her favour and against her challenger, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton won the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton enjoyed the support of the mainstream media; the Washington Post ran 16 separate anti-Sanders articles in 16 hours (Johnson, 2016a) and both Clinton and the media were happy that Donald Trump would be her Republican opponent. The Clinton team felt it would be an easy victory while the unpredictable billionaire TV star was great for ratings; there was a 55 per cent increase in average prime-time viewership of cable news between 2015 and 2016, a phenomenon sociologists have called the “Trump bump” (Pew Research Centre, 2017a). Trump received an estimated $1.9 billion in free media publicity. During the primaries, CNN, MSNBC and Fox all cut away from Sanders’ campaign speech to show an empty Trump podium.
The election was marked by WikiLeaks’ publication of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta’s emails. They showed that Clinton had a grossly unfair advantage against Sanders in the primaries, that her own publicity team held her in contempt and that she assured bankers that she had a “public” and a “private” position on Wall Street; that while she may promise the public to regulate them, she assured them she was completely behind them and merely lying to the nation for political reasons. Russia was identified as the source of this hack.
The Podesta emails also showed that Clinton’s team decided before the primaries that linking Trump to Russia and to Vladimir Putin, by now a figure of hate in America, was the optimum strategy. The issue of Russia was by far the most discussed topic during the presidential debates, with Clinton claiming Trump was controlled by the Kremlin, stating, “Putin would rather have a puppet as President.” Indeed, Russia was discussed 18 times as much as poverty or inequality and four times more than healthcare (including the repeal of Obamacare) (Johnson, 2016b). The media agreed with Clinton. Paul Krugman (2016) in the New York Times claimed Trump would be a “Siberian candidate” while even former CIA director Michael Hayden (2016) endorsed Clinton, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post claiming, “Trump is Russia’s useful fool.”
Despite the overwhelming support of the mainstream media (Clinton received 500 newspaper and magazine endorsements to his 28), Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. One popular explanatory factor for this stunning victory was the prevalence of “fake news” during the election campaign. Untrue stories from low quality websites circulated around social media spreading rumours and falsehoods. In November 2016 the Washington Post promoted a website, propornot.com, in an extremely well-publicized article. Propornot claimed fake news was being promoted by the Kremlin to game the election for Trump. The website was described by the Post (Timberg, 2016) as “two teams of independent researchers,” using “Internet analytics tools” that had identified over 200 fake news websites that were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” Propornot refused to reveal who they were or who funded them yet their list of websites was widely promoted. Included were WikiLeaks and Trump-supporting right-wing websites like InfoWars and The Drudge Report, anti-Trump leftist websites that were also critical of Clinton like Truthout, Truthdig and The Black Agenda Report, as well as libertarian vehicles like Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. In other words, news sites that did not toe the neoliberal line between the Clinton Democrats and moderate Republicans. Some of the sites on the list produce extremely high-quality journalism; Truthdig hosts Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges while Naked Capitalism was cited as one of CNBC’s top 25 best financial blogs.
Propornot explicitly informs its readers that websites that critique or criticize Obama, Clinton, Angela Merkel, the EU, NATO, the “mainstream media,” centre-left or centre-right moderates are a sure sign of Russian propaganda and encourages readers to investigate further. It also notes any site warning of the dangers of aggressiveness with Russia, that it might lead to world war three, is likely Kremlin propaganda too. As it notes, “Russian propaganda never suggests it would just result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual peaceful defeat, like the last time.” Leaving aside the millions of victims of the Cold War in South East Asia, Central America and many other places, the criteria of what is deemed Russian fake news is clear: any news outlet critical of the military industrial complex, war, mainstream journalism, neoliberal economics or the political system is a Kremlin puppet. Only the corporate centre can be trusted. Whether this constitutes McCarthyism is evidently a frequently asked question, as it appears on the FAQ. Propornot insists it is not despite simultaneously calling on the FBI to investigate the news media they have identified (while they remain anonymous). At least Senator McCarthy put his name to it.
The validity of the list is highly dubious. That the Washington Post chose to promote and effectively endorse it as neutral experts is remarkable, especially given the actions of the anonymous group, who use the language of puerile, foul-mouthed 13-year-olds when interacting on their official Twitter account. For example, in response to one political blogger, they said, “We don’t care if you’re paid to perform sexual favors for Putin or doing it for free. You’ve still got his dick in your mouth.”
Months later, the Post added an editor’s note to the article claiming it did not endorse Propornot’s list. However, the article had already helped spark widespread concern in the media about Russian-controlled fake news. Organizations like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Twitter announced they would be taking measures to weed it out. The effect was to hammer progressive outlets that challenged the hegemonic corporate media. Traffic to progressive sites not on Propornot’s list plummeted after Google, Bing and Facebook changed their algorithms. AlterNet experienced a 63 per cent reduction, Truth-Out 25 per cent, The Intercept 19 per cent and Democracy Now! 36 per cent (Damon and North, 2017). Reddit and Twitter deleted thousands of accounts while YouTube announced its new algorithm would weed out fake news. It promptly sent a video claiming the Parkland shooting was a hoax to the number one top trending video. Furthermore, the new algorithm promoted mainstream news sources like CNN and relegated independent news shows. Independently produced progressive news that challenged the dominant line on Syria, fracking and many other sensitive political topics had their content demonetized as part of what became known as the “adpocalypse.” Crucially, mainstream news outlets continued to receive advertising revenue on their videos covering the same topics. The effect has been to disincentivize independent media from challenging corporate media on controversial issues and to threaten their very viability.
On both left and right, many outlets and journalists were tarred as Putin puppets. Some, such as Keith Olbermann, proved their loyalty by being as belligerent on Russia as possible, while others, such as Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal, have continued to question the official line. The consequence of this is a new period of McCarthyism, not from the right as previously, but predominantly from the centre, whose purpose is to re-establish corporate hegemony over communication, challenged so openly from both left and right during the election.
Despite their apparent concern with fake news, the mainstream media has propagated a great deal of misinformation about supposed Russian attacks or influence on America. In late 2016 the Washington Post (Eilperin and Entous, 2016) headlined that “Russian hackers penetrated US electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, officials say.” It quoted the Governor of the State declaring that “all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged” that “one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin” had attacked the United States and calling for the United States to “vigorously pursue” and put an end to Russia’s actions. The easily verifiable reality was there was no hack whatsoever, merely that after receiving a Homeland Security notice sent to all US utility companies, Burlington Electric had found some malware on a single laptop unconnected to the grid. Instead, the Post did not fact-check the words of anonymous officials. Like with Propornot, long after story had run and had been read by hundreds of thousands and picked up in other media, the newspaper added a note informing the few who read it months later that the story was not entirely true.
Another example of the media’s over-preoccupation over Russian meddling was CNN’s (Starr et al., 2016) story, “Intel analysis shows Putin approved election hacking,” which began by quoting an unnamed US official claiming Russia hacked the election “with sophisticated hacking tools, the equivalent of those used by the US National Security Agency.” Yet buried in the story the article contradicted itself, stating their sources said, “there is certainly no obvious intelligence linking Putin [to it]” and that they had no evidence to implicate him. Eight out of ten people who interact with and six in ten who share it read only the headline of a story, with few reading the body of the text.
There were also a number of highly anticipated official reports released on the extent of Russian hacking of the election, although few had much substance whatsoever. Despite this, they were widely reported as conclusive proof of the Trump–Russia collusion theory. The short, 13-page joint FBI and National Homeland Security report made many accusations but offered no evidence whatsoever. More than two-thirds of it merely provided basic boilerplate advice on protection from hackers. Furthermore, the report came with a disclaimer on the first page noting, “This report is provided ‘as is’ for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”
The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) report was released around the same time. It was billed as the bombshell that would lead to Trump’s impeachment. It concluded that it was “highly confident” that Russia “interfered” with the US election. This conclusion was the headline across the mainstream media landscape. The short report was very low on actual evidence, however, and also came with an incredible disclaimer that “Judgements are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”
Most of the evidence that Russia was interfering in the election revolved around the content of Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik, which were favourable to Trump and critical of Clinton. The report noted that RT shows often presented the US political and economic system in a negative light, gave air time to third party candidates and covered topics like environmental issues and the Occupy Wall Street movement. It noted that programmes like Breaking the Set and Truthseeker had an anti-fracking message and that the network was a “leading voice in opposing Western intervention in the Syrian conflict.” What this has to do with the election is unclear.
It should be noted that nearly all the evidence presented is from 2012 or earlier, years before the election. Both shows mentioned had been off the air for more than a year by 2016. Indeed, most of the report appears to have been written years earlier. Thus, it tacitly takes the position that the United States is a near-perfect society and criticism of any aspect of it is propaganda, highlighting the totalitarian mindset of the US establishment’s concern that some Americans may be exposed to another opinion. Its primary argument is therefore Russia swung the election by airing content about Occupy Wall Street four years previously.
Nevertheless, despite the disclaimer and the inclusion of graphs showing RT and Sputnik’s tiny reach in comparison to other networks, the report was heralded as providing “overwhelming” proof of Russian “hacking” (Rozsa, 2017) by the media. That this could have been the case can only be explained by the complete subservience of journalists to the official line and the pre-selection of right-thinking people to staff those positions. President Obama expelled 31 Russian diplomats from the United States and the Trump administration forced RT to register as a “foreign agent” under a 1938 law designed to counter Nazism. RT now has trouble booking guests to come on their shows as it has become a career-killing move to do so, with politicians condemned for previously appearing on the network. Thus, a network that questioned the mainstream US line on politics and economics has been delivered a serious blow.
The Steele Dossier was published in January 2017, and, like the other two reports, became a leading story in news around the world. Written by a British spy, its central claim was that the Kremlin has evidence of lewd Moscow orgies where Donald Trump would pay Russian prostitutes to urinate in front of him and onto a bed previously slept in by Obama. It claimed that Putin was using this evidence to blackmail the incoming president, turning him into a Siberian candidate. No evidence was provided. However, the juiciness of the story spread it around the world and led to an increased paranoia that, not only had Putin supported Trump, “hacked” the Podesta emails (thereby “hacking” the election) but also had Trump personally under his control due to the seriously compromising evidence. That the dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign (Entous et al., 2017) came out only later and seemed not to have damaged her or Steele’s reputation in the media, nor the credibility of the dossier’s claims. The nebulous phrase “election hacking” was so widespread and used so liberally by the media that a majority of Democrats came to believe that Russia had hacked into voting machines during the election, stuffing the ballot with Trump votes, thereby swinging the election (The Economist/YouGov, 2017a).
Unable to convince the majority of the public to treat the idea of Russian hacking of the election seriously, the thrust of the investigation changed throughout 2017 and 2018, with alleged Russian interference in social media, primarily through Twitter troll bots and Facebook advertisements and groups becoming centre. In February 2018, a US grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian agencies with interference in the US political process. Among the entities was the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian “troll farm.” It was charged that the organization had attempted to swing the election for Trump by creating various Facebook groups and by spending $100,000 on pro-Trump and anti-Hillary advertisements.
However, only a quarter of this figure was geo-located to the United States. Over half was spent after the election and over half of the advertisements were not about the election at all. Facebook’s initial inquiry found that they were commercial in nature, not political. The agency spent just a few hundred dollars in key battleground states, minuscule in comparison to the $6.5 billion spent by Republicans and Democrats overall (with Clinton outspending Trump two to one). Among its most tangible achievements included organizing a pro-Trump rally in Florida attended by eight people, although the size of the rally was rarely mentioned in reporting. Mueller’s report also showed the IRA actually organized anti-Trump events as well. Despite this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was being touted by many as a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, was branded a traitor for aiding the “enemy.” Facebook changed its algorithm to prevent further Russian advertising and fake news spreading on its site. As with other sites, however, progressive news and politics pages reported dramatic drops in traffic after the change.
The media and the political establishment responded with vitriolic and bellicose language to Russiagate. Many in the media, like the Washington Post (Tumulty, 2018) and both Republicans like John McCain and Democrats such as Jeanne Shaheen described Russia’s actions as an “act of war.” Many others have gone further. Clinton herself called it a “cyber 9/11” while politicians like Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) and influential media figures like the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman have declared it a “new Pearl Harbor.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed Jerry Nadler (D-NY) who decried Trump’s inaction, stating, “Imagine if FDR had denied that the Japanese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor … Russia is destroying our country!” David Frum demanded a response, claiming Trump’s inaction was a “dereliction of duty” (Greenwald, 2018). A viral video fronted by Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman summed up the establishment message: “We have been attacked. We are at war with Russia.”
The belligerent language matches the rhetoric used at the height of the Cold War. Indeed, Hillary Clinton has already stated she would pursue a military response to the cyber hacking. Russiagate has had some effect on some of the population. Rising from just 2 per cent in 2012, a 2017 survey found 38 per cent of Democrats in 2017 saw Russia as an adversary; a figure higher than during the Cold War (Kiley, 2017).
If the actions of Russia constitute a new 9/11 or Pearl Harbor then it is of use to remember the US response to both actions. The response to 9/11 was to unleash two invasions in quick succession, leading to unending occupations and an expanding and never-ending war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, unleashing a death spiral across the region. The response to Pearl Harbor was to launch the largest war in American history, leading to massive carpet-bombing campaigns, leaving millions dead and the dropping of two atomic bombs. A war with a nuclear-armed Russia could be far more devastating, even than this.
While the threat of a hot war increases, the possibility of a disastrous accidental nuclear confrontation, as US and Russian missiles are put on hair-trigger alert, is more ominous still. In 2018, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its famous doomsday clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest the world has come to Armageddon in their estimation since 1953, before even the Cuban Missile Crisis, explaining “nuclear risks have been compounded by US-Russia relations that now feature more conflict than cooperation” (Mecklin, 2018).
Chomsky (2004: 74) notes that during the Missile Crisis, the world was literally “one word away from nuclear war” as US ships attacked Russian submarines. The submarine commanders discussed retaliating with nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack would have, of course, prompted a massive counterattack on Russia. Two of the three commanders voted to do so. However, Captain Vasili Arkhipov vetoed the order, a decision understood by the US National Security Archive to have “saved the world” from apocalypse. That so many in the US establishment media are pushing for a return to this state is extraordinary.
The utility in taking this position is captured in Freeman’s video, as the actor explains, “for 241 years our democracy has been a shining example to the world of what we can all aspire to” and “Putin uses social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political process.” Thus, for Freeman and those who espouse this position, the mainstream media and political system was flawless and should be trusted. It was not the failures of capitalism or deep racial and class divides in the United States that led to the election of Trump and the defeat of Clinton, but the nefarious actions of Vladimir Putin. Therefore, there is no need to scrutinize them. It is a tactic to retain control of the Democratic Party, for continued corporate dominance of the media and for the continuation of the political, media and economic system as a whole from challenges to its legitimacy.
The media’s focus on Russia has come at the detriment of other serious issues. One example of this is The Rachael Maddow Show, the highest rated news programme on cable TV, which devotes more of its time to Russia than all other topics combined. Maddow is symptomatic of American news more generally. A study of ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts in May and June 2017 found they devoted 75 per cent of their coverage to Russia, despite it being the top issue for only 6 per cent of Americans, whose principle priorities were healthcare and unemployment (Gabriel, 2017). Unfortunately, those subjects were barely covered. The media’s excessive concentration on Trump’s Russia connection is taking space away for serious critiques of Trump’s policies, including on healthcare, unemployment and the climate, more important for and relevant to the majority of Americans.
The great disparity between the priorities of the owners and advertisers of the media and the public’s view and why journalists continue to focus upon Putin must be explained. Herman and Chomsky (2002: 9) state that most biased choices in the media arise not from top-down intervention but from “The pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power.”
FIGURE 4.1 What Americans care about vs. what the media cares about
Source: Gabriel (2017)
However, top-down intervention does occur. CNN producer John Bonifeld was caught on camera admitting that the CEO of the company, Jeff Zucker, told him to “get back to Russia” after they covered the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the climate accords, a potentially fatal blow to the prospects for survival for the human species, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. He also admitted that the whole Russia–Trump collusion was “mostly bullshit” with “no real proof” and a “witch-hunt” and that the media was focusing on the story for ratings. “Our ratings are incredible right now,” he revealed (Concha, 2017). Maddow’s constant coverage of Russia has propelled her show to become the highest rated on cable news.
For all that ratings have increased, the ongoing story has failed to envelop America. Harvard-Harris (2018) polls have consistently shown that a significant majority (59–60 per cent) of Americans feel that the investigations into Russia are hurting the country, not helping it, while a series of Gallup (2018) polls found that less than 1 per cent of Americans consider Russia a top problem for the country. Trust in media is low and a continuing preponderance with promoting factually dubious stories about Russia and Trump may further erode public confidence in the media, which was slipping long before Vladimir Putin is alleged to have attacked the United States.
The anti-Russian filter would not have the power and potency that it does without the deep levels of resentment, fear and hostility towards the USSR built up throughout the Cold War, during which Americans lived in fear of communist infiltration and a Soviet missile attack. The new movement has used the emotionally charged symbols and imagery associated with the Soviet Union to emphasize Putin and the Kremlin’s nefariousness. The New Yorker published a Cyrillic cover, implying we would all have to learn Russian now that Putin controls the White House. Time magazine was more explicit; its May 2017 cover showed the White House being subsumed by the Kremlin. The message could hardly be clearer: Russia has taken over the United States. This notion draws on a tradition that passes back through the aforementioned NSC 68 and its proclamations of a Moscow-based conspiracy to subvert and conquer the United States, the last pure nation left.
Putinism is an expressly anti-communist, conservative ideology; the largest opposition party in Russia is the Communist Party. Despite this fact, conflations with the Soviet Union and communism are commonplace throughout the Resistance to Trump movement. Prominent liberal commentator Joy Ann Reid uses terms like USSR and Russia interchangeably, addressing Putin as “comrade” and his country as a communist state. In response to the Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia’s request that the United States return seized Russian government property, senior Democratic politician Donna Brazille claimed “the Communists are now dictating the terms of debate.” One of the most popular images of the resistance is a “Trump Putin” logo where the “T” of Trump is replaced by a hammer and the “P” of Putin by a sickle. That the result of a right-wing capitalist controlling another right-wing billionaire capitalist could result in a communist takeover goes to show how flexible the idea of communism is in American political culture. Nevertheless, the Resistance is clearly drawing from the deep well of fear and resentment of the word built up during the Cold War and has reanimated the McCarthyist “communist” menace, the potency of which owes much to the anti-communist filter of the media.
In much the same way as they were blamed for Clinton losing the election, Bernie Sanders and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein were also disciplined by the anti-Russian filter and portrayed as Putin’s useful idiots, particularly after the US Special Counsel investigation, led by former FBI director Robert Mueller. The counsel produced a report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, alleging that the Russian-based IRA attempted to widen divisions in American society and had “interfered” in the 2016 election to help Trump win.
Stein became a figure of hate for Democrats, and her presence in the election had long been posited as the reason for Trump’s victory. Her refusal to wholeheartedly embrace the Russiagate narrative drew serious fire from the media. In February 2017 Rachel Maddow demanded to know why Stein was silent on the Trump–Russia connection, proving that not only was resistance to the official line treated with suspicion, but even failure to sufficiently endorse the narrative. Maddow claimed she could not explain Stein’s silence because she could not pronounce it in Russian (Gettys, 2017). In response to the announcement that Stein’s connection to Russia was being investigated, Zac Petkanas, Director of Rapid Response for the 2016 Clinton campaign tweeted:
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
This accurately summed up the media and political atmosphere. The Mueller indictment alleged that the IRA promoted Stein, Trump, Sanders, black activists and others to damage Clinton, citing one Facebook post and one or possibly two Facebook ads that were pro-Green Party. Stein also defended Julian Assange, a “smoking gun,” according to Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee investigating her (Guardian, 2017). The media attacked her, depicting her as Putin’s puppet. Stein fought back, calling the charges “laughable” and an “obvious smear.” Grilled on MSNBC, she claimed “It doesn’t pass the laugh test as evidence of our campaign benefitting” from Russia, going on to highlight other, much more important reasons Trump won, “We were aware of other kinds of interference, for example, we know that $6 billion in free air time as given to Donald Trump by the big networks [like MSNBC].” Much was made of the fact she was present at a Moscow dinner Putin also attended. That Putin was welcomed to the White House and even went on holiday with President George W. Bush, who described him as a personal friend, has been consigned to the memory hole, as Bush was being rehabilitated by the Democratic elite for his criticism of Trump. A majority of Democrats now hold a favourable view of the former president, who is now embraced on the top liberal TV programmes like The Ellen DeGeneres Show (The Economist/YouGov, 2017b).
In contrast to Stein, Sanders has consistently endorsed the Russiagate theory, noting on Twitter that it is “clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be involved in 2018.” Despite his commitment to the cause, Sanders was fiercely attacked in the media as a Siberian candidate himself, proving that no action makes one safe from suspicion. A passing mention in the 43rd charge of the Mueller indictment that the IRA was helping his campaign was seized upon by the media, who described him as “struggling to address” the “Russian support” (Singman, 2018). This was built upon a long-standing narrative that he is the Kremlin’s choice for the next president. The Washington Post (Kirchick, 2017) asked, “When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders how will liberals respond?” thus tarring any future political actions as Russian-orchestrated. How posting Photoshopped homoerotic pictures of Sanders on Facebook helped his campaign was not addressed.
Indeed, virtually every political movement that challenged the neoliberal consensus was smeared as Kremlin puppets. CNN (Byers, 2017) claimed that Russia had bought advertisements for Black Lives Matter (BLM) and targeted them at Baltimore and Ferguson, hotspots of recent protests, thus associating the group with the Kremlin. The Washington Post (Timberg and Romm, 2018) also reported the IRA paid for self-defence lessons for one black activist and shared images promoting the Standing Rock environmental protests against the new Dakota Access Pipeline. Confidante of Clinton and Obama, Neera Tanden described Chelsea Manning as a “Russian stooge” and her run for Senate as part of a campaign whereby “the Kremlin pays the extreme left to swing elections.” That the demonstrable reach and impact of the IRA and other trolls is minuscule is rarely mentioned. The effect is to cast doubt upon any individual, movement or organization challenging power as potentially a Russian psychological operation.
The tactic of associating groups with the Kremlin in order to demonize, defame or discipline them has spread to other countries as well. The Atlantic Council (Polyakova et al., 2017) published a report calling Greek political parties Syriza and Golden Dawn the “Kremlin’s Trojan horses.” Not coincidentally, they are the main two parties challenging neoliberalism in Greece. Indeed, it has linked virtually every major European party challenging the neoliberal centre with Moscow. It was this organization that Facebook partnered with in order to weed out fake news on its site. Funded by NATO, the council’s board of directors includes notorious statespeople Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and James Baker, Generals David Petraeus and Wesley Clark, as well as a number of ex- and current CIA directors and senior tech executives. By September 2018, Facebook had begun to work with the National Democratic Institute, headed by Madeleine Albright, and the International Republican Institute, formerly chaired by John McCain. Reuters (Menn, 2018) reported that the media giant was anxious to better curate what people in other countries saw in their news feeds. Facebook promptly deleted a number of Iranian media channels and the Latin American network TeleSUR English, both of which provided alternative viewpoints to the Washington line. It also worked closely with the Israeli government to remove Palestinian voices from its platform. When groups like this have control over global news distribution and over which sources reach the public and which do not, it is tantamount to state censorship. Since the Atlantic Council’s partnership with Facebook, the US government now has considerable control over the means of communication worldwide, where it is a crucial avenue of information. Fifty-two per cent of Brazilians, 61 per cent of Mexicans and 51 per cent of Italians and Turks use the platform for news; 39 per cent of Americans gets their news from the site (Newman et al., 2018).
France’s president accused Russia of hacking their election, a claim much circulated in the media but later proven incorrect. President Mariano Rajoy of Spain, another neoliberal, claimed there was an avalanche of bots spreading fake news during the Catalonian independence referendum while it is often heavily implied that the left-wing Podemos party is in Putin’s pocket. Indeed, it is impossible to find a European political party to the left or right of the neoliberal beltway that has not been repeatedly linked with the Kremlin by the centrist establishment.
The leader of the leftist UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, is a prime example of this. In March 2018 Russian double agent and British spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned in Salisbury, England. It was immediately assumed Vladimir Putin was personally responsible. Corbyn, a long-time peace activist, uncharacteristically immediately blamed Russia and called for retaliation, tweeting, “The Russian authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence and our response must be both decisive and proportionate.” But Prime Minister Theresa May’s was even more extreme, immediately imposing sanctions on Russia without offering any evidence for the country’s guilt.
The UK media launched a storm of condemnation, not on the aggression of May but on Corbyn’s failure to respond with sufficient jingoism. The front page headline of the Sun, Britain’s highest selling newspaper, read “PUTIN’S PUPPET: Corbyn refuses to blast Russia on spy attack” while the second most widely read newspaper, the Daily Mail’s front page led with “CORBYN THE KREMLIN STOOGE.” The BBC’s flagship news and politics programme, Newsnight, filled its screen with a red-tinted picture of him in a Russian hat Photoshopped with a background of the Kremlin, the implication being clear.
The effect of the return of the fifth filter has been manifold. Herman and Chomsky (2002: 29) note that the filter,
Helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labour movements and serves as a political-control mechanism. If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil. Opposition to social democrats who are too soft on communists and “play into their hands” is rationalized in similar terms.
Putin and Russia have re-emerged as a convenient enemy to unite and mobilize the population against, and as a brush to tar, movements and institutions that challenge the neoliberal status quo, from right or left. As such, it represents a strong disciplining tactic to ensure media and political figures remain sufficiently loyal. Masha Gessen, a Russian anti-Putin journalist and activist, has said, “We’re seeing this sort of re-emergence of Russia as the ultimate toxic paintbrush that you can scare anybody with, and hope that it ends their political career” (Chotiner, 2017).
The return of the fifth filter has allowed the centre to smear and sow public distrust of political challenges from the right and left. Thus, movements not under the control of the Democratic or Republican establishment like BLM and the Standing Rock protestors can be dismissed as useful idiots for Moscow rather than engaging with their ideas. Likewise, the political movements challenging discredited neoliberal economics that have erupted over Europe, such as Podemos and the Corbyn insurgency, and in America, around the campaigns of Sanders and Trump can be written off as merely the result of an all-powerful Russian Internet army, rather than as a consequence of genuine frustration and suffering caused by the current system. The McCarthyist tactic of branding political enemies as traitors has proved effective at sowing distrust in the left, shutting down debate and as a disciplining mechanism. If the West is under attack, now is not the time to question the system. Thus, the public become more grateful to and credulous of those in positions of enormous power and with very poor track records of transparency and truthfulness like the CIA, FBI, the military and the large media companies like the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN that drive the narrative. The effect has been to hold these organizations to a lesser standard and accept hearsay from anonymous official sources as gospel, even from those who lie for a living like the secret services. The new filter encourages Americans to forego their faculties, close ranks and develop a conspiratorial mindset that differing opinions and information are not valid or genuine, but an attempt at brainwashing emanating from abroad.
It has also proven a convenient tool to destroy independent media and to re-establish corporate control over the means of communication. Huge media companies like Facebook and Google have used it as an excuse to change their algorithms and effectively disincentivize alternative opinions being voiced in the first place by cutting advertising revenue and from being discovered and shared by de-ranking sites from search listings and whitelisting certain sites from being seen. The constant discussion of fake news in the mainstream media has done a great deal to encourage mistrust and constitutes a silent attack on alternative media sources, many of them very high quality, who have seen their traffic numbers plummet after being smeared as Russian fake news. Foreign news channels offering a differing perspective like RT, Al-Jazeera and Press TV (Iran) have also seen their viewing figures fall. Conversely, the anti-Russian sentiment has also increased ratings for TV news and subscriptions to major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. The filter has proven extremely valuable to the old media monopolies.
The subtext to the Russia story is that the “hacking” of the election, the “collusion” and the “fake news” were the principle reasons why Clinton lost an unfair election to Trump. As such, it allows the Democratic leadership, under pressure from the left to change their policies, to construct a narrative to why they did not win. Consequently, there is no need for introspection, and certainly no need to cede control of the party to the insurgent Sanders wing.
Instead of encouraging a much-needed discussion as to why neoliberalism collapsed in America and is collapsing around Europe as an ideology, as centrist parties across the West fall into irrelevance, the fifth filter allows the Democratic establishment to close off debate and to tighten its control on power and to discount the disgruntlement over the great racial and class inequalities in America as deriving from Russia. The Democrats are in no small part responsible for exacerbating the inequalities themselves. This “happy families” version of America was summed up by Clinton’s semi-official campaign slogan, “America is already great.” Papering over these cracks may work in the short term but will not end well.
The fifth filter also aids the military industrial complex, who are happy to have a new enemy in Putin. In 2017, the Senate passed a $700 billion military budget, the increases in size alone would be easily enough to pay for free college tuition in the United States. It has also had the remarkable effect of expanding support for a neo-conservative war agenda among the Democrats’ liberal base.
The constant linking to and investigation of Trump and Russia has also arguably pushed the president into accepting a highly interventionist neo-conservative foreign policy. Before the election he claimed he wanted to work closely with Putin and develop a peaceful and fruitful relationship. Now he has taken steps even Obama did not take in bombing Russian-manned bases in Syria and arming anti-Russian factions in Ukraine while building up NATO forces on the Russian border. This was something he opposed before his election. Despite the media depiction, Trump’s policies towards Russia have been extraordinarily antagonistic. In April 2018 he warned that Russia should “get ready” for an attack. The new anti-Russian fifth filter has been a highly useful tool for political and social control and could not have been so successful without the century of propaganda and hostility towards the Soviet Union. This can be seen through the amount of communist imagery used to attack Donald Trump with, despite the fact the USSR has not existed for nearly 30 years.
Finally, it also serves to obscure Hillary Clinton’s own connections to Russia. As Secretary of State, Clinton signed off on a deal that gave the Russian government control of over 20 per cent of America’s uranium production, a strategic asset vital for national security, after investors donated over $140 million to her foundation, much of which was possibly used in her election bid. Furthermore, the Russians consequently gave her husband Bill $500,000 for a speech in Moscow with a Kremlin-connected bank (Becker and McIntire, 2015). The Podesta emails show that the Clinton campaign considered this Hillary’s “top vulnerability” in the upcoming election after polling showed more than half of all voters said they were less likely to vote for her after hearing that information.
The fifth, anti-Russian filter has returned swiftly to become a powerful influence on media and society and a useful disciplining mechanism for individuals and organizations that stray too far from neoliberal orthodoxy. The media’s overwhelming preponderance in covering Russia’s interference in the United States and other elections has had a negative effect for the public, as it takes away time from serious critique of Trump’s highly deleterious policies on health, education, foreign policy and the environment. But it has an enormous utility for the establishment.
It has made the public increasingly critical of alternative opinions and news sources and more trusting of official sources and the mainstream media and allowed huge media companies to attempt to reassert their hegemony over public discourse. The ability to smear political figures as Putin puppets is a powerful weapon in limiting debate and increasing discord among the left and allows the establishment to insinuate that any movement challenging it from the right or left, even those such as BLM and the Sanders movement, is doing the work of Putin. It matters little that these accusations are often backed up by very little; it mattered little during the McCarthyist era too. This weapon has proved too good to be restricted to the United States and has been deployed across Europe as well.
It also constitutes an attempt to divert focus away from both the Democrats’ and America’s structural problems that allowed for a Trump victory and blame their woes on a foreign adversary instead. Thus, the Democrats did not lose because of Clinton’s failings as a candidate, her unpopularity, the mistakes in her campaign, gerrymandering, their own corruption, the electoral college system or their shift to the right, thereby abandoning the American working class, but due to evil foreign influences that hoodwinked the electorate. It allows them to present an image of a united America and ignore the deep fissures in the American economy and society, ignoring or deriding those movements that rise up as a consequence of the policies they enacted. It provides an excuse as to why they lost to the most unpopular major presidential candidate in history and a reason not to cede control of the party to Sanders and to postpone any critical evaluation of their failures.
Herman (2017) described the Russia narrative as amusing “fake news” while Chomsky (2017) declared it a joke: “half the world is cracking up.” However, the return of the fifth, anti-Russia filter has dramatically increased tensions between the two states most equipped to destroy the world. The fate of the planet is no laughing matter.
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