Four Lies About Donna Brazile that Party-Protecting Reporters Made Viral

A slogan you will never see from the national Democratic Party until its current leadership is cleaned out and gone (source)

by Gaius Publius

The larger story — Those who control most of the Democratic Party, and those in the media who aid and abet them, are to their last breath fighting any attempt to turn the country and the Party in a more progressive direction. That resistance to change (the other #resistance, by the way) ended in Party failure during the electoral revolt of 2016, and it will continue to end in Party failure unless the Republican Party succeed in failing first.

The attempt to keep control of the Party out of the hands of anyone with Sanders-like appeal and policies is relentless and ongoing, and its media enablers are well placed and ubiquitous. The latter include many New York Times writers and editors; many Washington Post writers and editors; most journalists, commenters and hosts at NBC and MSNBC; and more.

The smaller story — That game of enabling resistance to change is playing out now in the mainstream Party and media reaction to Donna Brazile's recent revelations.

Donna Brazile, Dupe of "Russian-Fueled Propaganda"

As soon as the first Donna Brazile excerpts were published alleging collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC to make sure Clinton was the nominee, collusion which started as early as 2015, the attacks on Brazile began. As a reminder, here are a few of the articles covering Brazile's original charges:

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC [Brazile book excerpt; Politico]

Former DNC chair torches Clinton in new book [CNN]

Book Reveals Clinton Campaign Effectively Controlled DNC As Early As 2015 [NPR]

The reaction from both Party operatives and their friends in the media was immediate and brutal.

One recent example: The go-to charge usually leveled against Sanders supporters and Republicans — that anyone critical of the Democratic Party mainstream is a dupe of "Russian-fueled propaganda" — was wheeled out and leveled against Donna Brazile, a Party insider for decades, as well:

 Jesse Ferguson, DCCC and HFA insider, on Donna Brazile (click to enlarge)

Charges of "Russia! Russia! Russia!" are being made meaningless by this kind of mindless, automatic response to any and all enemies, no matter who or where.

Lies and Lying Liars — False Claims Against Donna Brazile That Journalists Helped Make Viral

In particular, four false charges against Brazile, refutations of her claims that are grounded only in lies, have been spread recently by mainstream journalists and publications in their own kneejerk attempts to defend the Party from attack, often using Twitter to make the false charges go "viral."

Let's look at one such charge in depth, courtesy of this piece by Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept. Then we'll list the other three with only brief comment. Again, note:

• Each of these charges is false.
• Most have been retracted, though almost invisibly.
• Few of the retractions have been acknowledged by the original authors of the charges.

The first false accusation in depth:

Viral Falsehood #1: The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the General Election, not the primary.

On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Donna Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Elizabeth Warren endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.

The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: that Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election,” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.

The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement. Unlike the journalists spreading this DNC defense, Campaign Legal Defense’s Brendan Fischer bothered to read it, and immediately saw, and documented, how obviously false this claim is[.]

Note not only the substantive point — that the charge can be proved false just by reading the agreement — but the methodology used to spread it. In this specific case the methodology was: "The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news. ... The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense. ... That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked."

This means that the "DNC-loyal journalists" who spread this story either did not read the agreement or did not care if their assertions were untrue. Their main purpose in either case seems simply to be this — Allow no harm to come to the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

Behavior like this is the very essence of propaganda and the opposite of responsible journalism.

Three More False Claims Against Brazile

Greenwald's piece details three more false claims made against Brazile that mainstream media editors and writers helped spread. These claims are:

Viral Falsehood #2: Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did.

Viral Falsehood #3: Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

Viral Falsehood #4: Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored.

About the first, Sanders made public his own agreement, which showed no such thing. About the second, the Washington Post's editors made that claim in a much retweeted headline to a story that contained no such statement.

The final claim — that the leaked Wikileaks documents were doctored — is simply an evidence-free assertion that many reporters and Party insiders seem simply to want to be true. About that, Politico wrote:

Clinton’s team hasn’t challenged the accuracy of even the most salacious emails released in the past four days, including those featuring aides making snarky references to Catholicism or a Bill Clinton protégé describing Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.” And numerous digital forensic firms told POLITICO that they haven’t seen any proof of tampering in the emails they’ve examined — adding that only the hacked Democrats themselves could offer that kind of conclusive evidence.

Would it not be incredibly easy to prove the claim true, by simply producing a single doctored email? The fact that none has emerged, that not one email released by Wikileaks has been challenged by its authors, itself compels the conclusion that no leaked email has been forged.

For the Many or For the Few?

Thus the battle rages, between the defenders and enablers of the Party status quo and those who wish to change it. But as these skirmishes appear and fade from the national media radar, keep the following more important points in mind:

     1. The nation has had it with pro-corporate, big-money governance. The electoral revolt of 2016 has failed in both parties, which is not good news. In general, if electoral solutions prove impossible, non-electoral solutions will be tried. Non-electoral "solutions" are by definition real revolutions.

     2. If the Democratic Party can't be fixed, it will continue to be abandoned.

     3. The deadlines of our twin tsunamis are short. We have less than a generation, likely fewer than two presidential cycles at most, before all hell breaks loose.

Those twin tsunamis are first, undeniable, irreversible climate chaos and the panicked reaction to it by rich and poor alike. (If events follow the pattern, the rich will abandon the poor, and the poor will take revenge.) And second, uncontrolled public rage against "government for the few," an anger that will explode like a pressure cooker if there's no alleviation.

As a visual example of the forces aligned for change, and the forces aligned against it, recall this:

(Click to enlarge)

Keep this also in mind. It's not just the parties making this mess; it's their media enablers, greater and lesser, that keep the pressure on an  increasingly unforgiving public. Media enablers are just as much at fault as those whom their lies defend.

GP