The Washington Post reports that Fox News anchor Bret Baier admitted, on a Friday morning Fox broadcast, that his blockbuster accusations against Hillary Clinton this week were “mistaken” (emphasis mine):
Fox News anchor Bret Baier apologized Friday for reporting that federal investigators had determined that Hillary Clinton’s private email server had been hacked and that an investigation would lead to an indictment of Clinton after the election.
In fact, Baier said, after checking with his sources, there is no evidence at this time for either statement.
A week before the election, a major network broadcasts high profile accusations against the front-runner, and then a few days later (after the damage has been done) admits that the entire story was false. In an earlier time, heads rolled when news organizations made such “mistakes”. Today, we just ignore it — just like many of us ignore the lies, bullying, and abuse that is the stock-in-trade of the Republican nominee.
I’m struck by how hard it was to find this in my Google news feed, buried deep inside the “US stories”, and not even visible now. Funny how stories about voters who think Clinton acted illegally stay in circulation, while the truth — that major news outlets like Fox News spread vicious and false accusations — remains buried. Each time media outlets repeat, as news, that “a majority of voters think Hillary Clinton acted illegally”, the truth is buried deeper.
We are watching American democracy bleed out from the multitude of wounds inflicted by irresponsible media outlets pandering to the prejudices of ignorant voters (ignorant because they rely on outlets like Fox News) and by equally irresponsible GOP politicians who hope to exploit the same prejudices for their political benefit.
By the time the truth is told — if it is ever told — it will be too late.
If Bret Baier had any integrity at all, he would resign. If Fox News had any integrity at all, Mr. Baier would be fired. The real story this week is the flagrant corruption of Republican officials such as James Comey and the brazen lies of Fox News.
That real story is not being told. We have hundreds of channels and tens of thousands of media outlets — and too many Americans remain ignorant, uninformed, and convinced of things that are absolutely false.
If the reverse had been done to Trump by NBC or anyone else, it would be his entire stump speech for the rest of the campaign.
they won’t have time any more lies
When are you going to admit to spreading the lie about Russian involvement with the Wikileaks’ emails. Assange categorically denied this Robbie Mook initiated smear yesterday. I believe Assange before Robbie Mook, thank you very much. Please do not continue these partisan meltdowns a la James Carville.))))
You need to expand your sources of information. You are just hilarious, did you mean this be a joke?
Please allow me deconstruct your comment a bit. I wonder if you actually paid attention to what Mr. Assange said, to whom I said it, and the relationship of his statements to the history of Wikileaks.
First, Mr. Assange did not categorically deny anything. He said, instead, that the Russion GOVERNMENT was not the agent responsible. Here are his words, as reported by Newsweek (emphasis mine):
The intelligence community does not assert that the Russian government is directly responsible. It asserts, instead, that the attacks originate in Russia — presumably from Russians, and that the attacks are happening with the blessing and knowledge of the Russian government. There is some speculation that Russian government agents are responsible — I’m not aware of any government or private sources that claim this as absolute fact. I’m reminded of the claims, when the Watergate burglars were first arrested (and prior to the subsequent disclosures), that Watergate was a “second-rate burglary” done by perpetrators with no connection to the US government or to the Nixon campaign. Those claims were largely true (or at least truthy), so long as they were not explored more than millimeter deep.
Second, the statement was a “preview” of an “exclusive interview” to be aired on the “Russian state-run news channel RT”. Are you now claiming that RT is a bastion of free-market journalism, working hard to expose the facts and only the facts? Get real, my friend.
Finally, in making these statements Mr. Assange breaks with a long Wikileaks tradition of NEVER revealing or discussing its sources.
Your reference to Robbie Mook suggests to me that you’re getting way too much information from breitbart.com
I come to my conclusions from examining the data. You seem to be relying on right-wing websites, personal bias, and Russian state-controlled media.
You’ve offered nothing that comes close to challenging credible charges of Russian involvement.
Meanwhile, what does Wikileaks have to do with the Fox News disgrace that is the topic of this thread?
Too bad we can’t edit typos.
on October 10-12. It is strange to see you become an apologist for our so-called intelligence agencies when it suits your purposes. Have they ever been right about anything in the last 10 years? As far as RT is concerned, what you and most Americans do not know is that there is a vibrant newspaper and media community in Russia. If you read Russian sources you would understand that there is as much dissent about issues, maybe more, than there is here. And lastly, the wikileaks fiasco has to do with the Fox news fuckup because in both instances news sources were and are promulgating falsehoods to support their own agendas.
It isn’t just our government agencies, the same information is coming from well-respected leaders in the private security field — private sources who have been right far more often than they’ve wrong.
Are you now arguing that RT is not state-controlled? Are we to believe that you are correct and Newsweek is wrong?
So far, you’ve offered no evidence whatsoever, just as you offered none a few weeks ago. I understand why that is — you have no evidence to offer.
Other than recycling talking points from breitbart.com, do you have ANY evidence? Any other explanations, from reliable sources, that align with the facts that we have on the table?
There is an extensive discussion of this. Then, if you have any evidence that OTM is mistaken, get back to this argument.
Please supply a link and perhaps even summarize it.
I’m not willing to plow through screen after screen of fluff in hopes of finding the piece you’re looking for. I’m also looking for evidence and facts, not more speculation.
and click (with your mouse) on this week’s podcast, dated Nov 4.
The segment starts after two interviews with people protesting the Dakota Access pipeline (which is also worth listening to). That lasts about 15-20 minutes.
If you want skip right to the segment on Russian hacking, look for the horizontal line at the bottom of the webpage. That is actually a very clever little device that lets you pick up on the podcast at any point. Look just to the right and left of the little horizontal line. There will be a number on each side of the horizontal line. One number is the elapsed time of the podcast, the other is the time remaining. Move the mouse over the line until you see the little number become something between 15.00 and 20.00. Then click it and the podcast will start right in at that point.
If the voices are already talking about Russia, repeat the process above and go to a slightly earlier number. If they are still talking about protesting the pipline you can move the move a little to the right.
With your extensive background in cyber security, you probably can handle it from there.
Sorry not to supply you with a link, but the ability to use google and to click your mouse will look good on your cyber security resume.
If you have facts to offer, show them.
The OTM piece argues that the standard of evidence isn’t high enough to attribute the hacks to Russia.
From 18:04 to 19:05 in the piece, Mr. Carr acknowledges that there may be evidence that he hasn’t seen. He speculates about why not — and that’s all he does. Neither Mr. Carr nor any of us understand what criteria is used to determine what can be disclosed and what is not to be disclosed. I hope you will agree that standards applied to Russia may differ from standards applied to North Korea (where Mr. Carr agrees we have persuasive evidence).
Similarly, from 21:12 to 21:50, Mr. Carr does not say that the Russian government was not responsible for the hacks. He instead says that the standard of evidence that he’s seen does not meet his criteria.
I don’t know Mr. Carr, other than through this interview and a brief skim of Google links about him. He may be a respected researcher whose opinion is valued by all who know him. He may also be a crank who demands an impossibly high standard of evidence. After all, I remind us that Freeman Dyson, prominent scientist with a long and distinguished record of contributions, is also a prominent skeptic of climate change. Not because he rejects the possibility, but because in his view climate models overstate the issue. It would be mistake to cite an interview with Mr. Dyson as evidence to show that climate change is a hoax.
I suggest it is similarly mistaken to cite this interview with Mr. Carr as evidence to show that the allegations of Russian involvement in these attacks is similarly a hoax.
There are at least two other explanations for the “comic book” nature that Mr. Carr complains of — one is a piece from last summer in the NYTimes, the other a mid-October piece from engadget.
Finally, I don’t call a five minute interview “extensive”. Perhaps Mr. Carr has published pieces comparable to my last link. There is very little substance in the piece you cite.
I note the following, from my last link (emphasis original):
I find the evidence that these attacks were perpetrated by Russians persuasive. I’ve written earlier that they may originate with Russian organized crime. This is particularly relevant given the various connections published earlier this year between Mr. Trump and his staff to Russian organized crime. Various media sources have published multiple accounts of deep connections between Mr. Putin and Russian organized crime, such as this January 2016 NYTimes piece.
When I see what is for me compelling evidence of hacks perpetrated by Russians, with strong indications that they are connected to Russian organized crime, and when that happens in the context of what are to me well-documented connections from Vladimir Putin to Russian organized crime, that meets my standard for agreeing that the Russian state at least knew of these hacks, even if Mr. Putin did not personally order them.
You, Mr. Carr, and edgarthearmenian may differ. That does not justify the hostility, snarkiness, and distortions of this sub-thread.
It certainly does not compare with the clear and admitted “mistakes” that Fox News so brazenly broadcast in the final week of the campaign — and then half-heartedly apologized for.
“Government security agencies and professionals know that the DNC hacks were orchestrated and conducted by the Russian government…..”
“Please, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT about this…..”
“The evidence of Russia’s involvement with these breaches is even more compelling than the evidence supporting climate change.”
Please, Tom, cool down and reread your own comments on this topic. Then reread my comments. All I’ve ever said was that it was wrong to call the Russian government’s alleged involvement in these hacks an “objective fact.” I never claimed that it was a hoax.
You, on the other hand, have suggested that Edgar the Armenian and I are in league with Donald Trump. And you have claimed that your opinion is based on special secrets that you have seen but can’t share. THEN, you mock Edgar and I for not looking for those secrets online, when you’ve just said that the information is not available to the public. And then when I come up with an interview that is available on a prominent NPR program, you whine about not having the time to ” plow through screen after screen of fluff”.
Sorry ( a little) about the snark, but you spent the better part of a month flaunting your technological superiority to poor Edgar and me, and then when I suggest a very simple google search, you act all incommoded.
All I’m saying now, and all I’ve ever said, is that the Russian government’s involvement in the hacks is not an “objective fact” based on what we know publicly. And that jacking up tensions with Russia over this is not a good thing.
I haven’t had access broadcast TV since losing my equipment in a divorce in 1998. I haven’t listened to radio on decades. I had no clue what “On The Media” was, and when I attempted to google it the first time, I got a long list of utterly useless hits with nothing to actually examine, watch or listen to.
Mixed in with your snark was enough information to let me find it myself. I’d like to suggest that much of the rancor of our exchange could have been avoided by simply citing it’s hosting page, together with its title (“On shaky ground”).
I remain convinced that there is absolutely no doubt that the hacks were perpetrated by the Russian government, in the same sense that the Watergate burglary was perpetrated by Richard Nixon and his cronies. Does that mean that actual current KGB agents did the acts? Of course not. It means that I believe that the Russian government knew about it ahead of time, knew about it afterwards, and allowed it to proceed.
Let me offer an analogy, from the fiction of Terry Pratchett. Assassination attempts against government officials are a relatively frequent occurrence. Nearly all of them are blocked or otherwise rendered harmless long before any actual threat happens. If an entity wants a particular official to be assassinated, and arranges for a “failure” of the security apparatus to stop the next assassination attempt against that individual, who is to blame? Did the entity hire the assassin? No. Will there be any evidence connecting the assassin to the entity? No. If the job is done professionally and correctly, there won’t even be ties from the security failure to the entity. Yet the entity did, in fact, accomplish its mission.
We apparently disagree about the likelihood that Russian agents perpetrated these attacks, and did so with the knowledge and blessing of the Russian government.
This most recent post by you is the ONLY actual reference to an actual opinion by an actual security expert about the situation. Your cite was a link to five minute NPR interview. There is no supporting evidence, Mr. Carr makes only a casual reference (“comic opera, keystone cops”) to what is now a substantial body of evidence and analysis about this. One of my criticisms of this interview is that in my opinion Mr. Carr misrepresents the views he criticizes — hence my subsequent cites.
My objection to the commentary from you, and to a greater extent edgarthearmenian, is that you essentially ignore that large and growing body of evidence and analysis. It does, in fact, demand a certain level of technical expertise to appreciate. The evidence shows that the EXACT same SSL certificate was used by an attack that all agree originated in Russia (an earlier attack on Germany) and this attack. I don’t know if it’s “flaunting [my] technological superiority” or not. I do know that that comes very close to either a smoking gun or a very clever ruse — a ruse that itself is difficult to accomplish (have you ever attempted to forge an SSL certificate?).
In my view, anthropogenic climate change is a scientific fact supported by compelling scientific evidence. Freeman Dyson disagrees (or at least disagreed in the relatively recent past). I view the Russian involvement in these hacks as similarly incontrovertible. You (and Mr. Carr) remain skeptical.
The precise words of edgarthearmenian, whom you stepped in to support, were these: “It is strange to see you become an apologist for our so-called intelligence agencies when it suits your purposes. ”
This is simply an ad-hominem attack on me. I’m happy to have a discussion with you about what standard of proof we require and whether or not the evidence meets that standard. I’m not interested in continuing a pissing contest with edgarthearmenian or anybody else.
That is a not a discussion that is advanced by the commentary from edgardthearmenian that I responded to.
…a person told me today that “Isis is going to attack us on election day and I wonder why Hillary will not stop it considering they donated to her foundation.”….I did not know how to respond.
Hillary isn’t going to stop any hypothetical attack on election day because she is not currently in any position to do so, and I am extremely skeptical of the idea that ISIS has donated to the Clinton Foundation. If you are willing to consider this nonsense for a nanosecond your case of Hillary Derangement Syndrome is more acute than I thought. Ultimately, you are under no obligation to respond to stupidity, however.
..this person would (and has in the past) simply respond with “Oh, you’re a liberal, aren’t you? Why don’t you admit what’s REALLY going on?”
If you have time (and stomach) to spare, try listening/watching some of the “alt right” stuff out there and then realize that there are people who listen to this stuff all day long, day in and day out.
There is no way possible for me or anyone to convince them otherwise in a causal conversation.
When you said you didn’t know how to respond, I took it as you couldn’t come up with a response because you did not have one on the tip of your tongue and maybe thought this person was on to something. Now it sounds like you couldn’t respond because your jaw had hit the floor in reaction to something so outrageous. My apologies for the misinterpretation.