7/21/17, "Fusion GPS Illuminates the Brave New World of Manufactured News for Hire," Lee Smith, Tabletmag.com
"The news media is dead broke. Print advertising is washed up and all
the digital advertising that was supposed to replace lost revenue from
print ads and subscribers has been swallowed up by Facebook and Google.
But the good news is that people will still pay for stories, and it’s an
awful lot easier to bill one customer than invoicing the 1,500 readers
of your blog. The top customers for these stories are political
operations.
There is no accurate accounting of how many of the stories you read
in the news are the fruit of opposition research, because no journalist wants to admit how many of their top "sources" are just information packagers,—which is why the blinding success of Fusion GPS is the
least-covered media story in America right now.
There’s plenty of oppo
research on the right, but most of it comes from the left. That’s not
because Republicans are more virtuous than Democrats and look for dirt
less than their rivals do. Nor conversely is it because Republicans make
a richer subject for opposition research because they’re so much more
corrupt. Nope, it’s simple arithmetic: Most journalists lean to the
left, and so do the majority of career officials who staff the federal
government. There are more sounding boards on the left, and more
sources. It’s not ideological, it’s business....
The Trump-Russia story has frequently been likened to Watergate, a
specious comparison since the latter started with evidence of a crime
and the former with publication of an anthology of fables, pornography,
and Russian-sourced disinformation put together and distributed by
partisan political operatives. The salient comparison is rather in the
effect—it has the same feel as Watergate. And it’s taking up the same
space as Watergate—and that’s because comms shops-for-hire like Fusion
GPS have assumed the role that the American press used to occupy....
For the past seven years, I’ve reported on and written about American
foreign policy and what I saw as troubling trends in how we describe
and debate our relationship to the rest of the world. What I’ve
concluded during that period is that the fractious nature of those
arguments—over the Iran Deal, for instance, or the war in Syria, or
Russia’s growing role in the Middle East and elsewhere—is a symptom of a
problem here at home. The issue is not about this or that foreign
policy. Rather, the problem is that the mediating institutions that
enabled Americans to debate and decide our politics and policies, here
and abroad, are deeply damaged, likely beyond repair.
.
The shape of the debate over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
illustrated this most clearly. The Obama White House turned the press
into an instrument used not only to promote its initiatives, but also to
drown out and threaten and shame critics and potential opponents, even
within the president’s own party. Given the financial exigencies of a
media whose business model had been broken by the internet,
mismanagement, and the rise of social media as the dominant information
platform, the prestige press sacrificed its independence for access to
power. If for instance, your beat was national security, it was
difficult at best to cross the very few sources of power in Washington
that controlled access to information. Your job depended on it. And
there are increasingly fewer jobs in the press."...
.........
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