PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Press Reckoning on Russiagate

Jeff Gerth’s Columbia Journalism Review article should be earth shattering, and it would be if anyone in the mainstream media paid attention to it. But they won’t. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Jeff Gerth’s investigation for The Columbia Journalism Review exposes the dark heart of the news media’s coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. 

Jack Anderson in 1973. (Rochester Institute of Technology, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

In the autumn of 1973, Jack Anderson, the wonderful iconoclast of the Washington press corps, published a syndicated column revealing that a Hearst Newspapers reporter had spied on Democratic presidential candidates in the service of Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign.

At the time of Anderson’s column, Seymour Frieden was a Hearst correspondent in London.  Anderson also reported, not quite in passing, but nearly, that Frieden tacitly acknowledged working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Anderson’s column was as a pebble tossed in a pond. The ripples grew, if slowly at first.

William Colby, the C.I.A.’s recently named director, responded with a standard agency maneuver: When news is going to break against you, disclose the minimum, bury the rest, and maintain control of what we now call “the narrative.”

Colby “leaked” to a Washington Star–News reporter named Oswald Johnston. The paper fronted Johnston’s piece on Nov. 30, 1973. “The Central Intelligence Agency,” it began, “has some three dozen American journalists working abroad on its payroll as undercover informants, some of them full-time agents, the Star–News has learned.”

April 24, 1975: C.I.A. Director William Colby, right, with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, left, and Deputy Assistant For National Security Affairs Brent Scowcroft during a break in a meeting of the National Security Council. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

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