You know it’s getting serious when the New York Times is sending its media columnist on a mission to Moscow, to find ominous parallels between the state of the Russian press, squelched and persecuted under Vladimir Putin, and the American media. Jim Rutenberg filed a 1,600-word report for Monday’s New York Times.
The Times doesn’t do much these days to hide its adamant opposition and hostility to Trump, and neither did Rutenberg’s story and headline: “In Russia, a Pliant Press That Trump So Craves.” Could it happen here?
I wanted to better understand President Trump’s America, a place where truth is being ripped from its moorings as he brands those tasked with lashing it back into place -- journalists -- as dishonest enemies of the people.
So I went to Russia.
It was like a visit to the land of Alternative Truth Yet to Come. But it also gave me a glimpse into how our new national look is playing in the global information war, where competing narratives are clashing along a sliding scale of fact and fiction.
I had picked a ghoulishly perfect week to swing through President Vladimir V. Putin’s Moscow, where spring was struggling to break out over the low-slung, slate-gray cityscape.
Mr. Trump had just ordered a Tomahawk strike against Syria’s Shayrat air base, from which, the United States said, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had launched the chemical weapons attack that killed more than 80 and sickened hundreds.
As soon as I turned on a television here I wondered if I had arrived through an alt-right wormhole.
Back in the States, the prevailing notion in the news was that Mr. Assad had indeed been responsible for the chemical strike. There was some “reportage” from sources like the conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones -- best known for suggesting that the Sandy Hook school massacre was staged -- that the chemical attack was a “false flag” operation by terrorist rebel groups to goad the United States into attacking Mr. Assad. But that was a view from the fringe.
Here in Russia, it was the dominant theme throughout the overwhelmingly state-controlled mainstream media.
The recent Tomahawk issile strike on Syrian targets enables Rutenberg to play things both ways: It's bad when Russian media agrees with Trump, and also bad when they say Trump is wrong.
One of Mr. Kiselyov’s correspondents on the scene mocked “Western propagandists” for believing the Trump line, saying munitions at the air base had “as much to do with chemical weapons as the test tube in the hands of Colin Powell had to do with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
That teed up Mr. Putin to suggest in nationally televised comments a couple of days later that perhaps the attack was an intentional “provocation” by the rebels to goad the United States into attacking Mr. Assad. RT, the Russian-financed English-language news service, initially translated Mr. Putin as calling it a “false flag.” The full Alex Jones was complete.
When Trump administration officials tried to counter Russia’s “false narratives” by releasing to reporters a declassified report detailing Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles -- and suggesting to The Associated Press without proof that Russia knew of Mr. Assad’s plans to use chemical weapons in advance -- the Russians had a ready answer borrowed from Mr. Trump himself.
Rutenberg fired a warning shot at critics of the liberal anti-Trump press here at home: If you "undermine the news media" at home, you will make the dictator Putin smile.
It was the best evidence I’ve seen of the folly of Mr. Trump’s anti-press approach. You can’t spend more than a year attacking the credibility of the “dishonest media” and then expect to use its journalism as support for your position during an international crisis -- at least not with any success.
While Mr. Trump and his supporters may think that undermining the news media serves their larger interests, in this great information war it serves Mr. Putin’s interests more. It means playing on his turf, where he excels.
Integral to Mr. Putin’s governing style has been a pliant press that makes his government the main arbiter of truth.
While talking to the beaten but unbowed members of the real journalism community here, I heard eerie hints of Trumpian proclamations in their war stories.
Take Mr. Trump’s implicit threat to the owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, during the election campaign. In case you’ve forgotten, while calling The Post’s coverage of him “horrible and false,” Mr. Trump warned that if he won the presidency Mr. Bezos’s other business, Amazon, would have “such problems.” (The Post was undaunted, and the issue hasn’t come up again.)
The government here doesn’t make threats like that. Things just happen. That was the case last year at the independent media company RBC after its flagship newspaper reported on sensitive financial arrangements of members of Mr. Putin’s family and his associates. The Russian authorities raided the offices of its oligarch owner, Mikhail Prokhorov. Within a few weeks its top three editors had left.
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One newspaper here, Novaya Gazeta, has lost five reporters to violence or suspicious circumstances since the turn of the century. Toward the end of the week, I went to its spartan offices in central Moscow to visit its longtime editor, Dmitri Muratov, who has fiercely guarded the paper’s independence through all of the killings and the crackdowns.
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Mr. Muratov follows the American news media closely. I asked him what he thought about the American press corps’ quandary when it comes to covering a president, like Mr. Trump, who trades in falsehoods and demonizes journalists.
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“Information from the Kremlin or from the White House, it’s not for us verified information,” he said. “We don’t place our trust just on their word.”
It’s a lesson American reporters should have learned long before Mr. Trump came along, especially after Iraq.
That’s a bit much, considering the press has been all too willing to be spun by administrations they feel ideologically simpatico with, as has been obvious after eight years of Barack Obama’s administration scandals about IRS snooping, the Fast and Furious gun scandal, the Benghazi video blame....
One of Obama’s top national security advisers, Ben Rhodes, openly bragged to the NYT Magazine in May 2016 about spinning the compliant press on Obama’s deal with Iran. Sticking to Russia and Syria, the press swallowed former Secretary of State John Kerry’s false claims about Syria having gotten rid of all its chemical weapons, when he said in a television interview that “we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.”
