[Peace-discuss] Russiagator Rachel Maddow is losing friends!

[J.B. Nicholson]

The Washington Post surprises with some journalism yet again! You'll recall 
that they recently published the Afghanistan Papers which clearly explains 
that we're spending billions every month on that war despite that "we 
haven't the foggiest idea what we're doing".

Now Eric Wemple has published an op-ed in the Washington Post 
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/26/rachel-maddow-rooted-steele-dossier-be-true-then-it-fell-apart/) 
which is years late to showing up the fraud that Rachel Maddow has become. 
She, like Marcy Wheeler wasn't always like this. Both Maddow and Wheeler 
used to say sensible things backed by evidence. Wheeler became another 
Russiagator who receives considerable coverage on Democracy Now. Aaron Maté 
debunked her long-winded and evidenceless explanations during his short 
tenure at The Real News. It's probably no coincidence that Maddow's switch 
to neoliberalism and neoconservatism (insofar as Russiagate backs Russian 
sanctions and sanctions are war on the poor) coincided with hosting her 
MSNBC show.

Credit where credit is due: Let's not forget that Aaron Maté & Glenn 
Greenwald were onto Maddow's scam years ago. And their exposés were better 
done than Wemple's.

Aaron Maté on "MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Sees a “Russia Connection” Lurking 
Around Every Corner"
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-sees-a-russia-connection-lurking-around-every-corner/

Glenn Greenwald on "Rachel Maddow’s Exclusive “Scoop” About a Fake NSA 
Document Raises Several Key Questions"
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/07/rachel-maddows-exclusive-scoop-about-a-fake-nsa-document-raises-several-key-questions/

So why isn't Maté still with The Intercept now?

While Greenwald reportedly enjoys editorial immunity in his founding deal 
with The Intercept, Maté told Jimmy Dore:

 From around 27m07s into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS0AlApiWLs
> Jimmy Dore: But that's what most of the people in journalism are about
> -- they're about their career and they don't have a lot of courage.
> Because that's what it takes to do this; it took a lot of guts to stick 
> your chin out and do this and thank God you found someone like Katrina 
> Vanden Heuvel over at The Nation to champion your writing otherwise you 
> would have been spending [your time], you and me over on our jagoff
> YouTube channel and nobody would have been getting awards.
> 
> Aaron Maté: It's true. It's true. It's true. Listen, I can tell you
> that I tried to write this stuff at The Intercept. It wasn't welcome
> there. I wrote one piece about Rachel Maddow -- you covered this on your
> show, I wrote that piece about Rachel Maddow and talking about how she
> covered Russia more than all other issues combined and going through
> and debunking a lot of her conspiracy theories; basically, arguing very
> politely that she was a propagandist. That piece did very well but
> after that I was never welcome back at The Intercept again. And I tried,
> you know. And I thought that of all outlets, an outlet that calls
> itself fearless and adversarial would wanna put resources that
> challenging the claims of intelligence officials like John Brennan and
> challenging this conspiracy theory that was so widespread across the
> corporate media. But they weren't interested, and instead they went and
> hired Jim Risen.
> 
> [Jimmy Dore throws his head back and laughs.]

Russiagate debunking would eventually give Maté cause to no longer work 
with 3 news outlets but this same reporting would later earn him an Izzy award.

- Democracy Now -- where Maté disagreed with chief host Amy Goodman's take 
on the fake Syrian gas attack near Douma (Maté's evidence-based approach 
seems to be vindicated by the scientists at the OPCW who have now multiply 
leaked their own findings indicating that the gas canisters were "manually 
placed" where the canisters were found and not dropped from the air). 
Goodman repeated Russiagate corporate narratives including echoing the now 
shameful phrase "it's the beginning of the end [for President Trump]" in at 
least two interviews with other guests (Marcy Wheeler & Kshama Sawant). 
Footage of Goodman saying this line is part of a infamous sequence of 
corporate-friendly media outlets saying this line and "the walls are 
closing in", "a bombshell report", "Trump is finished/done/in 'big' or 'a 
lot of' trouble", "This is the date everything changed -- mark it down", 
and more dating back to February 2017. See 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwW9RZCEydw for a mirror of this and see 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdHtAzFNwjE for Jimmy Dore & co's take on 
this video.

- The Real News Network (TRNN) -- Maté had a short series of recorded and 
aired disagreements with TRNN chief Paul Jay (which included discussions 
about Russiagate). Jay seemed ambivalent about Russiagate. Jay kept another 
TRNN host -- Russiagate supporter Marc Jacobs -- on the network where 
Jacobs remains today. Jay and his wife were allegedly recently pushed out 
of TRNN.

Maté now runs his own show, "Pushback with Aaron Maté" as part of the 
Grayzone Project with independent journalists Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, 
and Anya Parampil (see 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAZrqdbdGGQyeZmHn7ypybTcm1qPsBRUB). 
He also publishes with The Nation.



Greenwald summarized his own article above when he gave Maddow an 
"honorable mention" in the "Ten Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on 
the Trump-Russia Story"

 From 
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story/

> Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very
> melodramatically claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick
> her by sending her a fake Top Secret document modeled after the one
> published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come from the
> U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the
> document before it was published by us and thus must have had special
> access to it; in fact, Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on
> the document; the fake sent to Maddow was created after we published the
> document, and was sent to her by a random member of the public who took
> the document from the Intercept’s site and doctored it to see if she’d
> fall for an obvious scam. Maddow’s entire timeline, on which her whole
> melodramatic conspiracy theory rested, was fictitious.

Maddow fell for it. Mission accomplished.

The Washington Post has a 6-part op-ed "on the media’s handling of the 
Steele dossier". Maddow's endless stumping for Russiagate is part 5 which 
concludes:

> When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise
> MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely
> came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece
> of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of
> telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for
> the document.
> 
> And when large bits of news arose against the dossier, Maddow found
> other topics more compelling.
> 
> She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings — a pattern of
> misleading and dishonest asymmetry.

-J