03.10.2024
Hiding the hack
Even though the odds are too close to call, why are US media outlets so unwilling to use leaked material about Trump’s running mate? Paul Demarty investigates
The presidential election campaign is now in the closing straight.
It is neck-and-neck. Kamala Harris has her nose in front in national polling, but that is all but irrelevant, when a handful of swing states will, in reality, decide matters. In those, things are much dicier. For all the general impression of chaos in Donald Trump’s camp, for all the cringe-inducing podcast quotes being unearthed from Republican vice-president candidate JD Vance, the odds are too close to call at this point (leads of less than 3% are within the margin of error, and that margin has rather tended to embarrass pollsters in recent cycles).
You would think, then, that media outlets which back Harris and consider Trump an unconscionable fascist ogre would have a voracious appetite for anything that could put him in a bad position. And just such a document has appeared in recent months. When Trump was in the process of picking a running mate, his team ran opposition research on each of the candidates, trying to discern what weaknesses the other side would pick on. Vance’s dossier somehow found itself in the hands of persons unknown, who then attempted to shop it around to various news outlets. Remarkably, none decided to bite.
The reason is that this material is apparently believed to have been stolen by the Iranian state - which, of course, has a strong interest in Trump not returning to the White House. That may well be true - or not; we have only cryptic comments from various intelligence agencies to trust on this, but that does not stop the dossier from being noteworthy.
One man not inclined to keep this document out of the public eye was the investigative journalist, Ken Klippenstein, for a long time employed by the Intercept, but now independent, like many of his former colleagues (a change of leadership at the Intercept has triggered an exodus of many of its big-name writers). He threw the dossier up on his Substack website.1 He was immediately and permanently banned from Twitter for his troubles, and anyone attempting to share the link will discover that they are prohibited from doing so. The official reason is that it includes personal information like Vance’s address, but, given his prominent position in US politics, that is already effectively public knowledge. Again: why try to kill this?
Explanations
The Twitter situation has the more obvious explanation. Owner Elon Musk is the most notorious of the new cabal of far-right tech moguls. JD Vance was a subordinate of former PayPal boss Peter Thiel and strongly plugged into this network. They were all cock-a-hoop when he got the VP nod from Trump: he would be their man in the White House.
Some combination of low political calculation and personal favour-currying is likely behind all this. It is breathtakingly cynical, but hardly new - under the ‘old regime’, Twitter took the same action against the Hunter Biden laptop leak shortly before the 2020 election, which Musk loudly denounced at the time. (Many have noted that you can still link to that stuff, which includes far more sensitive material, from private emails to home-made pornography.)
As for the respectable press, it seems to go back to 2016, when Wikileaks provided a dump of internal emails of the Democratic national committee, which demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it was effectively backing Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign, as it came under threat from the insurgent challenge of Bernie Sanders. It was one of many scandals that nibbled away at Clinton, as she faced off against Trump that year, with the eventual result of her defeat. It was not the only, or even close to the main, reason for that defeat; but, facing up to the catastrophe of a Trump presidency, the only explanation acceptable to the sensible liberal mind was that she had been robbed by Russian interference in the election.
In this context, the ‘intelligence community’ asserted that Wikileaks had got the emails from the Russians (denied by Wikileaks, and no concrete evidence was ever made available for the charge - just an endless list of three-letter agencies and cybersecurity companies asserting that it definitely, definitely was true). In response, many mainstream outlets - now rebranding themselves as the vanguard of the ‘resistance’ - swore off reporting on foreign data dumps.
Promises
Of course, the press is perfectly capable of making such promises and then breaking them more or less immediately - see the Daily Mail’s promise, after the death of Diana Spencer, never to print paparazzi photographs again. It is my own view - shared by many on the right admittedly - that the Trump disaster produced a compact between the US media and the ‘intelligence community’. Breaking that alliance would be a bigger deal and so, when the CIA hints that some interesting leaked document might be of Iranian origin, it gets memory-holed, even if its content is embarrassing to the Trump campaign.
These are two different chains of reasoning, but they are in the end closely related, because they paint a picture of the ‘freedom of the press’, such as it is, in capitalist societies - and specifically of America in the present moment - when such freedoms seem to the ruling class and its appointed elites not to be worth the price of admission.
We learn, first of all, that there is a clear and strict constraint on what may or may not be published - the interests, real or perceived, economic or political, of the owners of the media. Musk seems, on the whole, to be completely out of control, but he knows what he thinks he wants. He wants a Trump victory, and a purge of the ‘woke mind virus’ from the body politic. He has turned his website into a far-right cesspit in furtherance of this aim. Meanwhile, deracinated legacy media outlets are more and more dependent on apparently credible briefings from willing sources (like intelligence agencies), which save them the bother of paying money for real journalism - no small problem in these days of decimated advertising revenue. Those relationships become more valuable than one’s own reputation for honest reporting.
The turn of global politics towards war, meanwhile, tends to infect national politics with chauvinism and obedience to the state. There is no need to press the case that Trumpite conservatism is chauvinist - but blaming all your country’s problems on the malign agency of some foreign power, as anti-Trump liberals do, is also chauvinism. Both parties are gearing up for the same war - against China - via perhaps different routes - through or around Russia (or perhaps not: Trump did Putin no favours in the end). This would be a major war, which will require, among other things, a compact and disciplined propaganda apparatus.
Pity, then, poor Ken Klippenstein - a man with a clear sense of vocation, but who finds that vocation increasingly difficult to live out. He was not the only Intercept exile to show up with a Substack, which has proven itself a fairly open-minded home for writers of various kinds and eccentric obsessions. It is not, however, that well-suited to investigative journalism. That has always been a cost-centre for media organisations, but there was a reason to support it, which was political influence. People did not buy media companies because they wanted to become rich, but because they were rich - and also wanted to be powerful in capital cities. The practice was therefore subsidised by the profit centres: sports, celebrity gossip, and whatever else.
The Substack model is to allow small publications to take subscription payments. How well this supports ongoing investigative work is strictly dependent on the subscription volume. Very few even make enough to pay a wage for the individual themselves - never mind a team of journalists of the sort that can really produce a story, the editors to shine it up, and the lawyers to make sure you are not on the fast track to debtor’s prison. And as we noted above, this sort of thing was never a huge money spinner in the first place. The people who do best on the platform tend to just crank out commentary, which - if it is sufficiently alarmist and confirms the ideological prejudices of some audience niche - can happily be done by a sufficiently motivated team of one.
As communists, we have an interest in the truth being unearthed - perhaps for agitational value, but then also to better understand our enemies and their own strategies. The Vance dossier is not terrifically interesting in itself; it perhaps provides some ‘hard’ questions for journalists to ask, but frankly the fact that Vance is an opportunistic, reactionary freak is not exactly a state secret, and we wonder why the Iranians (if it was they) did not set their sights higher. But it is one dot on the vast pointillist canvas of bourgeois politics, and has value for that reason.
Blind spots
Yet we are in a situation where, even forgetting their biases and blind spots, bourgeois media organisations are increasingly unable to provide an institutional frame for workaday journalism of this sort. It still happens, sure, but its ambitions steadily shrink. During the pandemic, the French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, quipped that there was no dystopia in the wings, nor any moral revolution to come from the experience: the future will be like the present, only “slightly worse”. Such has been the steady decline of the bourgeois media’s always extremely conditional commitment to uncovering uncomfortable truths.
The decline in this public good demands a response, which would mean an alternative institutional structure that can support it. Social media (here including Substack and the like, for simplicity’s sake) has signally failed to provide one. The future is not the petty-bourgeoisification of journalism by way of the world’s Klippensteins striking out on their own. For communists, this is precisely part of the role of the party. The old slogan goes: ‘Educate, agitate, organise!’ None of these are possible in an information vacuum.
A large - indeed, even a small, but not insignificant - political party has the resources to keep journalism ongoing. We can run it at a loss, because we are not in the game for profit. We do not need our investigations to yield advertising dollars, or curry favour with political elites. We need it to support the work of the party in organising for social revolution, in the course of which we must recruit members - members who pay dues. The whole thing balances out.
Journalism is hardly the only role of party media: it is for fighting out internal and external political differences, supporting campaigns, and much else besides. Yet it is worth highlighting here, simply because our rulers are doing such a terrible job of it.