So too did the press, the media, the intelligence community and Democrats –

New American Journal graphic by Evan Riddle

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

Facebook fucked up. So too did the entire traditional press and broadcast news media in America. So did the CIA, the NSA and the FBI. Democrats screwed up too.

The Republicans and the Russians just did what they do. We ended up with an unqualified, undignified dictator mob boss king as president because every institution we have that could have prevented it failed.

That is the message from Alex Stamos, the former chief of security for Facebook who was named prominently in a massive investigative take down report from the New York Times this week.

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

Stamos delivered his retort in the Sunday Washington Post opinion section.

Yes, Facebook made mistakes in 2016. But we weren’t the only ones.

To summarize the key points and make them even more clear, we already knew much of what the Times reported this week. The key point is that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were so focused on growing the platform to the point where it would be too big to fail and making it worth as many billions of dollars as possible that no one there wanted to hesitate for even a moment to focus on the downside of that for the rest of us, including the devastating effects on the economy of the press and democracy itself.

Stamos said “technology companies were so enamored with the utility of our own products” that they “overlooked … effective propaganda efforts.” In trying to grow as big and rich as possible, “Facebook stuck to a public-communications strategy of minimization and denial.”

But Facebook should not be alone in blame.

“The massive U.S. intelligence community failed to provide actionable intelligence on Russia’s information-warfare goals and capabilities before the election and offered a dearth of assistance afterward,” he says.

Elected officials, including Democrats, did little to effectively communicate and counter what was going on.

“Lawmakers’ public grandstanding at investigative hearings stands in stark contrast to their failure to establish facts, effectively oversee the executive branch and provide for the common defense,” Stamos writes.

He does not let the press off the hook either.

“We must also remember that in the summer of 2016, every major media outlet rewarded the hackers of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) with thousands of collective stories drawn from the stolen emails of prominent Democrats,” he said. “The sad truth is that blocking Russian propaganda would have required Facebook to ban stories from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and cable news — not to mention this very paper (the Washington Post). Since the election of Donald Trump, print and television news organizations have staffed up and provided a critical service to Americans, but they have never adequately grappled with their culpability in empowering Russia’s election interference.”

The problem with the corporate news media model in America today continues unchallenged, except by those of us who operate independently on the web. Since the election and the “fake news” story first came around, thanks to that very first missive in the Washington Post attacking lefty bloggers for the problem and for being “tools of Russian propaganda,” many news consumers turned away from alternative sources of news and back to the big name news brands, mainly through sponsored links and boosted posts dominating the Facebook news feed.

Here’s the piece I wrote about it at the time: America Has Fallen and Can’t Get Up

The target should have been instead the right-wing fake news operation already hard at work, from Rush Limbaugh on talk radio to Fox News, and Breitbart News online and all the fake Facebook news sharing operations set up by Steven Bannon, paid for by Robert Mercer — and the Russians.

Stamos says many of the individual reporters he has talked to are “warier of manipulation.” But he also says, “it is unclear whether the U.S. media would handle the strategic release of stolen emails any differently today. This might be a fundamental vulnerability in the free press, but it would be reassuring to see leading newsrooms publish their standards on how they might cover newsworthy data leaks without amplifying the messages of the United States’ enemies.”

The final message from Stamos is for citizens, who he says “must adjust to a media environment in which several dozen gatekeepers no longer control what is newsworthy. While the platforms that bring hundreds of new media outlets to your phone need to improve protections against abuse, in a free society we will always be vulnerable to the injection of narratives from the enemies of democracy, both foreign and domestic. The last line of defense will always be citizens who are willing to question what they see and hear, even when it means questioning our own beliefs.”

That’s easier said than done for people. But we have no choice but to try to build a better system and get the word out to more people, and yes we need your help to do it. So we will keep asking for it even if some people find it annoying.

Meanwhile, in another trending news item, Rolling Stone weighed in with a missive of its own against the Washington Post, showing how the paper covered up for its new owner, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, in reporting on the announcement of two new headquarters developments in New York and Washington.

Amazon’s Long Game Is Clearer Than Ever

In case you missed it, Saturday Night Live went after Trump and Bezos this week.

See Steve Carell’s Jeff Bezos Troll Trump With Amazon Expansion on ‘SNL’

Now, what is the average news consumer and Facebook addict to do?

Well, since the midterm elections are over and the news should slow down some with Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks on the horizon — that is if Trump will just stop tweeting for awhile and bashing the media and keeping everybody roiled up into an insane lather — we might take some time to conduct an assessment of where we are, how we got here and where we go from here.

I hate to say I told you so, but some of us in the alternative web press tried to warn people before Trump was elected that he had a real chance of ascending to the White House throne, and what a danger that posed for all of us. We tried to warn people about the problems with our press and media system, and with becoming overly dependent on Facebook and social media for information. We warned of the coming dangers of Trumpism.

Many listened. Many didn’t, like teenaged college freshmen who think they already know everything and don’t need help, education or advice.

We will continue to try to use this platform to warn people of impending danger, and report on it after the fact when it happens.

But like everybody else, I need a bit of a break from the news madness to think, to unwind, and to finish updating my book, Jump on the Bus.

As it stands, the book ends during the primaries of 2016. I’ve already updated the introduction and made significant progress on a new lead chapter on the special election in 2017 and the nationally significant race between Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore and now Senator Doug Jones of Birmingham. I am also writing about what has happened over the past two years in a new ending chapter. Stay tuned.

We are working on a new way to promote this book and get it out to more people, including a free promotion that will allow many of our regular readers who find out about it first to get the book FOR FREE!

If I had Trump’s money or the money of Jeff Bezos, I would buy every one of you who reads and shares this Thanksgiving dinner. As it is, I can only offer you something interesting and intelligent to read that might help you understand the complicated, crazy world we all live in now. If that is worth something to you, well, you know what to do.

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