Why Is The Media Not Questioning The CIA's Hacking Claims?

The lobby of the CIA Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia. (Reuters / Larry Downing)

James Carden, The Nation: Why Are the Media Taking the CIA’s Hacking Claims at Face Value?

Despite the CIA’s uninspiring record for the past 70 years, the media are defending the agency for all it’s worth.

In 1977, Carl Bernstein published an exposé of a CIA program known as Operation Mockingbird, a covert program involving, according to Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Bernstein found that in “many instances” CIA documents revealed that “journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that there isn’t much need for a covert government program these days. The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had it once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it.

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WNU Editor: The media is not experiencing a "love affair" with the CIA right now over their claims that the Russian government interfered in the U.S. elections .... what the mainstream media is now focused on is President-elect Trump and their need to find anything to de-legitimise/discredit his election victory. I have never seen anything like this .... especially seeing long time sceptics of the CIA all of a sudden embracing these CIA claims without raising any questions or doubts. And the funny part of all of this .... it looks like it is not working.