"The Times and Nord Stream."
Knees knock on Eighth Avenue.
10 MARCH—Sometimes news reports make news in themselves. The case most readily to hand, given that Dan Ellsberg is much on our minds these days, is the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe 52 years ago. The Times fought the Nixon administration all the way to the Supreme Court for the press’s right to make public the documents Ellsberg leaked. That was news.
And then there are cases, more all the time in our age of information warfare, when “news reports,” quotation mark required, make news. So it has been this week, when The Times pretended to report an utterly ridiculous, transparently planted account of who was behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosions as if it were legitimate news.
The once-but-no-more newspaper of record did its duty as it has perversely defined this for most of the years since it published the Pentagon Papers. It served as the national security state’s bulletin board and published the spooks’ preposterous concoctions about some lost-in-the-fog “pro–Ukrainian group” that blew up the Russia-to–Germany gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last summer. But it is clear to me that the government-supervised Times knew very well that the “new intelligence” its sources fed it is simply too far over-the-top to take seriously. Chafing, for once, under the authority of its supervisors, it went to press with barely disguised reluctance.
Do we really have to put out this rubbish? This question is the subtle-but-legible subtext running all through the piece.
This is my read, as chair of the Timesology Department at an expensive private university I cannot name because of the sensitivity of negotiations, and I can’t tell you anything about those, either, except to say there are negotiations. You have to read this piece carefully, and you can do so here. See if you agree with me: I detect a sliver of distance between the paper and the powers it serves—maybe some flicker of lost independence with a sepia tint of nostalgia to it. I will not go so far as to suggest this represents that greatest of grails reporters are ever in search of, a turning point. But passive-aggressive dissatisfaction such as we see in this story may—best outcome—suggest a modest start toward some kind of recovery.
You had to wonder what the Biden regime and the national security apparatus would do after Seymour Hersh published, on 8 February, his persuasively detailed account of the administration’s covert operation, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” They tried the usual strategies: First they ignored it, then they attempted to discredit it as “fiction.” Mainstream media, naturally, did roughly the same. Silence, for the most part, reigned.
But it is hard to ignore Sy Hersh, the most celebrated investigative journalist of the past half-century, and Sy doesn’t write novels so far as I know. I do not have a clear definition of “going viral” in the media context, but his lengthy report, the first he published in his new Substack newsletter, almost certainly has done so.
So it was that “the intelligence community” was compelled to develop an alternative story suggesting “a pro–Ukrainian group carried out the attack,” to quote the lead of the story The New York Times carried on page one of its 7 March editions. It’s a cockamamie tale, but I have long noted that propaganda and psy ops of this kind are often cockamamie because cockamamie tales are more than sufficient to take in the majority of those at whom they are aimed. Sad but so.
Of all the flimsy propaganda yarns the spooks have conjured over the decades, this one is surely among the flimsiest. The intelligence cited—and I honestly do not believe there is any, as this seems to me sheer fabrication—is conveyed to three Times reporters by officials who naturally go unnamed. It goes no further than “suggesting” this blurry pro–Ukrainian group I am certain they made up executed the Nord Stream operation. No, they don’t know much about the perpetrators. No, the officials will not disclose “the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained, or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains.” We’re back in the “trust us” days of Russiagate, when The Times and other corporate media routinely trafficked in all manner of now-disproven nonsense to subvert Donald Trump’s presidency.
There are repeated assertions that there is no connection between the purported group and the Zelensky regime in Kyiv. And, of course this, the point of the entire exercise, nicely down in the piece so that it does not appear to be the point of the exercise: “U.S. officials say Mr. Biden and his top aides did not authorize a mission to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and say there was no U.S. involvement.”
Good enough. They said it so it must be true.
Joe Lauria and Kelley Vlahos, editors respectively of Consortium News and Responsible Statecraft, have published pieces taking apart some of the more obvious problems with The Times story. Their reports can be read here, here, and here. How could a small group of “pro–Ukrainians” with no official ties and no access to state resources execute an operation of such magnitude and sophistication? Vlahos asks, one of numerous good questions.
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O.K., the national security state puts out another in a long, long line of Swiss-cheesy stories, this one intended to counter Hersh’s report, which he nickel-plated with irrefutable detail in anticipation of official Washington’s reaction. Routine enough, regrettably. But the way The Times handled what the spooks seem to have fed it like a foie gras farmer feeds his geese was not routine.
Let us net out this piece. No official has taken any responsibility for anything he, she, or they gave The Times. This is standard, of course. Then we note the other-than-standard. Almost nothing in this piece is asserted with clarity and certainty: It is all by way of vague suggestion with no there there. Even the core thought, the culpability of a pro–Ukrainian group, is a dodge in disguise: We are invited to think we have just been told a new fact, but a pro–Ukrainian group could be anybody all the way up to the people Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, assembled to plan and execute the operation. They qualify as pro–Ukrainian, obviously.
The sole thoughts we are supposed to go home with come down to two: The Biden regime was not responsible for the Nord Stream operation and there is an alternative to Hersh’s account of it. Neither of these is so.
Ordinarily in a case such as this—and the Russiagate fiasco gives us four years’ worth of examples—The Times would escalate its language such that, by the end of the piece, readers are quite certain they have been told things they have not been told and know things they do not know. I see no malpractice of this kind in this piece. The paper kept a palpable distance from what it published in bulletin-board fashion. It did nothing to make the inconsistencies and lapses of logic in the official account less inconsistent and more logical, as it typically would. At no point did it directly or indirectly attempt to refute the Hersh piece. It reported the Biden White House’s denial of responsibility dutifully and no more.
The Times makes one reference to Hersh’s report. Here it is:
Last month, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the newsletter platform Substack concluding that the United States carried out the operation at the direction of Mr. Biden. In making his case, Mr. Hersh cited the president’s preinvasion threat to “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.
The White House’s denial follows, one terse sentence:
U.S. officials say Mr. Biden and his top aides did not authorize a mission to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and they say there was no U.S. involvement.
That’s it. Think about what is in these paragraphs and then what is not.
The New York Times has been disgracefully wrong to turn itself into the notice board of the powers it is supposed to report upon and its reporters into clerks whose task it is to post messages on it. But in this case it has made it as clear as it can under the circumstances it has created for itself that it wants nothing to do with the message.
Sy Hersh has won this one, if you want to put it in such terms. The Times has just told us it has no intention of taking on Sy’s piece in any point-by-point way. It can’t: The Hersh report is too solid, and thank goodness Sy had the good sense to fortify it as he did. The regime and the spooks can’t, either, which is why they must resort to a rubbishy propaganda op that amounts to a tissue of non-facts dressed up as facts.
German media elaborated the “pro–Ukrainian group” bit subsequent to The Timespiece Tuesday, as Kelley Vlahos noted, and with ever-more-implausible fabrications. So did The Wall Street Journal. This is what our media and our friends in Langley do when the initial presentation of a new psy op doesn’t quite stick: They pile on what is supposed to be convincing detail.
But note: The Times has not so far gone anywhere near this stuff. It will be very telling to see if the paper puts reporters on the case and publishes what we call follow stories as the spooks on both sides of the Atlantic build the edifice ever higher. My wager: It won’t, or it will do the minimum and keep its distance from the proceedings such as it is principled enough to do.
I have long held the theory that if our mainstream newspapers and broadcasters are to recover their surrendered dignity and integrity, it will be because independent media have inspired or required them to do so. Let us watch.