Last Thursday, the front page of Le Monde featured a headline in its running commentary on the war in Ukraine: “Vladimir Putin assures that Russia is ready for negotiations with Kiev on the basis of the spring 2022 talks.” India’s The Economic Times similarly relayed the Russian president’s remarks at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in the city of Vladivostok. “Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing.”

Is anyone at The New York Times interested in or even curious about peace? Putin’s declaration should have caught the attention of anyone even vaguely aware of the way the war has been evolving. Russia’s advance in the east of Ukraine is clearly gaining momentum while the Ukrainians have launched a daring but perilous, possibly suicidal incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. Putin’s evoking a prospect for a negotiated peace should have been treated as major news.

At the same precise moment, sole mention of Russia on the NYT’s main page appeared in an article with the title, “U.S. Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 2024 Election.” That headline should have had a familiar ring. The newspaper of record did publish another article the same day, by Marc Santora and Anton Troianovski, on Putin’s speech in Vladivostok: “Putin Drives Home a Perilous Point: Ukraine’s East Is Russia’s Main Goal.” Nowhere in the article is there a mention of Putin’s allusion to negotiations. For these serious journalists, war is news. Peace is a childish fantasy.

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Russian Influence:

The presumed source of every objective observation made by informed Americans that deviates even slightly from official US government policy.

Contextual note

At least the NYT has recently begun to report a few unvarnished facts from the battlefield that are both true and, more surprisingly, at odds both with official state department talking points the paper usually prefers to repeat. Since February 2022, the NYT’s journalists have gotten into the habit of celebrating Ukrainian successes and ignoring, dismissing or seriously underreporting Russian advances. Its interpretation of the state of play consistently echoed White House assessments.

The paper took seriously Biden’s claim last year in Finland that “Russia has already lost the war.” In February of this year, as things had become even worse for Ukraine, it featured an op-ed piece claiming that “Putin Has Already Lost.” This was, of course, consistent with the rest of the mainstream media in the US, who long ago decided which team to root for. Newsweek, for example, at the beginning of Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region, just a month ago, featured the same tired headline: “Russia Has Already Lost in Ukraine.”

The NYT’s journalists nevertheless had the honesty to admit in their article on Putin’s speech that the “situation in the Donbas has now become increasingly difficult for Ukraine, even acknowledging that the besieged city of Pokrovsk is likely to fall.” But even there, their reporting was incomplete. The authors never troubled to explain that Pokrovsk is a major strategic hub, whose fall will provoke serious logistical headaches for all Ukraine’s defensive operations. The BBC, usually as reticent as the NYT to report the naked truth about the war, provides precisely the explanation the New Yorkers have so studiously avoided. It even quotes the assessment of a Ukrainian military expert: “If we lose Pokrovsk, the entire front line will crumble.” That sounds more like a lobotomy than a headache.

For the NYT, an article about a possible negotiated peace could never rival “political importance” with breaking news about what everyone has been encouraged for years to fear as an existential threat: Russian influence on the coming United States election. That will attract its readers’ attention far more surely than intimations of peace in Ukraine. Russia is our existential enemy. If ever we forget that, we may begin to question the massive continuing investment in the means of waging war, which is especially painless when we know it’s our good friends who wage those wars for us and sacrifice their lives, not ours. When reviewing “all the news that’s fit to print,” peace will inevitably end up in the dustbin.

Commenting on the latest avatar of Russiagate so eagerly featured by the NYT, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein pithily sums it up: “Russia’s influence operations are a joke.” He’s right. It’s a running punchline the NYT has been repeating since 2016. Klippenstein even highlights a truly comic twist: “The paradox of the government’s very public obsession with election security is that the more attention paid to these supposed threats, the more likely people are to question the legitimacy of the outcome. In fact, this is an effect foreign adversaries undertaking influence operations hope for.”

Historical note

Glenn Greenwald is more direct when he describes the highly mediatized legal case as “yet another act of standard Democratic Party reflex to scream Russia whenever they feel endangered.” This is a pattern that regularly plays out in the months before an election. Intelligence directors, past or present, government officials and “respectable” media have, since 2016, refined the art of launching terrifying accusations whose vacuity will only be revealed after the election. The now infamous case of the 51 intelligence directors who, weeks before the 2020 election, claimed that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” stands as the obvious precedent. They spoke out. Biden was elected. It worked in 2020, there’s every reason to think it could work again.

This new version of an old routine, as described by the three reporters from the NYT, contains a telling echo that made me in particular laugh. “The United States,” they explain, “was caught flat-footed in 2016 as its spy agencies learned about Russian efforts to influence the vote on behalf of Mr. Trump and were late in warning the public.”

Were they late? If so, they were late in announcing something that turned out to be false. Everyone curious about historical truth should know by now that the thesis we refer to as Russiagate was debunked by the special investigator, Robert Mueller, on whom the breathless anti-Trump media were counting as the inevitable prelude to a president’s impeachment. They eventually did muster up support for the impeachment, but, for lack of evidence, that too failed.

The deeper irony here harks back to something our Devil’s Dictionary revealed on August 26, 2019, when we glossed the precise term “flat-footed.” It came from a quote by NYT’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, in the context of a private meeting of his news desk. On that occasion, Baquet admitted that the paper had gone overboard with its Russiagate obsession. “We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed,” he confessed. “I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

When a serious journalist can say a story “looked” a certain way, it’s the clearest indication that the journal, even if we call it a “newspaper of record,” was looking in only one direction. That simple fact invites us, in turn, to have another “look” at the story to understand who was directing the NYT’s gaze.

Now, four years later, instead of apologizing for their own faulty reporting concerning the Hunter Biden laptop, the self-described “flat-footed” NYT complains that the clearly overeager spy agencies in 2016 weren’t over-eager enough. Just as the NYT did with the Havana Syndrome — another nothingburger no one ever apologized for, even after the CIA admitted it had no substance — its journalists have retained their habit of trotting out discredited stories from the past, with precisely the aim of instilling doubt about the fact that they have been definitively discredited.

Whether it’s Russiagate or the Havana Syndrome, or the JFK assassination 60 years after the fact, they can always appeal to the perception that nothing has been definitively proven either way. It’s the good old “there’s no smoking gun” defense. In reality, it’s just sloppy and sadly dishonest journalism.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.