[This article was originally published by Truthout.]
By Norman Solomon
When Donald Trump won the presidency, crucial questions begged to be addressed: How could it happen? Was Hillary Clinton seen by voters as too close to Wall Street, too aligned with wealthy elites? Was Bernie Sanders correct that loyalty to the billionaire class would undermine the Democratic ticket’s appeal to working-class voters?
Those were hardly the kinds of questions that Democratic Party leaders and corporate media wanted to put in the national spotlight. Instead, they quickly shifted the focus — to Russia.
Within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession speech, campaign manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John Podesta “assembled her communications team” at the national headquarters in Brooklyn “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up,” journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report in their inside-story book Shattered. “For a couple of hours … they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
There were real Russian efforts to intervene in the election. But their scope and effects became widely exaggerated. In U.S. media and politics, a laser focus on Russia quickly substituted for examining basic reasons for Clinton’s loss.
The traumatic reality of Trump’s victory called for a serious and well-grounded exploration of the key factors that led to the catastrophe. Such an exploration might have critically assessed the Democratic abandonment of many working-class voters that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had brashly heralded in July 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
The elitism of centrist Democratic orthodoxy — having no use for such progressive proposals as Medicare for All and tuition-free public college — failed to ignite enthusiasm or inspire turnout from the working class. But instead of scrutinizing that political approach, what came to the fore was a fixation on relentlessly blaming Vladimir Putin. It was a fixation that let the party’s leadership off the hook.
The Democratic National Committee went into 2017 with a grand total of one full-time staffer to address the nation’s rampant suppression of voting rights. In the spring, the DNC trumpeted expansion of that staffing to four employees. There was a clear need for legal resources to challenge pernicious voter ID laws and other barriers that had blocked so many people of color from casting their ballots in 2016. Yet in April 2018, when the DNC filed a civil lawsuit, it was against the Russian government (as well as the Trump campaign and associates, WikiLeaks and its founding editor Julian Assange).
From the outset of his presidency, Trump had been guilty of flagrantly violating the Constitution’s foreign and domestic emoluments clauses, which prohibit a president from gaining any personal benefits from government actions. But rather than zero in on the impeachable offenses involving corrupt self-dealing — which are easy for voters to understand — corporate media and leading Democrats focused narrowly on Russia.
As the Trump administration proceeded to inflict a vast array of harm, the Democratic leadership in Congress — and liberal media stars like Rachel Maddow on Comcast-owned MSNBC — persisted with a Russia obsession that would last years. That obsession crowded out attention to an enormous range of moral atrocities being inflicted by the Trump regime, including economic violence against low-income people in the United States and U.S.-aided slaughter by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
A study by the media watchdog group FAIR found that MSNBC — “the leading liberal cable network” — “did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.”
FAIR documented that in 2017, the first full year of MSNBC’s ongoing “Russiagate” obsession, the network “only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.”
Notwithstanding such realities, the mass media continued to fixate on Russia, while homegrown assaults on democracy became evermore vicious and damaging across the United States.
The fact that the Trump team lied about contacts with Russians caused people to lose sight of the fact that Trump continually lied about almost everything under the sun. Improper business deals and corrupt entanglements of the Trump Organization had been occurring in many countries. And Russia-related news coverage continued to mightily distract all too many progressives from anti-democratic maneuvers that were underway in our own country.