skip, Eichenwald sucksby Vested Id 12/22/2016, 4:02pm PST
Why Eichenwald is garbage and no one should listen...
Ok first, why you should listen to him
1) Senior writer for Newsweek and Vanity Fair contributing editor
2) Former Wall Street reporter for the New York Times, worked for CBS News, built a career on reporting on corporate malfeasance
3) Wrote the book The Informant! is based on, and well-received books on 9/11 and Enron
4) Pulitzer finalist, two time Polk winner, won an ethics award
I point these things out to add some ballast to the events of the last week
1)
Deleted tweet from September
2)
Tucker Carlson asks him about the tweet. He immediately nances Carlson (We all know what you're doing buddy, STOP trying to fool us it won't work), pulls out a prop, and drags his feet for nine full minutes. Segues into an incredibly weird valorization of the men and women of the CIA. Reformed Crossfire manchild is given a chance to play the adult and holds his cool while ending the interview.
3)
THIS IS THE POLICE, YOU'RE IN BIG TROUBLE KID
4)
There's a long story behind (the Trump institutionalization tweet). When you go through the full feed lead up to that tweet, there was a reporting purpose for that tweet going out, which is more than you're going to want to hear about. I thought I was making fun of Fox News and the rest who were doing, Hillary has seizures, Hillary has multiple sclerosis, Hillary has Parkinson's, y'know let's go to Dr. Oz, and so I was writing a series of jokes leading up to that with the intent of sending that tweet, which was a signal to a source to talk to me.
The larger question—the one on which Eichenwald’s case may turn—is whether a computer screen flashing at a certain brightness with a certain frequency could indeed have triggered a seizure in his case. The answer is: maybe.
6)
This is an aside but let's take a look at your article:
He thanked me for the investigative reporting I had done about Donald Trump before the election, expressed his outrage that the Republican nominee had won and then told me quite gruffly, “Get back to work.” Something about his arrogance struck me, so I asked, “Who did you vote for?”He replied, “Well, Stein, but—” I interrupted him and said, “You’re lucky it’s illegal for me to punch you in the face.” Then, after telling him to have sex with himself—but with a much cruder term—I turned and walked away.
If they opposed Trump while refusing to do what they could to keep him out of office—that is, vote for the only other candidate who could win—then they need to go perform sex with themselves. And I mean that in much cruder terms.
They have trafficked in them on Facebook and Twitter, they have read only websites that confirm what they want to believe, and they have, in the past few months, unknowingly gulped down Russian propaganda with delight.
7)
Russia, eh? You called this a slapfight, my friend you need to read it:
Glenn Greenwald wrote:
More insidious and subtle, but even worse, was what Newsweek and its Clinton-adoring writer Kurt Eichenwald did last night. What happened — in reality, in the world of facts — was extremely trivial. One of the emails in the second installment of the WikiLeaks/Podesta archive — posted yesterday — was from Sidney Blumenthal to Podesta. The sole purpose of Blumenthal’s email was to show Podesta one of Eichenwald’s endless series of Clinton-exonerating articles, this one about Benghazi. So in the body of the email to Podesta, Blumenthal simply pasted the link and the full contents of the article.
Once WikiLeaks announced that this second email batch was online, many news organizations (including The Intercept, along with the NYT and AP) began combing through them to find relevant information and then published articles about them. One such story was published by Sputnik, the Russian government’s international outlet similar to RT, which highlighted that Blumenthal email. But the Sputnik story inaccurately attributed the text of the Newsweek article to Blumenthal, thus suggesting that one of Clinton’s closest advisers had expressed criticism of her on Benghazi. Sputnik quickly removed the article once Eichenwald pointed out that the words were his, not Blumenthal’s. Then, in his campaign speech last night, Trump made reference to the Sputnik article (hours after it was published and spread on social media), claiming (obviously inaccurately) that even Blumenthal had criticized Clinton on Benghazi.
Eichenwald, with increasing levels of hysteria, manically posted no fewer than three dozen tweets last night about his story, each time escalating his claims of what it proved. By the time he was done, he had misled large numbers of people into believing that he found proof that: 1) the documents in the WikiLeaks archive were altered; 2) Russia put forgeries into the WikiLeaks archive; 3) Sputnik knew about the WikiLeaks archive ahead of time, before it was posted online; 4) WikiLeaks coordinated the release of the documents with the Russian government; and 5) the Russian government and the Trump campaign coordinated to falsely attribute Eichenwald’s words to Blumenthal.
