Emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler knows more than she tells, but she tells a lot - Columbia Journalism Review
This article is the first profile in a series focusing on notable forensic journalists for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
By Sam Thielman, CJR
September 24, 2018
In the sometimes murky world of national security reporters,
few people are wrong less often than Marcy Wheeler.
....Russia warned us not to go into Iraq. They were right. And we told Russia clearly that we were not going to engage in regime change in Libya. [Qadafi] was assassinated in terrifically horrible fashion, and I don’t think our engagement in Syria has been positive. I think there were other ways to engage in Syria, partly by tracking down the Saudis. I mean, the Saudis have been as toxic as anything in Syria, and have contributed to the bloodshed in Syria, and they’re supposedly our allies. And [they’ve been accused of war crimes in] Yemen, right?
I think Russia rightly criticizes those things, and those are some of Putin’s key issues. He doesn’t like regime changes.
How has your public profile changed in the recent past?
There is an endless audience for these Russia story cases, and I know that. I’ve been through that—my finances have improved because I’m covering the Russia story. It’s a lot sexier than covering [changes to FISA section] 702.
Is that a good thing?
Journalists are far too willing to be the playthings of defense attorney lawyers [like Trump’s].
I mean, with Mueller not leaking, there’s so little. This is how Trump has fooled the country into believing his primary risk is obstruction. It’s not! It’s collusion. It’s absolutely collusion, and yet because his attorneys over and over and over again say, “Well, there’s obviously no collusion, and here is how the obstruction case with Jim Comey and blah, blah, blah,” and that has gotten a huge number of very good journalists to believe that Trump’s only exposure is obstruction, and that’s crazy.
Even Maria Butina [the accused Russian spy who allegedly infiltrated the NRA on behalf of Putin confidant Alexandr Torshin] clearly had off-the-record conversations with a number of journalists, some of whom are mainstream, and there should be a real push for them to have to come clean and say, “Oh my gosh, I had no idea she deceived me about who she was.” But there is going to be a need, or there should be a need for a lot of that in journalism, because Butina’s not going to have been the only one [who manipulated the American press], and I don’t have a lot of confidence that people are going to have the appetite for that.....
