CNN's home page is taken to clustering stories. In their big cover story at the moment, The main headline is that Trump mocks intelligence agencies over the claims regarding Russian hacking. "Mocks" is a not-egregious interpretations of thing things Trump has said, so that seems like straightforward reporting. A subheading says that Assange claims he did not get at-issue emails he posted to Wikileaks from Russia. This is still relatively straightforward reporting. What Assange stated was that he did not get the emails from a state or state actor, which (if true) still leaves open the possibility that person who performed the hack was Russian or someone in Russia at the time. The final headline in the cluster is "Ex-CIA spokesman: Trump believes Julian Assange over the CIA <http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/politics/george-little-trump-tweet-assange/index.html>".
The latter headline (and associated story) ports in an odd assumption not present in the prior stories: The assumption that Trump's statements are with respect to the truth of the situation. I'm not sure why that is still a thing people are thinking. In contrast with that, I would say - based on the previous stories and other associated reports, and Trump's general behavior - that Trump's statements regarding Russian hacking evidences only that he thinks the best way to play the situation is to not publically blame Russia. That seems like a reasonable play, regardless of what Trump thinks and who he trusts. I can't see anything Trump would gain by publicly blaming Russia, and it is also unclear to me what the U.S. would have to gain by Trump publicly blaming Putin. If Trump thinks they hacked the DNC, one would think he would ask the spy communities and the diplomatic communities for advice about how to handle that behind the scenes, countering spycraft with spycraft. There is nothing for an incoming president to gain by trying to call Putin out, in public, with scant evidence, the details of which would be inaccessible to most of the public anyway. (CNN was recently called out for running a story about Russian hacking that used pictures for the video game Fallout 4, presumably because they thought people would connect with that as a representation of what "hacking" looked like.) Even if the intelligence community had iron clad proof, that everyone could understand and believe beyond a reasonable doubt (which they don't), it would only heighten questions about the legitimacy of Trump's win. At this point, that wouldn't be a win for Trump, or the country. Are we really going to get four years of the media trying to treat everything Trumps says as if it is a factual claim he deeply believes? Was this ever a viable assumption for any president? Were are the commentaries we would see if it were any other (recent) president, talking about how he might or might not believe it, but he's backed into a political corner, and is probably making the right move? ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Supervisory Survey Statistician U.S. Marine Corps <[email protected]>
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
