There is, however, little evidence that Klein pushed back on his compatriots when it mattered.
Ben Smith has regrets.
In his Semafor podcast, the onetime BuzzFeed editor confessed that he was less sure today of his fateful decision to publish the infamous “Steele Dossier” that purported to outline the extent to which the Kremlin had compromised Donald Trump. At the time, he had his reasons. “You know,” Smith reflected, “A lot of our readers felt, and a lot of Democrats felt like there’s no way this guy was legitimately elected.” To the extent that contributed to the “media energy” chasing down the claims that Trump owed his election to Moscow and the Putin regime’s manipulation of Facebook, Smith admitted “to some regrets about that in retrospect.”
Smith’s interlocutor, New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein, evinced none of Smith’s introspection. “I was always very hostile to the ‘Facebook did it through disinformation’ theory,” he insisted. “You can go back to what I said then: I thought there was evidence that Russian disinformation or ads or something on Facebook had turned the election.”
If we take up Klein’s challenge, we find that, as late as February 2018, Klein was among the many liberals who appeared to accept at face value the notion that Russia’s manipulative social-media campaign had at least had some effect on the 2016 race.
In his reflections on a Wired report on the immense punitive pressure Democratic lawmakers put on Facebook after Trump’s election, Klein gave no indication that he was skeptical of the premise he now wholly rejects. “Facebook didn’t understand the way Russia had used its platform to tilt the 2016 election until months after the vote,” Klein wrote in his capacity as Vox’s co-founder. Litigate the fine distinctions between “turn” and “tilt” all you like, but the difference between them will prove elusive.
It was a casual aside — one that Klein probably doesn’t remember because it was a reflex informed by the liberal milieu in which he cosseted himself. After all, it’s not as though the premise to which he lent credence was controversial among Democrats.
A December 2016 YouGov survey found that a majority of self-described Democrats believed in the maximalist version of the Russian interference narrative — the claim that Moscow had tampered with “vote tallies” to send Trump to the White House. “The NSA Chief says Russia hacked the 2016 election,” Mother Jones declared around the same time. In mainstream venues like the Financial Times and the New York Times, Russia was said to have “hacked” the election by virtue of its involvement in the illicit operation that exposed John Podesta’s emails to the public.
Democratic lawmakers embraced and promulgated this narrative. Indeed, they buttressed it with the absurd but oft-stated contention that Russian-funded Macedonian meme farmers altered the course of American history. The breathtaking visage of “Buff Bernie” Sanders, Aziz Ansari advising voters to cast their ballots via hashtag, and a bare-chested Jesus sparing with Satan with the soul of the nation in the balance; this was the stuff that Democrats cited as evidence of how susceptible Trump-voting Americans were to foreign propaganda.
Today, Klein can observe that the idea of Russian election interference “became a deus ex machina for liberals” to explain their 2016 failings. That is now conventional wisdom within his liberal ecosystem. He will incur no social or reputational costs for lending it credence. There is, however, little evidence that Klein pushed back on his compatriots when it mattered.
Klein’s reticence had a rationale. As he told Smith, he believed at the time and still believes, to one extent or another, that Trump or “the people around him” were “compromised” by Russia in some way. To survey the circumstantial evidence Klein marshaled in support of that claim, it’s reasonable to hold fire in advance of the investigations into that allegation.
That’s what I did while the jury was out. But I also considered the evidence to the contrary, including the many Trump administration actions that, even in its first year in office, rendered it Russia’s most frustrating adversary in the White House in this century.
Notwithstanding the president’s conspicuously obsequious rhetorical deference toward Putin, it’s a poor Russian stooge who, by February 2018, had seized Russian consular property, expelled its diplomats, imposed Magnitsky Act sanctions on its officials, expanded NATO, and engaged in set-piece battles with Moscow’s proxy forces in Syria.
There were plenty of analysts who, sifting through limited and contradictory information, kept their powder dry in advance of Robert Mueller’s findings but who also lent no validity to the Democratic claim that the outcome of the 2016 election was marred by the most cartoonish disinformation operation imaginable. Vox in the Klein era was not the venue for such circumspection.