ATCM: 'Spies and Journalists: A Very Special Relationship'

 It's hard to understate the irony of [Carl] Bernstein's complaining about journalists collaborating with intelligence officials when he had served as the unquestioning recipient of leaks by Mark Felt, the onetime head of FBI counterintelligence, motivated by Felt's bureaucratic beef against the elected president of the United States.

Bernstein's relationship with Felt can be thought of as the alternative model of intelligence-journalist cooperation, where the eyes of the intelligence services are not on foreign foes, but domestic political and bureaucratic opponents.

Instead of journalists being the eyes and ears of American spies, it's now the spies who observe and report to their journalist assets, not to relay facts, but to spread narratives that serve the opaque purposes of the government mandarins.

Journalists seeking to remain in the good graces of the intelligence community have returned the favor by pre-emptively tailoring their reporting to the needs of the spies.

Coziness between spies and journalists has grown exponentially worse as society has progressed further into the digital era.

So today the intelligence doyens of D.C. don't really have any better understanding of the ways of the wider world than do the know-nothing journalists to whom they leak.

Like Bernstein with Felt, journalists are perfectly comfortable being the patsies of deep-throated spies if the target is a Republican, and not some foreign foe.

https://the-pipeline.org/atcm-spies-and-journalists-a-very-special-relationship/