How Roger Stone played the media: Indictment exposes how he dictated 2016 Clinton coverage

How Roger Stone played the media: Indictment exposes how he dictated 2016 Clinton coverage

https://www.salon.com/2019/01/25/how-roger-stone-played-the-media-indictment-exposes-how-he-dictated-2016-clinton-coverage/

AMANDA MARCOTTE at Salon

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On Friday morning, in highly dramatic fashion, FBI agents swooped in and arrested Roger Stone, a longtime friend and unofficial campaign adviser to Donald Trump. The charges — witness-tampering, lying to federal officials, obstruction of justice — have been long expected, based on previous reporting that suggestsStone may have worked with WikiLeaks to release documents stolen from Democratic officials. The big news in this indictment, however, is that special counsel Robert Mueller appearss to have evidence that Stone was working at the direction of Trump campaign officials and that "a senior Trump Campaign official was directed" — by whom, we don't know  — to  communicate with Stone about his contacts with WikiLeaks.

Immediate media reaction to the indictment has been shot through with amusement at Stone's brash persona and his tendency to revel in his own villainy. The New York Times compared Stone to a "character in a whodunit whom readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime." The Washington Post's article  from the indictment rates "the most colorful section" of the indictment, in which Stone is quoted as urging a co-conspirator to mimic "The Godfather" as major takeaway No. 2 — above the section implicating the Trump campaign directly, which is rated at No. 3.

But in fact, reading this indictment is a sobering reminder of how terribly the mainstream media performed in 2016. Stone's deep involvement in the Trump campaign should have been a major, front-page story in itself. Stone has been a self-proclaimed dirty trickster and full-blown monster his entire adult life. He was fired from Sen. Bob Dole's office in 1973 for his part in the Watergate conspiracy. He worked directly for Trump to lobby against Native American casinos in the '90s. He helped orchestrated the "Brooks Brothers riot to shut down vote counting in Florida after the disputed 2000 presidential election. And that's not even touching on Stone's tendency to use racist slurs and call women, including Hillary Clinton, names like "cunt."

Instead of being the story, as he should have been, Stone was able to drive the 2016 media narrative by repeatedly hyping, with the help of WikiLeaks, conspiracy theories that were complete nonsense but still got endless, breathless coverage from the allegedly respectable media.

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