that means we could only project that's what we defuse it was one of the founders of. this and the story of jerusalem through the eyes of its own people saying. this could be nation injustice this is in the twenty first century jews a rock and a hard place. on the way to the. system did not establish that members of the campaign fired or the russian government has . gone too far from going after iron man or maybe reputation help or. hello i'm richard burton you're at the listening post here are some of the media stories we're covering this week the aftermath of the mother report the stain it leaves on the reporting of news outlets who went all in on the story of the trump campaign and russian collusion julian assange and the ecuadorian government at odds at the london embassy once again ethiopia one year after the arrival of

a new government what has it meant for the media there and take a deep breath yoga as a collective therapy for a united kingdom divided by bricks before moving up into a. rising nationalist. russia gate the theory that donald trump colluded with lot of mere putin to hijack the two thousand and sixteen us presidential elections was a story that was too big to fail but that's what happened and certain american news outlets now have some questions to answer the official summary of the muller report about alleged collusion says there's no clear evidence of it trumps people had many questionable contacts with influential russian nationals but not directly with the government having sold americans the seductive and conspiratorial notion that the man in the oval office might be a compromised foreign agent now comes a moment of reckoning for the u.s. media that includes the networks who gave. short shrift to skeptics who challenged

the prevailing collusion narrative the one that boosted ratings and brought on the clicks a golden goose of a story for those skeptics it's vindication as for trump himself after two years of accusing the media of a witch hunt calling them the enemy of the people this story has handed him a two thousand and twenty election gift like no other our starting point this week is washington. when it came out that the mother report had found there was no trump russian special counsel by the stronger understandable shock throughout the political establishment we are going to get a print out feels like. the place for a tough russia conspiracy which is not there i mean when you do journalism you don't follow what you imagine nation wants to believe this is an international war fare against our country you follow what the facts are and the facts undermine this

notion of a top russian speakers. five voices on the mall or report three who were skeptical of the russia collusion narrative all along and two who argue the journalists were right to focus on the story and no network anchor invested more air time more of her own credibility on the case for collusion then m s n b season and rachel maddow as if the worst is true. if the presidency is effectively a russian op if you had to pick one person who promoted the hysteria then. she would be that person her ratings were going down until trump was elected in until russia gate became a possibility and she seized on it immediately well before trump's inauguration are about to find out if the new president of our country is going to do what russia wants with this story she she started playing a character where she sort of became this. patriotic sort of front

actor there been tons of russians there was a very powerful element of really fear there ran through her shows that mean the most infamous broadcast was the one during a cold front earlier this year russia can just shut off the electricity they have that ability now where she suggests that the russians have the capability to turn off the heat across the united states at any moment what would happen if russia killed the power in fargo today you know that would be an act of war there was this implied subtext that the russians were this sort of reasoning with evil that was everywhere and we had to have vigilance and watch out for it everyone is going to accuse others of doing poor reporting i would point to margaret sullivan piece in the washington post where she said the solid reporting done by a lot of people should be celebrated because it's a hard story to tell and then there's cable t.v. and we need to make

a distinction between now commentary television is not nude in its commentary given all that's happened since and rachel maddow in particular she has certainly pushed the smaller matter but she's done so in a way that was supported by the facts we knew at the time so i'm not prepared to go with many of the folks who say this was hysterical this was wrong certainly was driven by the commercial interests of television in terms of what they covered. that angle commercial considerations tends to get over the focus is usually on ideology since matthaus network m s n b c leans to the left politico however since marketing itself as america's anti trump news channel m s n b c has seen record ratings at times maddow has drawn more viewers in her nine pm slot then her competition at fox news just a few years ago that would have been unheard of. the publication of the motor

report had an instant effect on that i was numbers ratings for her first two shows after the report's release were down by more than twenty percent as telling as the voices n.b.c. puts on the air to discuss russia gate is who it does not journalists like matt tayyiba and erin who have never bought into the collusion narrative of the case of a missing d.c. it's certainly a case of a network prioritizing profit and partisanship over actual journalism partisanship in the sense that this narrative of trumped russia it was the preferred one of democratic party elites that m. ascendancy is the one with and profit in the sense that this story helped drive and this n.b.c. upwards in the ratings but now they have to think about what has done to their credibility we were all ostracized none of us were invited on television other reporters and other people in the media they saw that there were a line that sent a message to everybody else that if you stick your head up you know you're going to

get the same treatment what is donald trump trying to hide m.s.n. b.c. he was not alone in investing in the russia gate story. the russians and collusion something that looks and smells a whole lot like collusion c.n.n. other networks and some of america's more prestigious papers the new york times and washington post included also found it hard to resist and they reverted to some bad journalistic habits american saw in the aftermath of nine eleven. according to u.s. intelligence senior when intelligence sources said that the bush administration's fictional stories of iraqi weapons of mass destruction point we're looking at the same kinds of problems that we saw in the run up to the iraq war and the failure to track down sources to check for actual evidence and for corroborated evidence and a real abandonment of professional standards the embrace all too many. in both

cases of a kind of stenographers rule rather than establishing an independent perspective some of the same intelligence officials who were involved in the initial trump russian best a geisha and also were involved in the iraqi the scam were put on cable news as experts former cia director john brennan he is our senior national security and intelligence analyst for amazon the see john brennan head of the cia and james clapper the director of national intelligence and for two years they took part in promoting the notion that trump was possibly compromised by russia john brennan also predicted that miller was going to hand down indictments for the trump russia conspiracy and he is going to be delivering what i think are going to be his indictments the fact that never came and the lesson we should draw from that which we should have drawn after iraq is that we do not trust intelligence officials or anyone without concrete evidence but we got today as a summary. findings now after years of being told to expect an indictment even

a possible impeachment american news audiences have to reassess the entire russia gates story and they lack the evidence they need to do that. the muller investigation a reported three hundred pages long has not been made public all the media have to go on is a four page summary from the attorney general bill barr who was appointed by the president that's a key argument and voices in the media are holding on to. we don't know what's in the mahler report that is the most important fact to keep in mind we only know what attorney general barr in a very brief letter says about the muller report russian interference is and was real people around this president did things they should not have done they knew it because they lied about. those people who are claiming this is wild hysteria nonsense there is lots of smoke here there are financial transactions with

oligarchy the way the world works under vladimir putin all of our are just as important as family russian government. the bar memo says that donald trump was helped to win by a hostile foreign government and he cheered every step of the way russia if you're listening i hope you are able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing if it's not fair to criticize him for having done that whatever his criminal liability for doing so that i think we're in a bad place for democracy is that why he won no not by itself but does donald trump deserve some criticism for cheering on a hostile foreign government. it's going to be only america first. and it's not as if there's been a shortage of domestic trump related scandals stories for reporters to change the

multiple indictments of his campaign and administration officials his former lawyer the payoffs to trump's former lovers his courtship of neo nazis however those stories lack the foreign bogeyman the idea that the kremlin had somehow help decide the two thousand and sixteen u.s. election it's as though the american media along with the opposition democratic party must look overseas for someone to blame for putting donald trump in the white house when they should be looking closer to home much closer. part of the reason we have is because we have a political and media culture that is dominated by people who do not want to take responsibility for their own failures their own actions the media gave trump and listen tension billions of dollars worth of free advertising during his election campaign and he was capitalizing on the very real anger towards the policies of the democratic party elites their neoliberal economic policies brought misery to large

parts of the country instead of reckoning with their own failures in two thousand and sixteen democrats turn to a scapegoat which was. russia is all of isis can lose you know product of collusion and collusion and unfortunately our media enabled them every step of the way. we're discussing other media stories that are on our radar this week with one of our producers minox you razzi mina julian assange the founder of wiki leaks has been in that ecuadorian embassy in london for seven years now over the past year the conditions of his asylum there have been tightened considerably and you've got the latest as you said richard we've seen a progressive squeeze on julian a songe and this latest story we're hearing gives us a sense of just how tense things have become at the embassy on march twenty fifth cassandra fairbanks a reporter with an american rightwing online outfit called the gateway pundit went to meet with the sun she says that her meeting had been pre-approved by the ecuadorian embassy but when she got there the situation became hostile fairbanks

says she was locked in a room with cameras and surveillance equipment and she overheard an argument between a songe his lawyer and embassy staff including the ambassador she reports a sundress told he could not enter the room unless he submitted to a body scan now the suspicion was that he was taking in a radio device with him to interfere with any surveillance recordings the argument was loud heated and prolonged and eventually a two hour long meeting was just eight minutes we're going to consider the source here though don't we i mean gateway pundit is a horrid right news outlet right alongside outfits like breitbart of course and that alone mandates some skepticism of their deporting just like we're skeptical of some of the reporting by the u.k.'s guardian now of course that newspaper has a much wider and more mainstream audience but some of the deporting on bikie leaks in a songe has ranged from inaccurate to just outright malicious what's changed in the relationship between a sanch and the ecuadorian government that government granted him asylum back in

two thousand and twelve in a sense that he feared being extradited to the u.s. is this just the result of the arrival of a new government. in quito well that's a significant factor certainly now in two thousand and twelve the president of ecuador was in a file called area leftist deeply critical of the united states in two thousand and seven he was succeeded by lenin moreno who described himself as a centrist and has publicly called julian a songe he is in headed to a problem now what seems to have triggered the crackdown on a sunday is internet connection and the frequency of his visitor is a comment he made last year on social media about ecuador his allies including spain it is an explicit condition of a songes asylum that he won't make any comment on ecuador's foreign policy and in addition to all of this we also have reports that the u.s. state department is putting pressure on the acquittal in government to lift the asylum to lift its protection of julian assange ok thanks mia it's now been one year since east africa's most populous country ethiopia experienced

a political transformation a change in leadership after years of social unrest and demonstrations prime minister haile mariam deselect unexpectedly quit leading to the appointment of abi ahmed a representative of the country's largest ethnic group to roma us the reforms came swiftly be packed his cabinet with a record number of women he promised to address the social tensions among ethiopia's multiple ethnic groups and he forged an historic agreement to end the twenty year standoff with neighboring eritrea changes came quickly to the media realm as well dozens of new news websites have appeared more than twenty new media publications are now in business and numerous journalists jailed and stifled under deselect he and his predecessor have been freed last year we spoke with four journalists of different media backgrounds about the role that social media has played in the political transition now about nine months later we've gone back to those voices to see how the new space is developing the listening posts slow

phillips now on the ethiopian media one year into the air. april the second twenty eighteen. ethiopia's new prime minister. is rushing into power on the coattails of national protests. one year on the bold agenda of africa's youngest leader has attracted praise from around the world. prime minister made in the job was. taken a country. that. really really excited about one. hundred. political journalists behind the headlines however a much more complex tense transition is taking place we are dealing with a country that is in its own twilight zone the transition is in many ways very

fragile. this is. the editor in chief of added standard a prominent newspaper that lead coverage of the series of protests that have taken place in the country it's a very delicate. highly emotional kind of conversation the way thing this country. tamar says managing editor of the adice food chain newspaper a media mainstay that reported throughout the twenty eight teen revolution and transition. to politics and the promise of possible to some. of the pictures for more complete about the. journalist and blogger iskander negra after years in prison he was released on a presidential pardon he set up shop again and rekindled his career there is still doubt whether the country could make it to democracy where with a little. good if there's a ball whether it's actually get worse i'm going to war and joel mohammed the

influential and controversial head of the iranian media now when he returned from exile to a hero's welcome. for journalists all with a part to play in this new phase of their country's history this is not the first time they're speaking with the listening post in twenty eighteen we interviewed them on their media expectations of the new prime minister we've come back to them now to get their thoughts on key media aspects of abbey ahmed ethiopia. if you are ready to be held accountable he has to start talking to the media. but they have not been accessible not been as open as they promised to be they. promised the press office with the whole been partners and all of this weekly or biweekly press conferences they had just one thing and they did not do it other

than he has also not made the media so far. to face our questions so that makes me worry of whether he is genuine or not if you wanted to have. requests for interview you don't get that opportunity we see more and more government officials using the social media which makes them directly accessible to people however i'm very disappointed that the distribution of this information is highly choreographed so it's very frustrating that we're limited into the kind of information government authorities want us to hear.