The Office of the Director of National Intelligence report is strong on opinion and scanty on detail, but seven pages of the report concerned Russian Television and said it influenced the election “by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.” “Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.” Wow! What a searing indictment! If we can be pardoned for continuing to wonder about all of this –we wish the ODNI would explain to us: How did the programming on Russian Television – which is available to very few customers in the US and is watched by even fewer of them – “influence” the election, especially considering that the US mainstream media, which is available to almost every American and is watched by most of them spent most of the election campaign making favorable comments about Hillary Clinton and consistently offered negative coverage of Donald Trump. We are asked to believe that the allegedly pro-Trump, anti-Hillary position of Russian Television, which no one watches, had a greater influence than the pro-Hillary anti-Trump spin on almost every other network, which almost everyone watches; or even than Fox News, which had a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary perspective and millions of viewers (and which President Obama has blamed on many occasions for turning Americans away from him). I guess we just don’t understand how “influence” works.
We also do not understand why the Russians would favor Donald Trump, who campaigned on rebuilding the US military, while Hillary Clinton would have continued the Obama policies of reducing the size and scope of our defense budget. We just are not sophisticated enough to figure that one out. And, perhaps the Russians think they could more readily blackmail or threaten Mr. Trump – although they no doubt had ample ammunition to use against Mrs. Clinton as well; and considering that for all practical purposes they rolled the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department for eight and four years respectively, why would they prefer anyone else? What’s more, whatever the Russian efforts for Mr. Trump were, they pale in comparison to the Obama administration’s efforts to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel or to defeat the Brexit vote or to elect a Labour government in the UK. Some types of influence are acceptable, we guess.