When you've lost The Nation . . .

 Why Are the Media Taking the CIA’s Hacking Claims at Face Value?

Despite the CIA’s uninspiring record for the past 70 years, the media are defending the agency for all it’s worth. 

... serious questions remain over the veracity of the CIA’s finding. After all, several aspects of the Times and Post reports that actually undermine the dominant narrative of “Russian interference” are often carefully cropped out of the mainstream media’s portrayal of the controversy.

For example, The Washington Post noted, almost as an aside, that “intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks,” while the Times reported that the RNC had “issued a statement denying that it had been hacked.” Indeed, the FBI has yet to make a determination on whether the RNC was hacked, something that the RNC itself denies.

The lack of clarity over whether or not the Russian government hacked the RNC is a critical part of the story, since the CIA’s “secret assessment” that alleged that the Russians interfered in the election in order to elect Trump was, according to a US official who spoke to Reuters this week, “based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked.”

Meanwhile, much of the media has ignored the rather salient fact that the FBI is by no means in agreement with the anonymous and secret CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the election in order to help elect Donald Trump.

Nor, for that matter, is the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI), which has declined to endorse the CIA report.

Yet the media are treating these rumors - for that is all they are - as gospel truth. Because Narrative.

Update: Slate, no friend of Donald Trump for sure, piles on, too:

The “leaked” CIA concerns over Russian meddling were quite clearly leaked deliberately by the CIA itself, an organization not exactly famed for its commitment to the truth; they’re the conclusions of an investigation that hasn’t even happened yet and on which there’s no consensus even among the gang of petty Caligulas that calls itself the intelligence community. 

"The CIA" did not conclude the Russians interfered with the election. There was a figure claiming to
be a CIA insider who said so to The New York Times, who cited this person anonymously and apparently without verifying his bone fides. The FBI is not in agreement, nor is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But that's okay because Narrative.