Andrew Cockburn

I always react with a mixture of anger and sadness when I come across the first article by a respected investigative journalist that is filled with Baathist talking points. When it comes to Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh, I know what to expect at this point. When I spotted an article in the latest Harpers by Andrew Cockburn that was titled “A Special Relationship: The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again”, I had a feeling that he would be the latest A-List reporter to go that route since the pressure on the academy and the media is most acute right now. If you stop and think about it, the war fever that has attached itself to Vladimir Putin’s adventure in Syria is not that different from what we saw in 2002 except in this go-round it is the Kremlin rather than the White House that quickens the laptop bombardier’s pulse.

Since Cockburn’s article is behind a paywall, I recommend that you read it in your local library since a penny spent for a magazine that costs $6.99 to read this crappy article is a penny ill-spent.

The first part of Cockburn’s article rehashes the support that the Reagan White House gave to the Islamists fighting against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, an affair about which there should be no controversy. What is controversial is Cockburn’s claim that Obama is reprising Reagan’s mission but in Syria rather than Afghanistan.

He singles out al-Nusra, the group that holds the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria, as carrying on in the bloodthirsty vein of Afghan rebels under Osama bin Laden’s command. As a sign of how bestial they are, Cockburn points to their killing members of the Druze faith in Idlib province last spring. What he fails to point out, however, is that Sunnis were killed as well. According to Scott Lucas the killings had more to do with al-Nusra’s determination to seize some abandoned houses that they planned to use as frontline defense against both Assad’s army and ISIS. When a Druze family claimed ownership of the properties, a heated argument led to a confrontation that finally ended in a machine gun attack on nearby houses that resulted in the death of 23 innocent people. The Tunisian commander who led the al-Nusra unit was relieved of his duties while the group publicly repudiated and denounced what most commentators describe as an isolated incident.

Now, none of this excuses al-Nusra, a group that most certainly does not share the goals of the revolutionary movement that emerged in Syria in 2011 but in terms of its overall record in Syria, it is far less savage than the regime as I explained in an earlier post.

Cockburn, like most pro-Assad journalists, has a talent for writing evasively. When I came across these sentences, I wondered how much effort he put into defying attempts to corroborate what he wrote:

A few months before the Idlib offensive, a member of one CIA-backed group had explained the true nature of its relationship to the Al Qaeda franchise. Nusra, he told the New York Times, allowed militias vetted by the United States to appear independent, so that they would continue to receive American supplies. When I asked a former White House official involved in Syria policy if this was not a de facto alliance, he put it this way: “I would not say that Al Qaeda is our ally, but a turnover of weapons is probably unavoidable. I’m fatalistic about that. It’s going to happen.”

I just went through 54 articles in Nexis to find any report such as the one described above. The results: none were found. Now it might be there but you would think that a seasoned reporter such as Cockburn would have taken the trouble to identify the date it was written—unless he wanted to defy any attempt to debunk his claims. In terms of the “former White House official”, you are straying into Seymour Hersh territory and the less said the better.

To buttress his case, Cockburn cites a Joe Biden speech given at Harvard that blames America’s allies for being bad guys: “They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” Well, since Biden does not seem to be aware that al-Nusra and Al Qaeda were the same thing, I am not sure how much stock to put in this gaffe-master’s analysis. More to the point, a serious analysis of al-Nusra would not be based on Biden’s words but independent and respected scholarly sources.

In fact, Saudi Arabia—the supposedly most fanatical Wahhabi element in the entire equation—does not support al-Nusra. Instead it backs other Islamist and Salafi units, especially Jaysh al-Islam, the group whose leader Zahran Alloush was killed by a Syrian air force attack this week. Whatever problems Jaysh al-Islam has, and they are considerable, it is not al-Qaeda. Maybe this is a difference without a distinction to someone like Andrew Cockburn but if you are serious about analyzing the Syrian civil war, you’d better get your facts straight.

For a more astute analysis of Jaysh al-Islam, I recommend Hassan Hassan who is a respected analyst of the Syrian rebel groups as opposed to Andrew Cockburn who appears to know next to nothing. In an article titled “The Army of Islam Is Winning in Syria“, Hassan makes a case for seeing such a group and al-Nusra differently:

But today, Salafi-leaning insurgents are the single most dominant force in liberated areas. Liwa al-Islam, which is the central player in the Army of Islam, now dwarfs both the FSA and radical militias such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, which long played a prominent role in the region. These groups had coordinated with each other through a Damascus military council, but Ahrar al-Sham pulled out of the council shortly after the merger, issuing an angry statement that criticized “the hegemony of certain factions and the exclusion of [other] effective ones.”

These developments, however, are not all bad news. The rise of Salafi-leaning rebel groups offers an opportunity to combat the real extremists — al Qaeda-linked groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which have recently started wreaking havoc in Syria’s north and east by fighting among themselves and against more moderate groups. Syria is no longer witnessing a struggle of moderates versus extremists, but of extremists versus both moderates and religious moderates. While recent developments are a setback for the FSA, they also have marginalized the truly radical factions.

As might be expected, Cockburn has it in for the Muslim Brotherhood that he regards as “the ideological ancestor of the most violent Islamist movement of the modern era.” According to Cockburn, this group was designated by the Obama White House to be its trump card in the Arab Spring—this despite the fact that its chief ideologist Sayyid Qutb was an “inspiration” to the young Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al Qaeda. Furthermore, Qutb’s call for a resurrected caliphate obviously must bear some responsibility for the birth of ISIS.

One hardly knows what to make of this prosecutorial attack on the Muslim Brotherhood except to wonder why General Sisi did not call Cockburn in as an expert witness for the prosecution’s case against the deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. After sliming the Muslim Brotherhood for its ideology, Cockburn fails to say a word about its actions. Now that the dust has settled in Egypt, it should be obvious that it was the most legitimate government the Egyptians had in a generation and whose worst offense was perhaps putting too much trust in the army.

Like most in the Baathist amen corner, Cockburn views the civil war in Syria as a proxy attack on Shia power, something that was plotted in advance by the Bush era neocons. He writes:

Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, testified on Capitol Hill that there was a “new strategic alignment” in the Middle East, separating “extremists” (Iran and Syria) and “reformers” (Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states). Undergirding these diplomatic euphemisms was something more fundamental. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who returned to Riyadh in 2005 after many years as Saudi ambassador in Washington, had put it bluntly in an earlier conversation with Richard Dearlove, the longtime head of Britain’s MI6. “The time is not far off in the Middle East,” Bandar said, “when it will be literally God help the Shia. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough.”

Whenever I read such an analysis, I rub my eyes in astonishment. Doesn’t Cockburn know that the current regime in Baghdad, whose anti-Sunni policies laid the groundwork for ISIS, is there because Bush made war on Sunni power? Was he asleep in 2004 when the US Marines were laying waste to Sunni-dominated Anbar province just as American, French and Russian bombers are doing today?

In order to establish the case that Obama approached Syria with the foreign policy imperatives of Saudi Arabia in mind and in much the same way Reagan intervened in Afghanistan (it was obviously impossible to make the same case by referring to Iraq where the White House aligned with the Shia bourgeoisie), Cockburn draws upon the expertise of Sir Richard Dearlove, a former MI6 official (what makes him and Hersh so drawn to men who have made a career out of misdirection and outright lies?)

Dearlove is a curious sort. He is both a supporter of the Henry Jackson Society that became infamous for its backing of Bush’s war in Iraq and a “senior advisor” to the Monitor Group that Wikipedia describes as “a consultancy and private equity firm which has been implicated in undertaking PR work for Libya and Muammar Gaddafi.” Sounds like a character in a Le Carre novel.

Citing Dearlove, Cockburn connects the usual suspects (Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to ISIS:

Some in intelligence circles suspect that such funding is ongoing. “How much Saudi and Qatari money—and I’m not suggesting direct government funding, but I am suggesting maybe a blind eye being turned—is being channeled towards ISIS and reaching it?” Dearlove asked in July 2014. “For ISIS to be able to surge into the Sunni areas of Iraq in the way that it’s done recently has to be the consequence of substantial and sustained funding. Such things simply do not happen spontaneously.” Those on the receiving end of Islamic State attacks tend to agree. Asked what could be done to help Iraq following the group’s lightning assaults in the summer of 2014, an Iraqi diplomat replied: “Bomb Saudi Arabia.”

This is probably the most absurd paragraph in this awful article that violates just about every journalistic standard and that could be used in a journalism school as an example of what to avoid (except for the fact that these are exactly the skills you learn to prepare you for a job in the bourgeois press.)

Does Saudi funding and ideology explain the rise of ISIS? Maybe the next time Patrick Cockburn gets together with his older brother, he can clue him in on what allowed ISIS to get a foothold in Anbar province:

The swift rise of Isis since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became its leader has come because the uprising of the Sunni in Syria in 2011 led the Iraqi Sunni to protest about their political and economic marginalisation since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Peaceful demonstrations from the end of 2012 won few concessions, with Iraq’s Shia-dominated government convinced that the protesters wanted not reform but a revolution returning their community to power. The five or six million Iraqi Sunni became more alienated and sympathetic towards armed action by Isis.

Patrick Cockburn does write a lot of bullshit but on this rare occasion he spoke the truth.

The final paragraph of Andrew Cockburn’s miserable article will be a depressing reminder of how so much of the left that was on the front lines opposing Bush’s war in Iraq now sounds exactly like the Islamaphobes of those days (Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Kenan Makiya, Norman Geras). This might even have been written by people with no pretensions of being on the left, sounding as it does like a Thomas Friedman op-ed piece or even the sort of thing that Dick Cheney might have come up with:

Things are clearer on the ground. Not long ago, far away from the think tanks and briefing rooms where policies are formulated and spun, a small boy in the heart of Nusra territory was telling a filmmaker for Vice News about Osama bin Laden. “He terrified and fought the Americans,” he said reverently. Beside him, his brother, an even smaller child, described his future: “To become a suicide fighter for the sake of God.” A busload of older boys was asked which group they belonged to. “Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda,” they responded cheerfully.

Suicide fighter…Osama bin Laden…For the sake of God.

And god help us when Andrew Cockburn, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh are all sounding as if they are angling to be guests on the Bill Maher show. It is enough to make you wonder if the ghost of Christopher Hitchens has taken over their miserable souls.

Martin Dempsey, America’s top general, funneled intelligence to Assad according to Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh, the doddering old fool who should have retired from journalism at least as long ago as Woody Allen should have stopped making movies, has written a preposterous article in the London Review of Books that relies pretty much on the word of an ex-official in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The unnamed source (what else would you expect) claims that the Pentagon has been effectively operating as an arm of the Kremlin to back Bashar al-Assad in his war on the Syrian rebels. If the Justice Department were to take these allegations seriously, they’d arrest the former Pentagon head for treason and not just put him in jail but underneath the jail.

Except for the supposed Dempsey-Putin conspiracy that would likely be rejected by Tom Clancy’s publisher as being implausible, most of the article is a tired retread of all the Baathist amen corner talking points.

Showing that he is as tough-minded as John Wight—the British Assadist who justified barrel-bombing as having something in common with the carpet bombing of Dresden (that’s some fucking justification), Hersh told Amy Goodman that you have to break an egg to make an omelet:

The Russians’ concern is not about establishing a new world order; their concern is terrorism, primarily. They have a big terrorism problem. There’s no question the leadership—many of the leadership modes or groups inside the ISIL, or the Islamic State, originated from the Chechnyan war. They had two wars with Chechnya—one of them went 10 years—brutal wars, in which Russia did horrible things, the same sort of stuff that Bashar al-Assad did, and one could argue that—same things we did to Japan at the end of World War II, when you see your country is at stake. People do very rough things in all-out war.

Well, he got this right—sort of. The USA dropped atomic bombs on Japan twice but was it because it saw that our country’s survival was “at stake”? That, of course, is the excuse that scumbags like Winston Churchill (a fave on John Wight’s website) made but one rejected by New Left historians like Gar Alperovitz who likely Hersh (and Wight) have never read. In fact the argument that your country’s survival is at stake is the same that was made in 1914 and then again in 1941. If you have zero understanding of the Marxist class analysis, or having once understood it like Christopher Hitchens and John Wight but went on to reject it in favor of Enlightenment Values against the dreaded jihadi scum, you are likely to line up with Hersh rather than Alperovitz. Barrel bombs, A-Bombs, carpet bombing…that’s what you need to ensure the rule of Reason, Religious Tolerance and Democracy. Just ask Bill Maher.

As might be expected, the LRB article begins with a reference to a top secret document that us poor unwashed mortals have to have transmitted to us through Hersh’s access to his informant. Don’t you feel blessed?

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya.

According to Hersh’s pal, it was the findings in this report that so frightened the top generals that ran lickety-split to their rolodex and phoned their counterparts in the Russian army. They had to put their heads together to stop the threat posed to world survival by ISIS and al-Qaeda. If you’ve seen “Dr. Strangelove”, you’ll remember how the Yanks and the Commies could put their differences aside when their common survival was at stake. I should add that if Stanley Kubrick were still alive, he’d be writing a screenplay based on Hersh’s fanciful reporting right now.

(Coincidently, Hersh admitted to a Pacifica radio interviewer (2:30 into this clip) that he never even saw the report, he only “knew about it”. So there’s a level of reportorial integrity here that is less than meets the eye.)

With the USA and Russia secretly aligned on behalf of Assad, you would think that the war in Syria would have ended long ago. So what kept it dragging on? Of course, it couldn’t be the rebels who Hersh dismisses as extremists with a zero social base in the population. Instead it has been Turkey, a country that developed “an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State”, that has tried to keep the pot boiling. But General Dempsey and his cohorts foiled the evil Turks’ dastardly plans:

“We worked with Turks we trusted who were not loyal to Erdoğan,” the adviser said, “and got them to ship the jihadists in Syria all the obsolete weapons in the arsenal, including M1 carbines that hadn’t been seen since the Korean War and lots of Soviet arms. It was a message Assad could understand: ‘We have the power to diminish a presidential policy in its tracks.’”

M1 Carbines? Really? Funny that this weapon is not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on arms used by the Syrian rebels. Who knows, maybe the rebels opened a box of M1’s and threw them away. But more to the point, despite all the fear-mongering over Turkey’s supposed backing for ISIS et al, there is evidence that it was crucial in blocking shipments of the very weapon that could have made the most difference, even without the connivance of those “trusted” Turks who were as ready as Martin Dempsey to prop up Assad.

On October 17, 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported (emphasis added):

U.S. officials say they are most worried about Russian-designed Manpads provided to Libya making their way to Syria. The U.S. intensified efforts to track and collect man-portable missiles after the 2011 fall of the country’s longtime strongman leader, Moammar Gadhafi.

To keep control of the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar formed a joint operations room early this year in a covert project U.S. officials watched from afar.

The U.S. has limited its support of the rebels to communications equipment, logistics and intelligence. But U.S. officials have coordinated with the trio of countries sending arms and munitions to the rebels. The Pentagon and CIA ramped up their presence on Turkey’s southern border as the weapons began to flow to the rebels in two to three shipments every week.

In July, the U.S. effectively halted the delivery of at least 18 Manpads sourced from Libya, even as the rebels pleaded for more effective antiaircraft missiles to counter regime airstrikes in Aleppo, people familiar with that delivery said.

Martin Dempsey resigned in May of this year, thus allowing Obama to preside over a foreign policy that could rely on a “more compliant” Pentagon. Hersh is disappointed in this, since it means “There will be no more indirect challenges from the military leadership to his policy of disdain for Assad and support for Erdoğan.” If that is the case, why the continuing refusal to supply the weapons that could turn Syria into a graveyard for Russian jets?

On October 26^th, the Voice of America reported on the frustration of Syrian rebel commanders over the continuing ban on MANPAD’s:

Abdul Rahman, a commander with the Ahfad Omer battalion, part of the larger First Brigade, a U.S. backed secular militia, said they had made several attempts to buy MANPADS and recently had been negotiating with a mafia group in Turkey, but they realized they were being set up for fraud. “We understood that they didn’t have access to the weapons they claimed,” he explained.

He said he has hopes that Saudi Arabia and Qatar may tire with the U.S. ban on supplying MANPADS and break coalition ranks, but that the Gulf countries are not ready to flaunt the Americans. “No one will give us any, we are really suffering because of this.” He added: “We are trying all kinds of ways to get them, including from the mafia, on the black market, anything we can think of to get some. Whatever money they want, we can give them.”

Is there any explanation for Saudi Arabia and Qatar not supplying MANPAD’s, especially in light of their supposed involvement with jihadist terror all around the world? With all of the zillions of articles about the Saudi’s commitment to Salafist terror groups like ISIS, why in the world would they respect a U.S. ban? None of this adds up, of course, if you accept the notion that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey would stop at nothing to create an Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. However, this is a false premise. These three nations have been supporting a wide range of groups in Syria but all of them have been at odds with ISIS. In fact, ISIS came into existence as a break with al-Qaeda in whose name the al-Nusra Front operates. That being said, Turkey has promoted other groups especially the FSA that has borne the brunt of Russian and Syrian bombing.

How does Hersh explain the various reports in the media about Russia targeting these enemies of ISIS? That’s no problem for our intrepid journalist. He relies on the Russian media for an explanation:

The Kremlin adviser on the Middle East, like the Joint Chiefs and the DIA, dismisses the ‘moderates’ who have Obama’s support, seeing them as extremist Islamist groups that fight alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and IS (‘There’s no need to play with words and split terrorists into moderate and not moderate,’ Putin said in a speech on 22 October).

Well, I guess that settles it. If Putin says it, it must be true.

To buttress his case against those of us who view Assad as a stinking, scabrous Middle East version of Pinochet or Suharto, Hersh invokes the expert testimony of a German journalist and one-time politician:

Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist who was allowed to spend ten days touring IS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, told CNN that the IS leadership “are all laughing about the Free Syrian Army. They don’t take them for serious. They say: ‘The best arms sellers we have are the FSA. If they get a good weapon, they sell it to us.’ They didn’t take them for serious. They take for serious Assad. They take for serious, of course, the bombs. But they fear nothing, and FSA doesn’t play a role.’”

Quoting this 75-year old globetrotting fool (if I embarrass myself as badly as Hersh or Todenhöfer 5 years from now, please inform my wife) is about the same thing as quoting Pepe Escobar or Mike Whitney. On his website,Todenhöfer invokes the Pentagon document found on Judicial Watch that has been cited 10,000 times by people like Seumas Milne to “prove” that the USA was trying to create an Islamic State (of course, everybody knows that Obama is a secret Muslim—just ask Donald Trump):

The contents of the said secret document is prone to leave readers speechless. It reveals a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to actually be an instigator of terror and shows how the West sides with international terrorists. Both of them have been deliberately promoting international terrorism – particularly ISIS! That’s the bitter reality.

The document is a sensation and a political scandal – let’s call it a “terrorist Watergate”. Obama and the West knew early on who was really fighting in Syria and how much of a terrorist threat their politics created for the world. While they were telling the world the usual lies of them fending for freedom, democracy and human rights, they were actually actively (and purposefully) supporting terrorist organizations.

Don’t these idiots read the document to its conclusion? It clearly states that the development of what would become ISIS is a threat to US interests:

. THE DETERIORATION OF THE SITUATION HAS DIRE CONSEQUENCES ON THE IRAQI SITUATION AND ARE AS FOLLOWS;

-1. THIS CREATES THE IDEAL ATMOSPHERE FOR AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq—don’t ask me why this stupid memo is in all-caps] TO RETURN TO ITS OLD POCKETS TN MOSUL AND RAMADI, AND WILL PROVIDE A RENEWED MOMENTUM UNDER THE PRESUMPTION OF UNIFYING THE JIHAD AMONG SUNNI IRAQ AND SYRIA, AND THE REST OF THE SUNNIS IN THE ARAB WORLD AGAINST WHAT IT CONSIDERS ONE ENEMY, THE DISSENTERS. ISI COULD ALSO DECLARE AN ISLAMIC STATE THROUGH ITS UNION WITH OTHER TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA, WHICH WILL CREATE GRAVE DANGER IN REGARDS TO UNIFYING IRAQ AND THE PROTECTION OF ITS TERRITORY.

Dire consequences? Grave dangers? How in fuck’s name do you interpret such words to mean that Obama was in favor of jihadists especially when he has been using drones to kill them all around the planet on a nonstop basis for fifteen years now? Some analysts say that the use of drones will convince people to join ISIS. Is that what Todenhöfer had in mind? Your guess is as good as mine.

Hersh also has good things to say about Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii who served two military tours in the Middle East. Hersh concurs with her statement to CNN that Russia was doing the USA a favor by bombing the rebels in Syria (with an occasional token gesture aimed at ISIS.)

I am a bit surprised to see Hersh neglect other major political figures who have pretty much the same outlook, including Donald Trump who said that even if Assad is pretty bad, the rebels are worse. Without going too far, it might be said that this is the dominant position across the political spectrum from Marine Le Pen on the right to Mike Whitney on the left. If you are comfortable with such bedfellows, be my guest. Just watch out for the crabs and the scabies.

And finally, if you are trying to establish whether or not Obama was a bitter enemy of Assad anxious to “bring ’em on” as George W. Bush once infamously referred to war with Iraq, there’s no need to go scuttling about trying to find some spook or retired Pentagon official to quote anonymously in the feckless LRB. You can simply check out what Robert Ford has to say–no not the guy who shot Jesse James but the former Ambassador to Syria who has been telling everybody who will listen that Obama had the same relationship to Assad as Neville Chamberlain had to Hitler. In countless interviews and articles, he has been hammering the administration for abandoning the rebels:

First, the Free Syrian Army needs far greater material support and training so that it can mount an effective guerrilla war. Rather than try to hold positions in towns where the regime’s air force and artillery can flatten it, the armed opposition needs help figuring out tactics to choke off government convoy traffic and overrun fixed-point defenses.

Indeed, this was administration policy all along. Perhaps General Dempsey was tilting even more for directly backing Assad but that would be trying to break down an open door as far as the White House was concerned.

In fact there was zero interest in a large-scale intervention in Syria in either civilian or military quarters. All this is documented in a NY Times article from October 22^nd 2013, written when the alarums over a looming war with Syria were at their loudest, that stated “from the beginning, Mr. Obama made it clear to his aides that he did not envision an American military intervention, even as public calls mounted that year for a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians from bombings.” The article stressed the role of White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, who had frequently clashed with the hawkish Samantha Power. In contrast to Power and others with a more overtly “humanitarian intervention” perspective, McDonough “who had perhaps the closest ties to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria.” In other words, the White House policy was and is allowing the Baathists and the rebels to exhaust each other in an endless war, just as was White House policy during the Iran-Iraq conflict.

(In a future post, I will deal with Hersh’s claim that Turkey had a “rat line” of Uyghur jihadists that Russia needed to exterminate for its own survival.)

From Assad diehard Stephen Gowans:

From ORB International website:

From Jill Lepore article in the New Yorker titled “Politics and the New Machine: What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy“:

Gallup had always wanted to be a newspaper editor, but after graduating from the University of Iowa, in 1923, he entered a Ph.D. program in applied psychology. In 1928, in a dissertation called “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper,” Gallup argued that “at one time the press was depended upon as the chief agency for instructing and informing the mass of people” but that newspapers no longer filled that role and instead ought to meet “a greater need for entertainment.” He therefore devised a method: he’d watch readers go through a newspaper column by column and mark up the parts they liked, so that he could advise an editor which parts of the paper to keep printing and which parts to scrap.

In 1932, when Gallup was a professor of journalism at Northwestern, his mother-in-law, Ola Babcock Miller, ran for secretary of state in Iowa. Her late husband had run for governor; her nomination was largely honorary and she was not expected to win. Gallup had read the work of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann believed that “public opinion” is a fiction created by political élites to suit and advance their interests. Gallup disagreed, and suspected that public opinion, like reader interest, could be quantified. To get a sense of his mother-in-law’s chances, Gallup began applying psychology to politics. The year of the race (she won), Gallup moved to New York, and began working for an advertising agency while also teaching at Columbia and running an outfit he called the Editors’ Research Bureau, selling his services to newspapers. Gallup thought of this work as “a new form of journalism.” But he decided that it ought to sound academic, too. In 1935, in Princeton, he founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, with funding provided by more than a hundred newspapers.

In 1936, in his syndicated column Gallup predicted that the Literary Digest would calculate that Alf Landon would defeat F.D.R. in a landslide and that the Digest would be wrong. He was right on both counts. This was only the beginning. “I had the idea of polling on every major issue,” Gallup explained. He began insisting that this work was essential to democracy. Elections come only every two years, but “we need to know the will of the people at all times.” Gallup claimed that his polls had rescued American politics from the political machine and restored it to the American pastoral, the New England town meeting. Elmo Roper, another early pollster, called the public-opinion survey “the greatest contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret ballot.”

Gallup’s early method is known as “quota sampling.” He determined what proportion of the people are men, women, black, white, young, and old. The interviewers who conducted his surveys had to fill a quota so that the population sampled would constitute an exactly proportionate mini-electorate. But what Gallup presented as “public opinion” was the opinion of Americans who were disproportionately educated, white, and male. Nationwide, in the nineteen-thirties and forties, blacks constituted about ten per cent of the population but made up less than two per cent of Gallup’s survey respondents. Because blacks in the South were generally prevented from voting, Gallup assigned no “Negro quota” in those states. As the historian Sarah Igo has pointed out, “Instead of functioning as a tool for democracy, opinion polls were deliberately modeled upon, and compounded, democracy’s flaws.”