NBC Wants to Make 2024 as Dumb as 2016 With "October Surprise" Trump Story

NBC reporters Courtney Kube and Carol Lee

NBC News has once again opened the door to frenzied election coverage about Donald Trump colluding with a foreign power, with a hair-raising headline that could be the plot of a Jack Ryan episode: “Are Russia and North Korea planning an ‘October surprise’ that aids Trump?”

The report published this morning says that U.S. officials are “bracing for North Korea to potentially take its most provocative military actions in a decade close to the U.S. presidential election, possibly at Putin’s urging,” adding that the move “could be designed to create turmoil in yet another part of the world as Americans decide whether to send President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump back to the White House.”

But the article provides no evidence to support this extraordinary claim — because there is none.

In fact, just last week, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, testified to Congress on election security, generally taking a very measured tone, including this gem:  “we have no information to suggest that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] will take a more active role in this Presidential election than it did in 2020”  — a year which China, Haines clarified, “did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.” (From her role overseeing the entire U.S. intelligence community, if the Chinese had intervened, Haines would likely know.) 

Haines and the other intelligence officials testifying before Congress generally said that Russia was engaged in “influence” activities to undermine American democracy — a job we seem to be doing very well ourselves — but did not even mention North Korea. Despite the sober assessment from U.S. intelligence, the NBC Intelligence Agency is soldiering on with its rerun of the 2016 election hysterics that was a ratings bonanza for it and other broadcast outlets.

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” CEO Leslie Moonves said  of the Trump election spectacle during the primary in 2016, in an unusual moment of honesty.

You don’t have to be a fan of Trump to recognize the profound opportunity cost of dedicating scarce media resources toward the Trump circus and away from any number of urgent systemic problems plaguing the country: stagnating wages, the insane cost of housing, college, childcare and childbirth, to name just a few.

Instead we get a retread of Russiagate — the news media happy to bias their coverage and repeat whatever anonymous administration (read: partisan political) officials tell them.

The “October Surprise” quoted in the headline of the NBC article evokes Jimmy Carter’s 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan due to Iran’s timing of the hostage release. But such a dastardly plot is mentioned just a single time in the article and, incredibly, is sourced to a “senior administration official.”

Not exactly a disinterested party! 

In fact, anonymous Biden administration officials are cited throughout the story, which again, is about Biden’s campaign opponent, Donald Trump. (One of the two authors of the article, Carol E. Lee, is a longtime White House correspondent.)

And even in the sole reference to an October surprise, the administration official throws cold water on the idea, saying “Russia might hesitate to take such a step.”

“The official said China, which has also grown closer to Russia and helped Putin wage his war in Ukraine, typically does not want instability in the region,” the administration official also says, according to NBC.

The only times “intelligence officials” are cited in the story are in claims that has almost nothing to do with the central premise of the article: 

• “U.S. intelligence officials accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 election to help elect Trump.”

• “We have no doubt that North Korea will be provocative this year. It’s just a matter of how escalatory it is,” a U.S. intelligence official said. 

• “U.S. intelligence officials believe Putin is providing North Korea with nuclear submarine and ballistic missile technology in exchange for Pyongyang’s sending Russia large amounts of munitions for its war in Ukraine, the senior U.S. officials said.”

The only one that comes close to the premise of the article is the official observing that “North Korea will be provocative this year.” Fair enough, but that could mean anything. As for Putin exchanging technology with North Korea, that also sounds plausible, but how do you get from that to, ‘They’re planning an “October surprise”’?

The evidence for the story’s central claim amounts to the fact that, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow is coordinating more closely with China, which might mean they’ll coordinate influence operations, too. With Russia and China both overseeing substantial state-sponsored foreign influence operations, it’s of course possible — Russia did so in 2016. But as Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, testified, China didn’t try to interfere in the 2020 presidential election “principally because of concerns regarding blowback if caught.”

As for Russia, nothing was said to substantiate any campaign to help Trump, nor has there been any evidence that the Kremlin is interested.

Cogency isn’t the point of these stories, which seem designed to ratchet up fear — a precious commodity for national security agencies in their eternal quest for bigger budgets.

I can see why national security officials plant these stories, but not why the media run with them.

— Edited by William M. Arkin