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I’ve mentioned several times that Steve Bannon likes to brag about being smarter than liberals. He probably also thinks he’s smarter than the folks in our mainstream media—and he might be right about that. During the run-up to the 2016 election, he played them like a fine-tuned machine.

That is the conclusion one reaches when reading a section of the recent report by the Berkman Klien Center at Harvard titled, “Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 Presidential Election.” They provide lots of interesting insights into our current media environment, like the fact that, as Kevin Drum noted, fake news is mostly a right-wing phenomenon.

To get the essence of how Bannon played the mainstream media, you have to go to page 104 of the report and read the section titled: “Dynamics of Network Propaganda: Clinton Foundation Case Study.” Here is a basic timeline of what happened:

Prior to April 2015

The Government Accountability Institute (GAI), which is run by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer, commissioned Peter Schweitzer (who works for both Breitbart and GAI) to write a book that will purport to demonstrate that the Clinton’s manipulated their foundation and Hillary’s role as Secretary of State to enrich themselves. When the book is published, its title is, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”

April 2015

Prior to the book’s publication in May, Bannon, Schweitzer and GAI worked with the New York Times to publish an extensive piece based on the research materials in an advance copy of the book, titled, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.” As the Berkman Klein report states: