You wouldn’t know it around this leading neoliberal “Progressive” political blog, where stories—from Daily Kos’ front page on down—have been loudly applauding Craig Timberg’s fabricated, McCarthyesque, Washington Post excuse for "fake news about fake news" story that was the veritable lede of that shell of a newspaper’s week that just concluded. Thankfully, there are award-winning journalists like Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald expanding upon the Post’s pathetically shallow dialogue into something more than “a one-sided WaPo conversation” and setting the record straight on the newspaper’s hardcore, neocon propaganda in their respective articles (SEE: "The Washington Post 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting" and “Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group”), appearing over the past couple of hours and on Saturday afternoon, respectively.
The capital's paper of record crashes
legacy media on an iceberg
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
3:45 PM, November 28th, 2016
Last week, a technology reporter for the Washington Post named Craig Timberg ran an incredible story. It has no analog that I can think of in modern times. Headlined "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say," the piece promotes the work of a shadowy group that smears some 200 alternative news outlets as either knowing or unwitting agents of a foreign power, including popular sites like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism...
Taibbi provides background, much of which I covered here, Saturday. (SEE: "WaPo Promotes Shadowy Website That Accuses 200 Publications of Being Russian Propaganda Plants") i.e.: “The piece referenced those 200 websites as "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda," etc., etc.
…Forget that the Post offered no information about the "PropOrNot" group beyond that they were "a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds."
Forget also that the group offered zero concrete evidence of coordination with Russian intelligence agencies, even offering this remarkable disclaimer about its analytic methods….
Taibbi then quotes Timberg’s story…
"Please note that our criteria are behavioral… ... ... For purposes of this definition it does not matter ... whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide 'useful idiots' of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny."
Matt continues: “What this apparently means is that if you published material that meets their definition of being ‘useful,’ to the Russian state, you could be put on the ‘list,’ and ‘warrant further scrutiny...’”
...Forget even that in its Twitter responses to criticism of its report, PropOrNot sounded not like a group of sophisticated military analysts, but like one teenager:
"Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject - they're so vewwy angwy!!" it wrote on Saturday.
"Fascists. Straight up muthafuckin' fascists. That's what we're up against," it wrote last Tuesday, two days before Timberg's report.
Any halfway decent editor would have been scared to death by any of these factors. Moreover the vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.
But if that same source also demanded anonymity on the preposterous grounds that it feared being "targeted by Russia's legions of skilled hackers"? Any sane reporter would have booted them out the door. You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike… … …The "Russians did it" story was greedily devoured by a growing segment of blue-state America that is beginning to fall victim to the same conspiracist tendencies that became epidemic on the political right in the last few years…
Where Taibbi stops, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton continued in their far more thorough/expansive Saturday afternoon piece. (Again, you really need to read The Intercept piece in its entirety, if for no other reason than the sheer depth of details they provide in their disassembling of this poorly-sourced WaPo excuse for a “story.” Of course—if past behavior is any indication of future results—while I’d like to hope otherwise, many reading this will claim “tl;dr” as an excuse to ignorantly crap on The Intercept in this “reality-based website’s” comments.)
Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton
The Intercept
November 26 2016, 1:17 p.m.
[Greenwald/Norton reference the story lede in prior paragraph(s)] ...Thus far, they have provided no additional information beyond that. As Fortune’s Matthew Ingram wrote in criticizing the Post article, PropOrNot’s Twitter account “has only existed since August of this year. And an article announcing the launch of the group on its website is dated last month.” WHOIS information for the domain name is not available, as the website uses private registration.
More troubling still, PropOrNot listed numerous organizations on its website as “allied” with it, yet many of these claimed “allies” told The Intercept, and complained on social media, they have nothing to do with the group and had never even heard of it before the Post published its story.
Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://t.co/jQKnWzjrBR
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 25, 2016
.@ggreenwald No-one I've spoken to listed as "allies" on their site had even heard of them before the WP piece.
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 25, 2016
I can confirm. I've no idea what this website is nor who runs it. Not sure how that makes us "allies." Looks like just a blogroll https://t.co/BfKo5j4Lvo
— James Miller (@Millermena) November 25, 2016
…
...When The Intercept asked PropOrNot about this clear inconsistency via email, the group responded concisely: “We have no institutional affiliations with any organization.”
In his article, the Post’s Timberg did not include a link to PropOrNot’s website. If readers had the opportunity to visit the site, it would have become instantly apparent that this group of ostensible experts far more resembles amateur peddlers of primitive, shallow propagandistic clichés than serious, substantive analysis and expertise; that it has a blatant, demonstrable bias in promoting NATO’s narrative about the world; and that it is engaging in extremely dubious McCarthyite tactics about a wide range of critics and dissenters...
Greenwald and Norton proceed to link individuals claimed by Timberg to be members/associates of PropOrNot to neocon/rightwing U.S. organizations.
...As Fortune’s Ingram wrote [about one of the specialists PropOrNot relies upon for its claims, and the external group of which he’s a member] of the group, it is “a conservative think tank funded and staffed by proponents of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.”
PropOrNot is by no means a neutral observer...
…
...Even more disturbing than the Post’s shoddy journalism in this instance is the broader trend in which any wild conspiracy theory or McCarthyite attack is now permitted in U.S. discourse as long as it involves Russia and Putin – just as was true in the 1950s when stories of how the Russians were poisoning the U.S. water supply or infiltrating American institutions were commonplace. Any anti-Russia story was – and is – instantly vested with credibility, while anyone questioning its veracity or evidentiary basis is subject to attacks on their loyalties or, at best, vilified as “useful idiots.”
Two of the most discredited reports from the election season illustrate the point: a Slate article claiming that a private server had been located linking the Trump Organization and a Russian bank (which, like the current Post story, had been shopped around and rejected by multiple media outlets), and a completely deranged rant by Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald claiming that Putin had ordered emails in the WikiLeaks release to be doctored – both of which were uncritically shared and tweeted by hundreds of journalists to tens of thousands of people, if not more.
The Post itself – now posing as warriors against “fake news” – published an article in September that treated with great seriousness the claim that Hillary Clinton collapsed on 9/11 Day because she was poisoned by Putin. And that’s to say nothing of the paper’s disgraceful history of convincing Americans that Saddam was building non-existent nuclear weapons and had cultivated a vibrant alliance with Al Qaeda. As is so often the case, those who mostly loudly warn of “fake news” from others are themselves the most aggressive disseminators of it.
Indeed, what happened here is the essence of fake news. The Post story served the agendas of many factions: those who want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those who want to believe that the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled, in contrast to the objective truth which reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a resurrection of the Cold War. So those who saw tweets and Facebook posts promoting this Post story instantly clicked and shared and promoted the story without an iota of critical thought or examination of whether the claims were true, because they wanted the claims to be true. That behavior included countless journalists.
So the story spread in a flash, like wildfire…
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I thought it'd be appropriate to end this post with a comment from Meteor Blades, from November 21st…
Meteor Blades glb3
Nov 21 · 11:52:37 PM
A better way to destroy real journalism (which is already on life support) is to flood the field with fake journalism. Pretty soon, not only will many people have filled their heads with lying propaganda, but people who are more discerning won’t know who to trust. Don’t censor the good books, magazines, newspapers, and broadcast media—just bury us with conspiracy theories and other crap.
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