To put it mildly, there was a lot of news last week. Looking back and comeying through it all, there was one interesting piece that was largely overlooked- a New York Times interactive explaining how Fox News found itself promoting a parody blog post that became Russian propaganda. It’s not a climate story, but it illustrates how fake news efforts take nonsense blogs picked up by social media and turn them into stories in what some people consider legitimate conservative media, like The Sun and Fox News. Of course once it’s there, there’s a decent chance the president will parrot it or base policy on it.
But, as Eric Boehlert at Media Matters explains, using Team Trump’s Paris decision as a case study, sometimes that process goes the other way. Like Putin, for whom the Paris decision was a gift, Trump has a sympathetic echo chamber that’s all too happy to promote his counterfactual narratives. And like in Putin’s Russia, that allows for the legitimization of authoritarian propaganda.
Speaking of authoritarian propaganda, failing Breitbart lost 90% of its advertisers and half its traffic recently, which is comforting. (Reminder: even as the Mercer-funded outfit advanced subsequently rejected claims that it’s independent of political interference, Bannon was given a waiver to continue communicating with the outlet he ran until he began running Trump. At the time, the White House told reporters no staffers received waivers. In reality, there were at least 16 waivers granted to top staffers, allowing them to work with past clients or employers.)
Anyway, James Delingpole’s latest Breitbart blathering is a listicle of graphs that supposedly show global warming is a myth. Of course James “Interpreter of Interpretations” Delingpole didn’t compile this research himself, rather copied (with attribution, at least) the work of another blogger, whose post was shared over 15,000 times on social media.
Climate Feedback contacted the authors of the papers listed. At the time of writing this on Friday afternoon, CF had gotten 26 responses to their inquiry into whether or not authors agreed with the characterization that their paper disproved climate change. All 26 said no.
So when a former NASA chief scientist says that Americans are “under siege by fake information,” Breitbart is exactly the sort of thing she’s talking about. And when the NYT shows the lifecycle of fake news moving from fringe blogs to social media to conservative media, they could be describing just about any Breitbart column.
All Trump/Russia collusion questions aside, it’s probably just a coincidence that Trump-aligned Breitbart uses the Russian propaganda playbook to push narratives that justify a Putin-pleasing position on climate change.
Though when you put it like that, one might start to think maybe Russia is what puts the “red” in Scott Pruitt’s red team. An idea, by the way, he first raised in an interview with Breitbart. On outlet, by the way, being investigated as part of the FBI’s probe into Russia’s election activities.
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