Proud To
Say, ICH Made The List
Washington
Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist
From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group
By Ben
Norton, Glenn Greenwald
November
27, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Intercept"
-
The Washington
Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new,
shadowy organization that smears
dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S.
foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of
Russian propaganda.” The
article by reporter Craig Timberg – headlined
“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’
during election, experts say” – cites a report by a
new, anonymous website
calling itself “PropOrNot,” which claims that
millions of Americans have been deceived this year
in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.”
The group’s
list of Russian disinformation outlets includes
WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as
Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout,
Black Agenda Report, Truthdig and Naked Capitalism,
as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com
and the Ron Paul Institute.
This Post
report was one of the most widely circulated
political news articles on social media over the
last 48 hours, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
U.S. journalists and pundits with large platforms
hailing it as
an earth-shattering exposé. It was the most-read
piece on the entire Post website after it was
published on Friday.
Yet the
article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven
allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy,
slothful journalistic tactics. It was not surprising
to learn that, as BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel
noted, “a lot of reporters passed on this
story.” Its huge flaws are self-evident. But the
Post gleefully ran with it and then promoted it
aggressively, led by its Executive Editor Marty
Baron:
At some point last
night, after multiple groups listed as “allies”
objected, the group quietly changed the title of its
“allied” list to “Related Projects.” 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.
To see how frivolous and even childish this group of
anonymous cowards is – which the Post venerated into
serious experts in order to peddle their story –
just sample a couple of the recent tweets from this
group:
As for their refusal to identify
themselves even as they smear hundreds of American
journalists as loyal to the Kremlin or “useful
idiots” for it, this is their mature response:
The Washington Post should be
very proud: it staked a major part of its news
story on the unverified, untestable assertions of this laughable
organization.
One of the core functions of PropOrNot appears to be
its compilation of a lengthy blacklist of news and
political websites which it smears as peddlers of
“Russian propaganda.” Included on this blacklist of
supposed propaganda outlets are prominent
independent left-wing news sites such as Truthout,
Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Consortium
News and Truthdig.
Also included are popular libertarian hubs such
as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute, along with the hugely influential
right-wing website the Drudge Report and the
publishing site WikiLeaks. Far-right, virulently
anti-Muslim blogs such as Bare Naked Islam are
likewise dubbed Kremlin mouthpieces. Basically,
everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist
Hillary-Clinton/Jeb-Bush spectrum is guilty. On its
Twitter account, the group announced a new “plugin”
that automatically alerts the user that a visited
website has been designated by the group to be a
Russian propaganda outlet.
The group commits
outright defamation by slandering obviously legitimate
news sites as propaganda tools of the Kremlin.
One
of the most egregious examples is the group’s inclusion
of Naked Capitalism, the widely respected left-wing site
run by Wall Street critic Yves Smith. That site was
named by Time Magazine as one
of the best 25 Best Financial Blogs in 2011 and by
Wired Magazine as a crucial site to follow for finance,
and Smith has been
featured as a guest on programs
such as PBS’ Bill Moyers Show. Yet this cowardly
group of anonymous smear artists, promoted by the
Washington Post, has now placed them on a blacklist of
Russian disinformation.
The
group eschews alternative media outlets like these and
instead recommends that readers rely solely on
establishment-friendly publications like NPR, the BBC,
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, Buzzfeed and VICE. That is because
a big part of the group’s definition for “Russian
propaganda outlet” is criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
PropOrNot does not articulate its criteria in detail,
merely describing its metrics as “behavioral” and
“motivation-agnostic.” That is to say, even if a news
source is not technically a Russian propaganda outlet
and is not even trying to help the Kremlin, it is still
guilty of being a “useful idiot” if it publishes
material that might in some way be convenient or helpful
for the Russian government. In other words, the website
conflates criticism of Western governments and their
actions and policies with Russian propaganda. News sites
that do not uncritically echo a pro-NATO perspective are
accused of being mouthpieces for the Kremlin, even if
only unwitting ones.
While
blacklisting left-wing and libertarian journalists,
PropOrNot also denies being McCarthyite. Yet it
simultaneously calls for the U.S. government to use
the FBI and DOJ to carry out “formal investigations”
of these accused websites, “because the kind of
folks who make propaganda for brutal authoritarian
oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of
bad business.” The shadowy group even goes so far as
to claim that people involved in the blacklisted
websites may “have violated the Espionage Act, the
Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related
laws.”
In sum:
they’re not McCarthyite; perish the thought. They
just want multiple U.S. media outlets investigated
by the FBI for espionage on behalf of Russia.
Who exactly is behind PropOrNot,
where it gets its funding and whether or not it is
tied to any governments is a complete mystery. The
Intercept also sent inquiries to the Post’s Craig
Timberg asking these questions, and asking whether
he thinks it is fair to label left-wing news sites
like Truthout “Russian propaganda outlets.” Timberg
replied: “I’m sorry, I can’t comment about stories
I’ve written for the Post.”
As is
so often the case, journalists – who constantly
demand transparency from everyone else – refuse to
provide even the most basic levels for themselves.
When subjected to scrutiny, they reflexively adopt
the language of the most secrecy-happy national
security agencies: we do
not comment on what we do.
Timberg’s piece
on the supposed ubiquity of Russian propaganda is
misleading in several other ways. The other
primary “expert” upon which the article relies is Clint
Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute, a pro-Western think tank whose board of
advisors includes neoconservative figures like infamous
orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis and
pro-imperialist Robert D. Kaplan, the latter of whom
served on the U.S. government’s Defense Policy Board.
What the Post
does not mention in its report is that
Watts, one of the specialists it relies on for its
claims, previously worked as an FBI special agent on a
Joint Terrorism Task Force and as the executive officer
of the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism
Center. As Fortune’s Ingram wrote 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. It actively calls on
Congress and the White House to work “with our European
allies to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT financial
transaction system, effective immediately and lasting
for at least one year, as an appropriate response to
Russian manipulation of the election.”
In other words,
this blacklisting group of anonymous cowards – putative
experts in the pages of The Washington Post –
are actively pushing for Western governments to take
punitive measures against the Russian government, and
are speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological
framework that the Post concealed from its readers.
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. Tens of thousands of
people, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions,
consumed it, believing that it was true because of how
many journalists and experts told them it was. Virtually
none of the people who told them this spent a minute of
time or ounce of energy determining if it was true. It
pleased them to believe it was, knowing it advanced
their interests, and so they endorsed it. That is the
essence of how fake news functions, and it is the
ultimate irony that this Post story ended up
illustrating and spreading far more fake news than it
exposed. |
