The New York Times Sees a 'Russian-Style' Conspiracy Everywhere
The New York Times Sees a 'Russian-Style' Conspiracy Everywhere
Alex Proimos
Schools out for summer, and corporate media are eager to enter their junior
year of the Russiagate conspiracy, despite its utter obliteration by Robert
Mueller in April. Perhaps some journalists have taken to heart the tips
several Russiagate skeptics offered to the media via FAIR on how to avoid
further erosion of their credibility, but the New York Times June 29
exclusive is a sign that not all in the media are ready to let go of
Russophobic concern-trolling about Putin sowing discord among the left
with disinformation.
This time, however, the sneaky culprit isnt Russian. His tactics are merely
Russian-style.
In Trump Consultant Is Trolling Democrats With Biden Site That Isnt
Bidens, the Times revealed that Patrick Mauldin, a Trump re-election media
consultant and founder of the Republican consulting firm Vici Media Group,
was the independent creator of the parody Joe Biden 2020 campaign website
JoeBiden.info, which appeared as one of the first results on various
iterations of Google searches for the presidential hopefulthough sometimes
below a paid ad for Bidens legitimate site. Prior to the Times story, the
owner of the website, which states at the bottom that it is political
commentary and parody of Joe Bidens presidential campaign website, was
anonymous. The page only states:
It is not paid for by any candidate, committee, organization or PAC. It is a
project BY AN American citizen FOR American citizens. Self-Funded.
The satirical webpage features animated GIFs of Bidens inappropriate
behavior with women and girls, and mocks his legislative accomplishments,
highlighting among other things his vote against gay marriage in 1996, his
authorship of the notorious 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration,
and his crusade against school desegregation in the 1970s, for which he
recently came under fire from Kamala Harris in the first 2020 Democratic
Primary debate.
The Times describes the site as a slick little piece of disinformation,
but each of the hyperlink citations attached to his political record listed
above are featured in that section of Mauldins website. See for yourself if
Biden didnt champion the Iraq War, didnt vote for states rights to
overturn Roe v. Wade, or didnt help escalate the war on drugs.
While the presentation of Bidens positions is perhaps decontextualized, and
some of his views have changedthough fighting alongside segregationists for
segregation is pretty hard to forgive in any contextnothing on
JoeBiden.info appears to be factually incorrect.
The hook, of course, is Russia. The Times featured image caption reads:
Armed with bogus websites that mock leading candidates, a Trump campaign
worker is exploiting tensions on the left with Russian-style disinformation.
Continuing the thriller, the pieces author, Matthew Rosenberg, writes:
Yet in anonymously trying to exploit the fissures within the Democratic
ranks fissures that ran through this past weeks debates Mr. Mauldins
website hews far closer to the disinformation spread by Russian trolls in
2016 than typical political messaging. With nothing to indicate its
creators motives or employer, the website offers a preview of what election
experts and national security officials say Americans can expect to be
bombarded with for the next year and a half: anonymous and hard-to-trace
digital messaging spread by sophisticated political operatives whose aim is
to sow discord through deceit. Trolling, that is, as a political strategy.
Rosenberg perfectly executes the Russiagate article recipe: adopt
sensational language like armed, sow discord and deceit; fall back on
unnamed experts to ramp up an alleged threat; use an espionage-evoking
word like operative; resuscitate the 2016 election trigger word troll;
and imply the useful idiocy of what corporate media tend to call the far
leftRosenberg opens the report by coloring Mauldins depiction of Biden as
in terms that would warm the heart of any Bernie Sanders supporter (but
surprise! It was a Trump staffer!). It only takes 11 more paragraphs for the
Times to mention that Mauldin also created less effective parody sites for
Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
Putin and any actual Russian involvement are the missing cherries on top.
But the damage is done when the association is made. The result is a story
that whitewashes a conservative Democrats unpopular record. Sound familiar?
Its important to remember that the so-called Russian Pearl Harbor of our
(otherwise ostensibly unmanipulated) social media, as journalist Aaron Maté
pointed out before and after the release of the Mueller Report (The Nation,
12/28/18; RealClearInvestigations, 7/5/19), was a dud. The Mueller-indicted
Russian clickbait firm whose disinformation the Times referencesthe
Internet Research Agency (IRA)produced mostly non-election content, its
scale was minor, its budget was negligible, and its sophistication was
well, unsophisticated. The kicker is its not entirely clear the IRA was
connected to the Russian government.
Using the same term used to hype the IRAs vapid memes (NBC News, 12/17/18),
the Times described as sophisticated Mauldins entirely routine buying a
web domain, designing a fairly simple webpage, promoting it on Reddit and
making T-shirts. You can go make your own website on WordPress with a
first-year-free domain name for $5 a month. On the topic of Mauldins
digital know-how, Rosenberg emphasizes that
he also appears to be very much on point in his choice of targets: Mr. Biden
is the Democrat polling strongest against Mr. Trump and has been repeatedly
singled out on Twitter by the president.
Mocking a frontrunner by pointing out his unpopular political history:
ingenious strategy, indeed.
The web analytics firm SimilarWeb says that the fake website had 390,000
unique visitors through the end of May, 80,000 more than Bidens actual
website. Its definitely problematic that search engines were directing more
people to the Trump consultantmade faux site than to the real one. But the
serious questions are: What was its impact, and is it worth such a
blockbuster, front-page upset?
Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch is the one who fed media the
uncheckable yet widely reported estimate of people who mayhave seen IRA
content: 126 million. He also said this figure comprises 0.004 percent of
content on peoples newsfeed. To put it in perspective, Stretch said, if its
platform was TV rather than Facebook, youd have to watch more than 600
hours of television to see something from the IRA. The scary figure the
Times is pushingthe fake Biden sites 390,000 visitorsis less than a third
of a percent of the not-particularly-pervasive 126 million.
Lacking evidence that JoeBiden.info will actually affect voter turnout,
Rosenberg invokes a study by Tovo Labs, an adtech firm for Democrats, that
brags that the company suppressed moderate and conservative Republican
turnout in Alabamas 2017 special Senate election by 2.5 and 4.4 percent,
respectively. The Times suggests that Mauldins satirical Biden website
utilizes a similar divide and suppress strategy, although Tovo ran a much
more complex and explicitly manipulative targeted-ad campaign. Republicans
were served ads that took them to a website encouraging them to write-in a
candidate other than Roy Moore, the far-right contender. Other ads brought
them to a curated site with articles opposing Moore by religious and
conservative figures.
In other words, Tovo, which boasts on its website dynamic content, AI and
the worlds best adtech to supercharge progressive campaigns and deliver
persuasion and action at an unprecedented scale, went far beyond Mauldins
laughably fake campaign website. Its a fear-mongering comparison between
apples and oranges.
Just as corporate media sought to distract their audience from the
significant failures of their preferred Democratic candidate in 2016 with a
collusion narrative that was baloney from the beginning, the Times wants you
to be scared of anything and everything except Bidens actual policy record.
The Russiagate trope allows media to get away with feebly calling the
inconvenient facts on JoeBiden.info less-than perfect moments (Daily
Beast, 6/29/19), unfavorable policy positions (Newsweek, 6/29/19),
policies that might not be seen as liberal today (The Hill, 6/29/19). In
the end, the label the Biden campaign hopes youll apply is the
Russia-tinged one the Times (6/29/19) supplies: disinformation.
Alan MacLeod (FAIR.org, 7/27/18) astutely characterized the utility of
Russiagate after the 2016 election:
For the Democrats, Russiagate allows them to ignore calls for change and not
scrutinize why they lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in
history. Since Russia hacked the election, there is no need for
introspection, and certainly no need to accommodate the Sanders wing or to
engage with progressive challenges from activists on the left, who are
Putins puppets anyway. The party can continue on the same course, painting
over the deep cracks in American society.
As media continue to evince bias against the more progressive ideas and 2020
candidates in the Democratic Party, this Times exclusive smells like
Biden-loss excuse preparation. What better seasoning than Russian-style
disinformation?
Teddy Ostrow / FAIR
