Excerpt: "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 image from the Washington Post story in question. Russian President
Vladimir Putin, in an interview with RT in 2013. (photo: Yuri
Kochetkov/AFP/Getty Images)
Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New,
Hidden, and Very Shady Group
By Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton, The Intercept
28 November 16
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
an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of
Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian misinformation
campaign.
The groups 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 on Friday after it was published.
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 BuzzFeeds 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:
In casting the group behind this website as experts, the Post described
PropOrNot simply as a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign
policy, military and technology backgrounds. Not one individual at the
organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the
condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group to
avoid being targeted by Russias legions of skilled hackers.
In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly
branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda even
calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage while cowardly hiding
their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic
essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual
names to the blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin senator, the group refers to
its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as The List.
The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify,
as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself. The Intercept
contacted PropOrNot and asked numerous questions about its team, but
received only this reply: Were getting a lot of requests for comment and
can get back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon]. The group added:
Were over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny
anyones involvement.
Thus far, they have provided no additional information beyond that. As
Fortunes Matthew Ingram wrote in criticizing the Post article, PropOrNots
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.
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 Posts Timberg did not include a link to PropOrNots
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 NATOs 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 that 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 isnt 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.
To hype its story, the Post article uncritically highlights PropOrNots
flamboyant claim that stories planted or promoted by Russias
disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times. Yet no
methodology is provided for any of this: how a website is determined to
merit blacklist designation or how this reach was calculated. As Ingram
wrote: How is that audience measured? We dont know. Stories promoted by
this network were shared 213 million times, it says. How do we know this?
Thats unclear.
Presumably, this massive number was created by including on its lists highly
popular sites such as WikiLeaks, as well the Drudge Report, the third-most
popular political news website on the internet. Yet this frightening, Cold
War-esque 213 million number for Russian planted news story views was
uncritically echoed by numerous high-profile media figures, such as New York
Times deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman and professor Jared Yates
Sexton although the number is misleading at best.
Some of the websites on PropOrNots blacklist do indeed publish Russian
propaganda namely Sputnik News and Russia Today, which are funded by the
Russian government. But many of the aforementioned blacklisted sites are
independent, completely legitimate news sources that often receive funding
through donations or foundations and have been reporting and analyzing news
for many years.
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 groups 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
PBSs 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
groups 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: Theyre 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 Posts 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: Im sorry, I cant
comment about stories Ive 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.
Timbergs 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 advisers includes neoconservative
figures like infamous orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis and pro-imperialist
Robert D. Kaplan, the latter of whom served on the U.S. governments 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 Academys Combating Terrorism Center. As Fortunes 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 is actively pushing for
Western governments to take punitive measures against the Russian government
and is speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological framework that the
Post concealed from its readers.
Even more disturbing than the Posts 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 Newsweeks 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 a warrior 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
thats to say nothing of the papers 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 that 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
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The image from the Washington Post story in question. Russian President
Vladimir Putin, in an interview with RT in 2013. (photo: Yuri
Kochetkov/AFP/Getty Images)
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a
-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/https://theint
ercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-b
lacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/
Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New,
Hidden, and Very Shady Group
By Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton, The Intercept
28 November 16
he 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
an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of
Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian misinformation
campaign.
The groups 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 on Friday after it was published.
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 BuzzFeeds 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:
In casting the group behind this website as experts, the Post described
PropOrNot simply as a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign
policy, military and technology backgrounds. Not one individual at the
organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the
condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group to
avoid being targeted by Russias legions of skilled hackers.
In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly
branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda even
calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage while cowardly hiding
their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic
essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual
names to the blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin senator, the group refers to
its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as The List.
The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify,
as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself. The Intercept
contacted PropOrNot and asked numerous questions about its team, but
received only this reply: Were getting a lot of requests for comment and
can get back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon]. The group added:
Were over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny
anyones involvement.
Thus far, they have provided no additional information beyond that. As
Fortunes Matthew Ingram wrote in criticizing the Post article, PropOrNots
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.
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 Posts Timberg did not include a link to PropOrNots
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 NATOs 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 that 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 isnt 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.
To hype its story, the Post article uncritically highlights PropOrNots
flamboyant claim that stories planted or promoted by Russias
disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times. Yet no
methodology is provided for any of this: how a website is determined to
merit blacklist designation or how this reach was calculated. As Ingram
wrote: How is that audience measured? We dont know. Stories promoted by
this network were shared 213 million times, it says. How do we know this?
Thats unclear.
Presumably, this massive number was created by including on its lists highly
popular sites such as WikiLeaks, as well the Drudge Report, the third-most
popular political news website on the internet. Yet this frightening, Cold
War-esque 213 million number for Russian planted news story views was
uncritically echoed by numerous high-profile media figures, such as New York
Times deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman and professor Jared Yates
Sexton although the number is misleading at best.
Some of the websites on PropOrNots blacklist do indeed publish Russian
propaganda namely Sputnik News and Russia Today, which are funded by the
Russian government. But many of the aforementioned blacklisted sites are
independent, completely legitimate news sources that often receive funding
through donations or foundations and have been reporting and analyzing news
for many years.
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 groups 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
PBSs 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
groups 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: Theyre 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 Posts 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: Im sorry, I cant
comment about stories Ive 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.
Timbergs 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 advisers includes neoconservative
figures like infamous orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis and pro-imperialist
Robert D. Kaplan, the latter of whom served on the U.S. governments 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 Academys Combating Terrorism Center. As Fortunes 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 is actively pushing for
Western governments to take punitive measures against the Russian government
and is speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological framework that the
Post concealed from its readers.
Even more disturbing than the Posts 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 Newsweeks 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 a warrior 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
thats to say nothing of the papers 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 that 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
