WaPo Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group
Ben Norton, Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, Nov 26 2016
The WaPo on Thursday promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of Pindo news sites that are critical of Pindo 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 Pindosis 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, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. This WaPo report was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media over the last 48 hours, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of journalists and pundits with large platforms hailing it as an earth-shattering exposé. It was the most-read piece on the entire WaPo 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:
In casting the group behind this website as “experts,” the WaPo described PropOrNot simply as “a non-partisan 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 WaPo said it was providing the group “to avoid being targeted by Russia’s 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 WaPo thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy but without the courage to attach their names to their 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 about its team, but received only this reply:
We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =) We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.
They have provided no additional information beyond that. As Fortune’s Matthew Ingram wrote in criticizing the WaPo 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.
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 WaPo’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:
https://twitter.com/propornot/status/802473476279762944
https://twitter.com/propornot/status/801156803711107076
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:
https://twitter.com/propornot/status/802243300824449024
The WaPo 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 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.
https://twitter.com/propornot/status/802085187714564096
To hype its own story, the WaPo article uncritically highlights PropOrNot’s flamboyant claim that stories planted or promoted by Russia’s “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 don’t know. Stories promoted by this network were shared 213 million times, it says. How do we know this? That’s 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 NYT deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman and professor Jared Yates Sexton, although the number is misleading at best. Some of the websites on PropOrNot’s blacklist do indeed publish Russian propaganda, namely Sputnik News and Russia Today, which are funded by the Russian government. But many of the blacklisted sites are independent, completely legitimate news sources which often receive funding through donations or foundations and which 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 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 WaPo, 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 NYT, the WSJ, the WaPo, Buzzfeed and Vice News. That is because a big part of the group’s definition for “Russian propaganda outlet” is criticizing Pindo 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 Pindostani 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 Pindosi 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 WaPo.
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 relies is Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a pro-Western think tank whose board of advisors includes neocons like Bernard Lewis and pro-imperialist Robert Kaplan, the latter of whom served on the Defense Policy Board. What the WaPo 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 West Point Military Academy’s Counter-Terrorism Center. Fortune’s Ingram wrote of the group:
It’s a conservative think tank funded and staffed by proponents of the Cold War between the Pindostan and Russia.
PropOrNot is by no means a neutral observer. It actively calls on Congress and the White House:
(We call upon) 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 WaPo, 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 WaPo concealed from its readers. Even more disturbing than the WaPo’s shoddy journalism in this instance is the broader trend in which any wild conspiracy theory or McCarthyite attack is now permitted in 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 water supply or infiltrating Pindp 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 (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 WaPo 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 Pindostanis that Saddam was building non-existent nuclear weapons and had cultivated a vibrant alliance with AQ. 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 WaPo 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 WaPo 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.
This from the anti-Trump side by way of ‘balance’:
Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies
Lee Fang, The Intercept, Nov 26 2016
The extraordinary phenomenon of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump. By that reckoning, entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers, opportunists in Tbilisi and California millennials have exploited social media algorithms in order to make money, incidentally leading to the viral proliferation of mostly anti-Clinton and anti-Obama hoaxes and conspiracy theories that thrilled many Trump supporters. The WaPo published a shoddy report on Thursday alleging that Russian state-sponsored propagandists were seeking to promote Trump through fabricated stories for their own reasons, independent of the candidate himself. But a closer look reveals that some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump’s political advisers and consultants.
Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash of JFK Jr & the deaths of various friends and Democrats. The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views. Another LifeZette video claimed that voting machines might be compromised because a voting machine company called Smartmatic, allegedly providing voting machines in sixteen states was purchased by George Soros. But Soros never purchased the company, which in any case did not provide voting machines used in the general election. One LifeZette article claimed the UN backed a secret administration takeover of local police departments; another went viral in the week prior to the election, saying that Clinton CoS John Podesta engaged in occult rituals. Ingraham’s site regularly receives links from the Drudge Report and other powerful drivers of Internet traffic, but LifeZette pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump’s inner circle of advisers. Brown gained notoriety nearly three decades ago for his role in helping to produce the “Willie Horton” campaign advertisement to derail Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid. Brown is also the political mentor of David Bossie, who went to work for Trump’s presidential campaign this year after founding the Citizens United group. In an interview this year, Brown called Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway “a longtime friend.”
Brown now produces a flow of reliably pro-Trump Internet content through a company he owns called Liftable Media Inc which operates a number of high-impact tabloid-style news outlets that exploded in size over the course of the election. One of Brown’s sites, called Western Journalism, is the 81st largest site in Pindostan, with 13 million monthly unique page views; another, called Conservative Tribune, is the 50th largest site with over 19 million monthly unique visitors. Brown’s sites churn out bombastic headlines with little regard to the truth, such as one that claimed Obama had redesigned the White House logo to change the Pindosi flag to a white flag, “a common symbol for surrender, which has many people wondering if Obama was trying to secretly signal to Pindostan’s enemies that he was surrendering.” The Facebook post touted the article with the line:
We all know Obama hates Pindostan, but what he just did to the White House logo is beyond the Pale.
Snopes noted that it was no signal of surrender, and that the bleached White House logo with a white flag was not even an Obama creation. The white logo dates back to as early as 2003, under the Bush administration, which used it for official documents. The Conservative Tribune and Western Journalism provide a steady stream of similarly deceptive, eye-catching headlines. Muslims Ordered to Vote Hillary is the headline for one election post based on this article about a Pakistani Pindosi activist going to door-to-door to help Clinton’s campaign. Obama Urges Illegal Immigrants to Vote Without Fear of Getting Caught, blared Western Journalism, claiming that Obama had suggested in an interview on issues facing Latino millennial voters that non-citizens could vote and “will never get caught if they do.” The article left out the part of the Obama interview in which he said:
You can’t legally vote, but they’re counting on you to make sure that you have the courage to make your voice heard.
Posts range from the assertion that Clinton went on a “drug holiday” before the Las Vegas presidential debate to rumors that Obama’s birth certificate is under serious scrutiny. Thanks to views sourced largely to referrals from Facebook, Brown’s websites now outrank web traffic going to news outlets such as the WSJ, CBS News and NPR. Both Western Journalism and Conservative Tribune are certified by Facebook as bona-fide news providers. Trump’s relationship with one particularly influential online news site with a history of fabricated stories couldn’t be much closer. Stephen Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, took a leave of absence from the organization to become the CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign and has been tapped to serve as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Trump himself regularly promoted Breitbart stories, including a tweet used to justify his campaign to prove Obama was not born in Pindostan.
Breitbart News blends commentary and journalism with inflammatory headlines, in many cases producing fake stories sourced from online hoaxes. The site once attempted to pass off a picture of people in Cleveland celebrating the Cavaliers as a massive Trump rally. The site furiously defended Trump’s false claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey were “cheering” the 9/11 attacks, a claim that multiple fact-checking organizations have thoroughly debunked. Other conservative content farms, including WorldNetDaily, maintained ties to the Trump election effort. Campaign finance records show that Great Pindostan PAC, a Trump-backing Super-PAC, paid WND for “online voter contact.” The surge of fake news has been much commented on in the mainstream media, and its effect on Trump’s election victory has been widely debated, with little mention of purveyors close to the Trump campaign. A Buzzfeed article that came out shortly before the election famously traced more than 100 pro-Trump websites to young entrepreneurs in a single town in the FYROM who discovered that the best way to generate clicks at a fraction of a penny per click in ad revenue is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook. After the election, New Yorker editor David Remnick described Obama as “talking obsessively” about that article, and quoted him bemoaning its significance. Obama said:
The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal, that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.
The WaPo interviewed Paul Horner, the “impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire,” who sounded somewhat aghast when he said:
I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything. They’ll post everything, believe anything.
Another WaPo story described two Southern California slackers turning their website of made-up pro-Trump clickbait in a virtual goldmine. The NYT profiled a fake news operation run by three brothers in Tbilisi who experimented with a variety of content, sometimes lifted from other sites, at other times made up from whole cloth, finding that pro-Trump material was the most popular and therefore the most profitable. Finally a WaPo story this week alleged a Russian government role in spreading fake news to help Trump. But its sources were not remotely credible. For instance, it cited a list that characterized as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” a number of well-established and well-respected websites including Truthdig, Naked Capitalism and TruthOut. The growth of fake news isn’t confined to Trump or to conservative sites. A number of left-wing political sites have trafficked in demonstrably false stories, including deceptive pieces stoking fear about vaccines. Earlier this year, when critics called for Clinton to release the transcripts of her three paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, as well as to other interest groups, Daily News Bin, a new liberal website specializing in viral hits, published a piece titled “Video surfaces of Hillary Clinton’s paid speech to Goldman Sachs, and it’s completely harmless” in which the embedded video was not of one of Clinton’s paid speeches, but of a public event sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The article was shared over 120,000 times. Judy Muller, professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, said:
We live in a time when people don’t care about facts. People only care about opinions that support their own biases. so they’re not reading other people’s facts. They’re not checking the facts. They don’t want to know. That’s the scariest development to me.
During the last three months of the campaign, Buzzfeed said that the top 20 best-performing hoax stories related to the election had more Facebook engagement than the 20 best performing stories from major news outlets. Facebook has responded to the recent outcry over fake news websites with promises to crack down on obvious phony sites. Many critics are still worried that Facebook is not doing enough to counter outright lies promoted by the platform. Others are concerned that such efforts risk suppressing critical information. Muller said that if Ingraham is nominated by Trump to be his spox to the press, she will have to distance herself from her growing Facebook content empire. But the demand for fake news is unlikely to subside. A recent study by Stanford University researchers found that students have difficulty discerning between fake content, corporate sponsored advertorial content posing as journalism, and legitimate news.
Niqnaq 
