Tuesday, December 06, 2016
Site
Smeared as 'Russian Propaganda' Demands Washington Post Retraction
"Your identification of Naked Capitalism as
a 'fake news site' and as an agent for Russian propaganda designed to undermine
American democracy is defamatory"
The allegations reported by Washington
Post "have caused and will continue to cause great harm to Naked
Capitalism," says letter from attorney. (Photo: Max Borge/flickr/cc)
The
progressive finance and economics website Naked Capitalism has
demanded a retraction and apology from the Washington Post for
its "astonishingly lazy report" smearing
independent news outlets as "Russian propaganda."
The Post story,
as Common Dreams reported, cited anonymous organization
PropOrNot in accusing multiple left-wing outlets of peddling "fake
news" during the 2016 election as tools of a Russian "misinformation
campaign." Naked Capitalism was among those named in the
report, along with sites including Truthout, Black Agenda
Report, Consortium News, and Truthdig.
The
article drew widespread condemnation for the Post;
for media outlets that "uncritically
wrote up the Post's most incendiary claims with little or minimal
pushback;" and for PropOrNot itself.
"To
PropOrNot, simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political
mainstream is enough to risk being labelled a Russian propagandist,"
Adrian Chen wrote at the New Yorker.
"The
group...embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the
courage to attach individual names to the blacklist," said Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton
at The Intercept, who described Naked Capitalism's
inclusion on the list as "[o]ne of the most egregious examples" of
PropOrNot's "outright defamation."
"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 [publisher Yves] Smith has been featured as a guest on programs such as PBS's
Bill Moyers Show," Greenwald and Norton wrote. "Yet this cowardly group of anonymous
smear artists, promoted by the Washington Post, has now placed
them on a blacklist of Russian disinformation."
In a
letter dated Sunday, Naked Capitalism attorney James Moody
gives the Post three days to respond to three listed demands:
the immediate removal of the story from the newspaper's website; a
"prominent public apology;" and "an equally prominent (i.e. not
in the 'Comments' section) opportunity to respond."
"Your
identification of Naked Capitalism as a 'fake news site' and
as an agent for Russian propaganda designed to undermine American democracy is
defamatory per se," reads the letter from Moody.
It
continues:
You
accuse Naked Capitalism of spreading "Russian-backed
phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience."
These serious allegations have caused and will continue to cause great harm
to Naked Capitalism, including but not limited to damage to policy
impact and reputation, diversion of scarce reporting and managerial resources
to respond to concerned inquires and debunk this smear, loss of readers, and
damage to the site's profitability. Moreover, writers and editors associated
with Naked Capitalism face ridicule, emotional distress, loss of reputation,
and risk to future career advancement, including for example, difficulty
passing background and security checks.
In a less
formal show of outrage this week, Naked Capitalism launched the "spoof PropOrNot.org site,
which uses the PropOrNot project as an example of sorely deficient propaganda
and shows where it went wrong."
The site
"came out of a desire to create more balance among the responses to this
McCarthyite initiative," Smith wrote in her introduction to the humor
site, which bills itself as: "Your Authentic Neighborhood Propaganda
Identification Service, Since 2016!"
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is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"
The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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