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
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 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 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:
Russian
propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent
researchers http://wpo.st/PHWG2
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 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 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: “We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get
back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon].” The group added: “We’re over
30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s
involvement.”
Thus
far, they have provided no additional information beyond that. As Fortune’s
Matthew Ingram wrote in criticizing the Post 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.
Just
want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave
permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/802050100231020544 …
This
WashPost story gets more and more embarrassing by the minute: https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/802166958426914816 …
.@ggreenwald No-one I've spoken to
listed as "allies" on their site had even heard of them before the WP
piece.
I
can confirm. I've no idea what this website is nor who runs it. Not sure how
that makes us "allies." Looks like just a blogroll https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/802192611608031233 …
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:
Awww,
wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject - they're so
vewwy angwy!! It's cute 
We don't censor; just highlight.
We don't censor; just highlight.
Fascists.
Straight up muthafuckin' fascists. That's what we're up against. Unwittingly or
not, they work for Russia. http://bzfd.it/2fo3ew7
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:
We'll
consider revealing our names when Russia reveals the names of those running its
propaganda operations in the West 
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 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.
We
just published a BETA (very beta) version of our Chrome plugin, which
highlights domains we've IDed: http://bit.ly/2fumsNx
To
hype its story, the Post 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 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 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 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 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’s 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 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. 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 — 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 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 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 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 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 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.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"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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