Washington Post on the ‘Fake News’ Hot Seat

[dcbl]

Even if we assume that all of this "it was Russia that did this" talk was true (it's not)

we already know that the DoJ colluded with the Clinton's and that the FBI had a guy overseeing Hillary's case whose wife got $675,000 for her failed campaign.

If the Russians helped make Trump president by hacking Democrat emails, all that does is highlight just how incompetent the Democrats are; we are so far behind our enemies that we can't keep email communications secret?

Thank God we have Trump coming in with America 1st to fix it - right?

Anyway, I don't buy it - 17 intelligence agencies and unsourced rumors from CIA - WaPo = Fake News

Washington Post on the ‘Fake News’ Hot Seat

There has also been a fusillade of disparaging commentary in publications ranging from The Intercept to The New Yorker.

“I thought it was completely ridiculous that the Post would put this sorry piece of trash on the front page,” Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, told The Daily Beast in a typically vehement slam.

“The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting,” was the headline on Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s takedown.

The critics panned the Post story’s heavy reliance on the judgments of unnamed “researchers” for PropOrNot.com, a shadowy website launched three months ago ostensibly to expose “Russian influence operations targeted at US audiences, distinguish between propaganda and commercial ‘clickbait’, and help identify propaganda and push back.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/09/washington-post-on-the-fake-news-hot-seat.html

 

[owebo]

Even if we assume that all of this "it was Russia that did this" talk was true (it's not)

we already know that the DoJ colluded with the Clinton's and that the FBI had a guy overseeing Hillary's case whose wife got $675,000 for her failed campaign.

If the Russians helped make Trump president by hacking Democrat emails, all that does is highlight just how incompetent the Democrats are; we are so far behind our enemies that we can't keep email communications secret?

Thank God we have Trump coming in with America 1st to fix it - right?

Anyway, I don't buy it - 17 intelligence agencies and unsourced rumors from CIA - WaPo = Fake News

Washington Post on the ‘Fake News’ Hot Seat

There has also been a fusillade of disparaging commentary in publications ranging from The Intercept to The New Yorker.

“I thought it was completely ridiculous that the Post would put this sorry piece of trash on the front page,” Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, told The Daily Beast in a typically vehement slam.

“The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting,” was the headline on Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s takedown.

The critics panned the Post story’s heavy reliance on the judgments of unnamed “researchers” for PropOrNot.com, a shadowy website launched three months ago ostensibly to expose “Russian influence operations targeted at US audiences, distinguish between propaganda and commercial ‘clickbait’, and help identify propaganda and push back.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/09/washington-post-on-the-fake-news-hot-seat.html

Democrats will double, and even triple, down on their fake news as they lose control of the media.....

 

[easyt65]

One of the most alarming concerns for me - and should be for all - resulting from this 'fake news'-effected election is the massive effort - and justification - that I predict WILL COME for government to CONTROL and even SENSORSHIP of all news.

Not only will the major news media be targeted, but every little 'news' and blog site on the internet will be targeted.

Armed with the 'fact' that 'fake news' cost a major political party candidate the Presidency, I - again - predict the govt will seek to crack down on / exercise more control over media, and thetefore 'Freedom of the Press'.

We'll see...

 

[easyt65]

Democrats will double, and even triple, down on their fake news as they lose control of the media.....

Just the opposite.

They will eventually stop freaking out, will look to punish yhose who caused the loss / prevent it from happening again.

The party that once said, 'Never let a crisis go to waste' will eventually see this as an OPPORTUNITY.

Remember, the 'Big Government' agenda they push is all about CONTROL! This is a 'golden opportunity' to go after more government control of the media.

 

[Disir]

What the Washington Post did in boosting an anonymous blacklist of American journalists accused of criminal treason is one of the sleaziest, and most disturbing (in a very familiar Kremlin way) things I’ve seen in this country since I fled for home. The WaPo is essentially an arm of the American deep state; its owner, Jeff Bezos, is one of the three richest Americans, worth $67 billion, and his cash cow, Amazon, is a major contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, this is as close to an official US government blacklist of journalists as we’ve seen—a dark ominous warning before they take the next steps.

It’s now been a few days, and the shock and disgust is turning to questions about how to fight back—and who we should be fighting against. Who were the Washington Post’s sources for their journalism blacklist?

Smearing a progressive journalism icon

The WaPo smear was authored by tech reporter Craig Timberg, a former national security editor who displayed embarrassing deference to the head of the world’s largest private surveillance operation, billionaire Eric Schmidt—in contrast to his treatment of his journalism colleagues. There’s little in Timberg’s history to suggest he’d lead one of the ugliest public smears of his colleagues in decades. Timberg’s father, a successful mainstream journalist who recently died, wrote hagiographies on his Naval Academy comrades including John McCain, the Senate’s leading Russophobic hawk, and three Iran-Contra conspirators—Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Robert McFarlane, whose crimes Timberg blames on their love of country and sacrifices in Vietnam.

WaPo’s key source was an anonymous online group calling itself PropOrNot (i.e., “Propaganda Or Not”). It was here that the blacklist of American journalists allegedly working with the Kremlin was posted. The Washington Post cited PropOrNot as a credible source, and granted them the right to anonymously accuse major American news outlets of treason, recommending that the government investigate and prosecute them under the Espionage Act for spreading Russian propaganda.

Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.

The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full coopI'm eration of the Washington Post’s front page.

The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying

I'm disgusted.

 

[Rustic]

How exactly do hacked emails make Donald Trump president unfairly?

Progressives are a basket of deplorable's... fact

 

[Norman]

They have went completely ape-shit indeed. How anyone can read such propaganda and take it seriously is beyond anyone at this point.

Washington Post admits article on ‘Russian propaganda’ & ‘fake news’ based on sham research


I hope they lose all lawsuits, and go bankrupt after.

 

[dcbl]

A little more "even if"

truth is - our friends in "traditional media" went all out backing Hilldawg this go round, there wasn't even any pretense of "objectivity" (with very few exceptions)

so, thank God for Wikileaks and "Russia" for doing the actual job of American "journalists"

we know for 100% certain sure that these bastards worked overtime to try to influence the election:

 

[depotoo]

Another article, coming from all places, a progressive site-fair.org, which explains it pretty well, surprisingly-

The day before the party’s convention opened in Philadelphia on July 24, Wasserman-Schultz had to resign her post or face a floor revolt. Sanders delegates were so angry at what they were learning from WikiLeaks about the sabotage of their candidate thathundreds walked out on the second day of the convention, tossing away their delegate credentials over the security fence and vowing never to support Clinton.

In short order, the DNC and the Obama administration-led intelligence establishment began claiming, with no hard evidence, that the source of WikiLeaks’ explosive emails was “the Russians.” While denied by WikiLeaks, it was a charge that Clinton made ad nauseum on the campaign trail and in her three televised debates with Trump, using it as an all-purpose excuse for tough questions about herself-dealing as secretary of State, her lucrative off-the-record speeches to Wall Street bankers, or the DNC’s thumb on the scale in the primaries.

Mainstream news organizations were quick to adopt this “Russia did it” trope, which despite the lack of proof has only grown more widely accepted since Trump’s stunning election-night victory...

...By November 30, PropOrNot, saying it had been challenged by many journalists, but still remaining anonymous, issued a press release announcing that it was “reviewing” its methodology. The group said that it would stop listing news sites that were open about who they were and that were running actual news. They also said they would stop using techies to evaluate whether news sites were propaganda organs or not.

The Post, however, despite its “editor’s note” preface, is still standing by a tawdry story reminiscent of Red Channels in the 1950s. So is Timberg, who on November 30 enthusiastically cited his earlier piece in reporting on a House/Senate conference working on the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, that approves $160 million to “identify propaganda and counter its effects.”

Timberg wrote that the measure, originally produced last spring, had earlier focussed upon propaganda in foreign countries, but he says, enthusiastically linking to his own article of six days earlier: “The context shifted in recent months as independent experts [those PropOrNot guys!] warned that Russia was carrying out an intensive propaganda campaign during the US election season.”

That should make the folks behind PropOrNot happy. On their own site, while claiming they aren’t trying to censor anybody, they call on the FBI and DOJ to open “formal investigations by the US government, because…we strongly suspect that some of the individuals involved have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act and other related laws.”

The irony is that in purporting to expose Russian propaganda manipulation of the media, the Washington Post has provided a graphic demonstration of how the whole propaganda thing works.


There is much more at link-

Rather Than Exposing Propaganda, WaPo Shows How It’s Done

 

[Mac1958]

I have to wonder if the Left will rue the day they started this "fake news" meme.

Yes, it certainly exists, and yes, it needs to be examined.

But the other side of the spectrum is having zero (0) trouble finding examples THEY can use, TOO.

Just more noise.
.

 

[Norman]

A little more "even if"

truth is - our friends in "traditional media" went all out backing Hilldawg this go round, there wasn't even any pretense of "objectivity" (with very few exceptions)

so, thank God for Wikileaks and "Russia" for doing the actual job of American "journalists"

we know for 100% certain sure that these bastards worked overtime to try to influence the election:

Haven't you heard? Any journalist who doesn't collude with Clinton is to be regarded as "fake".

 

[Pete7469]

Democrats will double, and even triple, down on their fake news as they lose control of the media.....

To this day I see bed wetters parroting the "Gore won in 2000" bullshit.

Parroting lies is a regressive principle though.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

---Regressive Patron saint Goebbels