“New Knowledge” and the same old same old
Jonathon Morgan, CEO of New Knowledge and former State Department employee.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | February 4, 2019
Most of us in the UK-based alternate media are familiar with the Integrity Initiative by now. A disinformation campaign funded by the foreign office through the (very dodgy sounding) Institute for Statecraft. Their job was to smear people opposing Theresa May’s government – be they foreign or domestic. The scale of the scandal hasn’t been appreciated by the public, thanks to the muteness of the mainstream media, but the foreign office using public money to have the intelligence agencies smear the opposition should be enough to bring down any government.
Thanks to some excellent work by people in the alternate media and some MPs, the Integrity Initiative’s website is currently empty “pending an investigation of data theft”. More honestly, it had become an embarrassment. They will likely disappear and then relaunch under a new name, and may indeed have already done so. For now, the Integrity Initiative is done.
Less well-known in this country is New Knowledge, a direct US-based parallel of the Integrity Initiative. They’ve been conducting “counter-propaganda” and “social media experiments” in the US since 2015, but only just hit the headlines.
Who are “New Knowledge”?
A good question – we don’t really know. Their website claims to have “thousands of volunteers”. This may or may not be true – we only have three named people:
… but what a three they are. Jonathon Morgan, formerly of the State Department and Brookings Institute. Ryan Fox, formerly of military intelligence. Renee DiResta, formerly of Wall Street.
The State Department, military intelligence and Wall Street. The unholy trinity.
Obviously, some questions present themselves. Primarily, can we really trust all those “formerlies”? How did these three start this project? How do they know each other? Where does their funding come from?
We don’t know. What we do know is that, somehow, these three crazy kids got together and decided to use their money (we don’t know where they got it from) and their army of volunteers (we don’t know who they are) to “combat disinformation”. A noble goal indeed.
Let’s see how they did…
Why is New Knowledge in the news?
This “think tank” recently made the headlines in the US because they were caught attempting to manipulate the Alabama Senatorial election. This is not a fringe “conspiracy theory” claim – it was in the New York Times, twice.
It’s now known that New Knowledge took part in various social media-based attempts to swing the Alabama senate race in favour of Democrat Doug Jones. These efforts were varied and odd. They included creating a fake Facebook page, purporting to be a group of Baptists who supported Republican candidate Roy Moore, because they believed he would help them ban alcohol statewide. They also encouraged (and/or created) independent candidates from the conservative right, in efforts to split the Republican vote.
We don’t know what impact it had – but Jones did win a very narrow victory over Moore (fewer than 22,000 votes).
However, this was – by far – the most important facet of this story:
It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
New Knowledge pretended to be Russians supporting a Republican candidate in order to discredit him by association. They freely admit it:
We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,”
So it seems rather than “combatting disinformation”, New Knowledge actively spreads disinformation to achieve political goals.
They are staffed by State Dept. and intelligence agency veterans, and they spread false information to swing elections. That makes them a Psy-Op:
Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.
So what was the reaction?
Mild. Disappointing. On multiple levels.
Just like the Integrity Initiative coverage in the UK, the wider implications of corruption were completely ignored. The story was always framed in terms of “fighting back against the Kremlin”, or “turning Putin’s methods against him”. The coverage focused on this being a “gift for the Kremlin” because it appeared to undermine the claims of Russiagaters (Note “appears to undermine”, rather than “undermines”).
New Knowledge (NK), of course, denied they were attempting to corrupt democracy in Alabama. Morgan called the Alabama operation an “experiment” testing the effectiveness of “Russian methods”. He claimed it was specifically “designed to have as little impact as possible”. (How you can “test the effectiveness” of something designed to have no impact is unclear to me).
No evidence is supplied to corroborate Morgan’s version of events. In fact, there’s no reason to think this is a one-off at all. This is just the one we know about. Deep State psy-ops are like ants, for every one you see… there’s a hundred you don’t. A single sighting means there’s a whole colony nearby.
All of the national media and pundits resolutely ignored the very large elephant in the very small room – NK have existed since 2015. Before the 2016 Presidential election. The NYT warns these tactics could make the 2020 election ugly – but they don’t relate it back to the 2016 election at all.
This is not about Russia “corrupting our practices” or us “employing Russian methods”, this is evidence that there NEVER WAS any “Russian interference”, that “Russia’s methods” are actually our methods. Evidence that “Russiagate” is a Deep State psy-op designed to discredit and control Donald Trump’s administration.
Rather predictably, none of the media articles takes this angle.
And, unlike the Integrity Initiative, New Knowledge’s website is very much alive and well. Outside of political corruption, there’s also levels of financial corruption. New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan is also one of the builders of Hamilton 68 – a program which claims to track Russian “bot” activity. On the one hand, he works for a think-tank which fakes bot activity, on the other, he charges people for a product he claims tracks bot activity. There is, of course, a massive opportunity for fraud and corruption there.
But, far from being rebuked, sanctioned, or punished in any way – New Knowledge seems to be functioning just as before.
In fact, NBC News already ran a story claiming progressive Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being backed by the Russian “propaganda machine”
They cite New Knowledge as an expert witness.
Conclusion
In summary, a shadowy think-tank staffed entirely by State Department and intelligence veterans is using funding from unknown sources and volunteers of unknown identity to pretend to be Russians on social media in order to discredit politicians and political movements in the United States. This should be a Congressional hearing. But instead, it’s a back-page “oh, did you know” story.
The following are important questions that need answering:
- How is the New Knowledge group funded?
- Are they paid by the government or military?
- Who are these “thousands of volunteers”?
- Are they the US equivalent of the UK’s 77th Brigade?
- What other elections were targetted by New Knowledge (or similar) operations?
Just like the Integrity Initiative, New Knowledge works by concealing its true nature and intentions. It is layer after layer of deception and darkness. It can be beaten, the same way II was beaten – by bringing it out into the open and exposing lies to the light of truth.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Regime Change In Venezuela: Army Defectors, Russian Mercenaries And Disappearing Gold
South Front | January 31, 2019
Over the past few days, the intensity of anti-government protests in Venezuela has declined despite attempts of the US-led bloc to warm them up through both public and clandestine measures. However, the conflict continues to develop amid the acute standoff in the media sphere between the Maduro government and its opponents backed by the US-led bloc.
On January 29, CNN released an interview with two “Venezuelan army defectors” who appealed to US President Donald Trump to arm them to defend “freedom” in Venezuela. They claimed to be in contact with hundreds of willing defectors via WhatsApp groups and called on Venezuelan soldiers to revolt against the government of President Nicolas Maduro.
“As Venezuelan soldiers, we are making a request to the US to support us, in logistical terms, with communication, with weapons, so we can realize Venezuelan freedom,” one of the alleged defectors, Guillen Martinez, told CNN. Another one, Hidalgo Azuaje, added: “We’re not saying that we need only US support, but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru, all brother countries, that are against this dictatorship.”
During the entire clip, these persons were presented in a manner alleging that they had just recently defected and are now calling on others to follow their step. However, therein lies the problem. The badges on their uniform say FAN – Fuerza Armada Nacionales. This is an outdated pattern, which has been dropped. Now, Venezuela’s service members have a different badge – FANB, which means Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana. So, either the “Venezuelan army defectors” somehow lost the letter B from their uniform, or the entire interview is a staged show involving former Venezuelan service members, who have been living for a long time outside the country, or in the worst case – actors.
The interview came amid increasing US political, media and sanction pressure on the Maduro government. White House National Security Adviser John Bolton was even spotted with a mysterious note about the deployment of 5,000 US troops to Colombia, the US ally which borders Venezuela. In this situation, a large-scale military uprising or at least formation of some opposition within the army would become a useful tool in a wider effort to overthrow the country’s government. On the other hand, the use of such CNN-styled content shows that so far the US and its proxies have achieved little success in buying the support of Venezuelan service members.
On January 29, Venezuelan lawmaker Jose Guerra claimed via Twitter that a Boeing 777 of Russia’s Nordwind Airlines landed in Caracas on January 28 to spirit away 20 tons of gold bars, worth some $840 million, from the country’s central bank. When asked how he knew this, Guerra provided no evidence. By January 30, these items of breaking news had rocked the headlines of most of the mainstream media.
Another version, which was also quite popular among pro-opposition media, is that the plane, which reportedly made the trip directly from Moscow, moved in a group of Russian private military contractors to support the Maduro government. This version is fueled by reports claiming up to 400 Kremlin-linked private military contractors may have arrived in Venezuela.
The developing crisis is also accompanied by the growth of citizen journalism. Bellingcat members already created a Twitter page named “In Venezuela”, which provides field news about the crisis from Toronto, Canada. It’s easy to expect some “open source intelligence investigations” revealing crimes of the Maduro government against peaceful protesters very soon if the conflict escalates further.
Roughly speaking, the mainstream media presents the audience with the following story: The Maduro government is about to fall and is already moving the country’s gold reserves somewhere via Russian planes. At the same time, Vladimir Putin sent his mercenaries to rescue Maduro and to keep the corrupt regime in power in order to secure Russia’s economic and political interests. This, as well as the oppressive nature of the regime, are the only reason why the forces of good have not yet achieved victory.
Fortunately, there is the shining knight of democracy, Juan Guaido, who was democratically appointed as the Interim President of Venezuela from Washington. He, his Free Venezuelan Army consisting of hundreds of WhatsApp defectors and a group of unbiased US/NATO-funded citizen journalists and investigators are ready to stand against the Maduro-Putin alliance and to defend freedom and democracy in Venezuela… with a bit of help from the Trump administration for sure.
There are no doubts that modern Venezuela is allied with Russia and Moscow will employ its existing influence to resolve the crisis and thus defend its investments and oil assets. Furthermore, Maduro and his supporters showed that they are not going to give in to the US-led pressure. At the same time, The level of MSM hysteria, including an open disinformation campaign against the Maduro government and attempts to demonize it through various means, including its ties with Moscow, show that the Washington establishment is serious in its regime change efforts and may even be ready to instigate a Syria-style “proxy war” in the country in order to achieve own goals.
Fake News: ‘Hundreds Killed In Clashes Between Pro-Iranian, Pro-Russian Forces’
Syrian War Report – January 29, 2019
A fake-news story about large-scale clashes between pro-Russian and pro-Iranian factions in Syria is making jitters in English- and Russian-language mainstream media outlets. According to these reports citing anonymous sources and each other, “the pro-Russian Tiger Forces and 5th Assault Corps” clashed with “the pro-Iranian 4th Division” near the villages of “Shahta, Bredidg, Innab and Haydariye” in northern Hama.
Most of the reports claimed that there were casualties among the sides providing “precise” numbers varying from a dozen to 200 fighters from the both sides. No source was able to provide details into how clashes had started but the versions are varying from “some differences” to “a campaign to limit Iranian influence”.
Most of the media outlets presented these reports as some kind of breaking news. However, in fact, this is a week-old story. First such reports appeared in several pro-militant social media accounts and a local media outlet, al Modon Online. Later this rumor was reposted by anti-Assad, anti-Iranian and anti-Russian bloggers also citing anonymous sources to show the story look more reliable. By January 29, this rumor has reached large mainstream media outlets, but no evidence has appeared to confirm this kind of developments. However, the lack of factual data was ignored because this story is contributing to the US-Israeli-backed media efforts designed to undermine cooperation between Iran and Russia or at least to show that there are significant tensions between the sides.
The similar situation was observed in 2018 when various mainstream media outlets and even top US leadership like President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo were claiming that “hundreds” of “Russian fighters” were killed by the US-led coalition in the province of Deir Ezzor. Both of these stories demonstrate how media forgery could reach the wide international audience and start being repeated as facts despite zero evidence supporting them.
On January 27, Russian forces launched at least three surface-to-air missiles at unidentified aerial objects near the Hmeimim airbase. According to local sources, at least 3 UAVs apparently launched from the Idlib de-escalation zone were intercepted.
The Syrian Arab Army deployed reinforcements at frontlines near the Idlib de-escalation zone and carried out a series of artillery strikes on militant positions in northwestern Hama and southern Idlib on January 28 and 29.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces continue to claim dozens of casualties among ISIS members in the Euphrates Valley. However, a few remaining ISIS positions remaining there are still not captured.
NewsGuard: A Neoconservative Contrivance Which Promotes an Establishment View
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | January 28, 2019
There’s a new thought policeman in town. He calls himself NewsGuard and he promises to restore “Trust and Accountability” to what one reads online. His website elaborates that “NewsGuard uses journalism to fight false news, misinformation, and disinformation. Our trained analysts, who are experienced journalists, research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism—and which are not… Our Green-Red ratings signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
One might well stop reading immediately after running into “our trained analysts” with all that implies, but that would deny the greater pleasure derived from considering news-sites that have “… a hidden agenda or knowingly [publish] falsehoods or propaganda.” Excuse me, but hidden agendas, lies and propaganda are what the mainstream media is all about, note particularly the recent feeding frenzy over the Covington school incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Catholic racist white boys vs. elderly Native American war hero was how the story was framed all over the mainstream media before it became clear that the entire chosen narrative was upside down. Only a couple of news outlets bothered to apologize when the truth became known.
NewsGuard claims to have a staff of 50 that evaluates 2,000 websites in something like real time. How exactly it does that is not clear, but The New York Times repeats company claims that “the sites it rates account for 96% of online news and information engagement in the U.S.” NewsGuard also told The Times that it intends to quadruple its vetting of sites and seeks to make its coverage “ubiquitous.”
Make no mistake, NewsGuard is a neoconservative contrivance which promotes an establishment view of what is true and what is false. Its co-founder Gordon Crovitz is an ex-editor of The Wall Street Journal, who has enthused over the project, saying that it is “a milestone in the fight to bring consumers the information they need to counter false information, misinformation and disinformation online.” Crovitz has also been associated with the leading neocon foundation The American Enterprise Institute while the NewsGuard advisory board includes Tom Ridge, who was head of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, and Michael Hayden, who directed both the CIA and NSA. It is as government-establishment in orientation as it is possible to be.
In a sense seeking to establish “accuracy” in news reporting is nothing new as the social media, to include Facebook and Twitter, have had that objective for some time, but NewsGuard defines itself as having as its target the screening of the entire media in a politically impartial fashion, as “an information resource.” And the real danger is that it will soon be appearing on your computer or phone whether you want it there or not. It is already installed on local library computers in Hawaii and Ohio and is working with university and even high school libraries to include its software on all public computers. Worse still, NewsGuard is in partnership with Microsoft as part of the latter’s Defending Democracy Program. Microsoft currently has NewsGuard on its Edge browser and it intends to install the tool on its Microsoft 10 operating system as a built-in feature. Microsoft 10 is the standard operating system on nearly all computers sold in the United States.
When you go to a news site NewsGuard has a little shield that pops up in the corner of your screen that will tell you whether that site is a reliable source or not. A green tag displays for approved and red for not compliant. Similarly, if you do a search the responses that come up will feature a green or red shield as part of the results. The site for NBC news shows green, approved, with the heading “this website generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” It then uses what it calls a “nutrition label” to break down the nine specific areas that were assessed, each of which also receives and individual green check for NBC. Under “Credibility” appears “Does not repeatedly publish false content; Gathers and presents information responsibly; Regularly corrects or clarifies errors; Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly; and Avoids deceptive headlines.” Under “Accountability” appears “Website discloses ownership and financing; Clearly labels advertising; Reveals who’s in charge including any possible conflict of interest; and The site provides names of any content creators along with either contact or biographical information.”
The first thing one might observe about the system is that it is designed to favor large, well-funded establishment news sources that are staffed to go through the motions of fact checks and corrections. All of the major news networks are approved, including Fox, MSNBC and CNN, all of which editorialize heavily, almost constantly, in their news coverage. Voice of America, which is a U.S. government propaganda instrument by design, also is approved. NewsGuard also has approved all major newspapers to include The New York Times, which frequently gets the story wrong, and The Washington Post, where news stories are nearly indistinguishable from editorials through the use of evocative headlines and slanted narrative. All the U.S. media currently lead off, for example, with stories about Russia that include the assertion that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election, a claim that has yet to be confirmed through actual evidence.
Russian media operating in the U.S. including RT America and Sputnik get red ratings with a warning “Proceed with caution: this website fails to basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” RT is apparently guilty of “repeatedly publishing false content,” “not gather[ing] and publish[ing] information responsibly,” “not handl[ing] the difference between news and opinion responsibly” and “not provid[ing] the names of creators.” Al-Jazeera, another news service that often criticizes the United States and its governmental policies also is rated red, suggesting that the true criterion for rejection by NewsGuard is one’s relationship to the official establishment and globalist/interventionist line being promoted by the United States.
A glaring example of NewsGuard’s political bias relates to BuzzFeed, which is an approved site. The Washington Post reported recently how a BuzzFeed story about Michael Cohen and President Trump claimed that the president had directed his lawyer to lie to Congress regarding a proposed office tower project in Moscow, which would have been both a crime and impeachable. A day later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office intervened and described the story as untrue. The New York Times ran the first story on page one but the retraction that followed appeared on page 11.
And it was not the first major bit of fake news for BuzzFeed. The same two journalists had previously reported that Russia had financed the 2016 election.
CNN, another NewsGuard green authority, inevitably bemoaned possible consequences arising from the Cohen-Trump story by complaining that it would be used to justify “bad stereotypes about the news media,” had its own Russiagate misstep when it falsely claimed that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks’ DNC emails before their 2016 publication.
The BBC, yet another reliable source approved by NewsGuard, reported back in September that the U.S. government had evidence that the Syrian “regime” was continuing to develop chemical weapons. It added an assessment from the completely befuddled U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey that “President Assad had ‘no future as a ruler’ in Syria… Right now [the Syrian government] is a cadaver sitting in rubble with just half the territory of Syria under regime control on a good day.”
The fact is that Jeffrey was completely wrong about developments in Syria, where the government had been extremely successful in re-asserting control over nearly all of the country, while the claims of chemical weapons use have been rebutted many times, including by actual witnesses and journalists on the ground during the alleged attack at Douma in April.
Reuters news agency, yet another NewsGuard green light, is also into the game. In November 2013 it published an article, part of a series, entitled “Khamenei controls massive financial empire based on property seizures,” which claimed that an Iranian government charitable foundation called Setad (also known as EIKO) actually exists to take control of property for the use of the government’s religious leadership.
A subsequent news report that appeared in January in the alternative media revealed that the investigative journalists who wrote the story did so from Dubai, London and New York and never visited the properties they identified, in most cases completely misrepresenting what could be seen on the ground.
Robert Fontina at Counterpunch has also rejected the depiction of Setad as anything but a charitable foundation. The truth is that Setad engages in major social projects, including rural poverty alleviation, empowering women, home and school building, and provision of healthcare. Fontina observes that American sanctions against it and similar entities hit ordinary Iranians’ lives by producing food insecurity while also restricting the supplies of needed medications. Ahmad Noroozi of the Barakat Foundation claims that numerous Iranians have already been affected by U.S.-initiated sanctions directed against his country, restricting access to cancer treatments and other pharmaceuticals.
So who gets the endorsement from NewsGuard? Those who toe the line on U.S. policy and the establishment globalist/interventionist agenda. It would be interesting to know what NewsGuard’s staff of analysts is really looking for when it researches a site or media outlet. As the examples cited above demonstrate, NewsGuard has nothing to do with taking pains to report the news accurately, nor is there any evidence of real accountability. It is all about who pays the bills and who is in charge. They give the orders and one either falls in line or goes out the door. That is the reality of today’s mainstream media.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain.
Russian Ambassador Says Reports on Alleged Russian Mercenaries in Venezuela Hoax
Sputnik – 26.01.2019
Russian Ambassador in Caracas Vladimir Zaemsky slammed on Friday in a conversation with Sputnik media reports about alleged presence of “private military contractors” from Russia in Venezuela as “another hoax.
“I don’t know about the presence of any Russian private military companies in Venezuela. This is another hoax,” Zaemskiy said.
Earlier in the day, Reuters news agency reported, citing anonymous sources, that “private military contractors who do secret missions for Russia” had recently arrived in Venezuela, which is currently going through a political crisis, to boost safety of the country’s incumbent president, Nicolas Maduro.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters that Kremlin had “no such information.”
On Tuesday, the opposition-run Venezuelan National Assembly adopted a statement declaring President Nicolas Maduro a “dictator.” On Wednesday, opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself the country’s interim president at a mass rally in Caracas. The United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile and Colombia, among others, have recognized Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president, while some other countries, including Russia and Mexico, expressed support for incumbent President Maduro.
No need to install: Microsoft has controversial fake news filter NewsGuard built into mobile browser
© http://www.microsoft.com
By Igor Ogorodnev | RT | January 23, 2019
Corporate and neocon-backed startup NewsGuard is one step closer to its vision of bringing its “unreliable” news rater to every screen after Microsoft makes it an integral part of its Edge mobile browser.
Rather than having to download an app as before, Edge users on Android and Apple devices can now just click one button to enable its “green-red rating signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
Among the green-rated websites: Voice of America, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as left-leaning upstarts such as Vice News and Refinery 29. Ones that are given the red warning label of “failing to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability”: RT and Sputnik (obviously enough) and the right-wing Daily Mail, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, in addition to hundreds of other non-mainstream news websites such as Wikileaks.
Not only does the integration ensure that NewsGuard is present on every browser, and is easier to use than to ignore, but by making it a fundamental Microsoft-provided feature, the company gives it inherent level of trustworthiness, something akin to a bundled anti-virus feature, only this time the virus targets your brain, not your computer or iPod.
‘Totally transparent’
None of this is the slightest bit alarming if you believe that NewsGuard is an absolutely fair arbiter of what constitutes real news or propaganda.
Its pride of place is its “Nutrition Labels” which ape the precision of a list of calories, carbs, and saturated fats to give a supposedly scientific assessment of media reliability on nine different criteria. Among them: doesn’t repeatedly publish false content, avoids deceptive headlines, gathers and presents information responsibly, handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.
© Newsguardtech.com/Media sample
The green-listed media outlets above apparently do not ever engage in these practices, or at least not knowingly. So CNN never misleads with its headlines, the Guardian never dresses up its agendas as news, and Buzzfeed stories are always accurate. One literally doesn’t have to go back three days to find dozens of examples to the contrary, but this would be too mind-numbingly pedantic a task.
Even regular readers of the green-tick media must be able to see these are judgment calls. What is even “presenting information responsibly”?
Perhaps realizing that their pseudo-scientific fancy diagram is insufficient, NewsGuard has stressed that they are not using shadowy methods like tech companies and are open to two-way communication.
“We want people to game our system. We are totally transparent. We are not an algorithm,” company co-founder Steve Brill told the Guardian.
This is how he explained the Daily Mail red warning.
“We spell out fairly clearly in the label exactly how many times we have attempted to contact them. The analyst that wrote this writeup got someone on the phone who, as soon he heard who she was and where she was calling from, hung up. As of now, we would love to hear if they have a complaint or if they change anything.”
On the other hand, RT did answer NewsGuard’s queries in detail. You can guess how much difference that made.
From anthrax scares to Russia fears
But who are these people that the Daily Mail or RT have to impress and why?
Brill himself is a veteran centrist journalist and author, his co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a former Wall Street Journal columnist. After Brill, its second-biggest investor, along with his father, is Nick Penniman, the liberal publisher, and the third-biggest is Publicis Group, a multinational advertising agency.
Meanwhile, its advisory board includes Tom Ridge, the first-ever Homeland Security chief, and developer of another famous color-coded system, the terror alert, and Michael Hayden, the CIA director, also under George W. Bush. There are also several Obama and Clinton-era figures.
Tom Ridge and George W. Bush in 2004. © Reuters
The overall picture emerges of a mix of establishment journalists, hawkish old-school Washington insiders, and so-called ethical businessmen.
They may all be experts in their fields, but if you believe that these are selfless neutral adjudicators you are probably beyond being helped by color charts. And this is not some one-off initiative either: NewsGuard is part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program, which combats purported election meddling, presumably primarily from Russia. The frontline of the information war is not customarily the place for impartial news judgment.
But I wasn’t an Edge user…
However much respectability NewsGuard enjoys through Microsoft, Edge has a laughably small – a fraction of a percent – market share on mobiles. In practical terms, even an increase of popularity of several thousand percent will only mean several thousand new users, and other browsers are available.
This would be that, if not for NewsGuard’s self-proclaimed ambition “to expand to serve the billions of people globally who get news online.” This is just a beginning: there is an overarching plan where all public computers, from the school to the university to the library, are automatically equipped with the same “safe browsing” system.
And rather than as an individual warning, NewsGuard plans to make its designations work as an effective financial tool. The company, which has received $6 million in backing, also plans to soon work with advertisers, “keeping ads off unreliable news websites” to ensure “brand safety.” Fall foul of the green ticks, no money for you. Advertising managers are already demonetizing programs with alternative or controversial viewpoints elsewhere, and soon the process can be automated, and Brill is boasting that he is “happy to be blamed” – doing the dirty work for the platforms. No wonder alternative outlets in the US are openly opposed.
So, just like the use of NewsGuard in all public libraries in the faraway state of Hawaii (no money charged), it is best to look at the Edge integration is more of a test, a pilot project, a dry run. Latching NewsGuard onto a popular browser like Chrome, or a social network like Facebook, would stir tremors of public debate, as it has done in the past when similar initiatives have been tried. Instead, first they came for the Edge users.
Integrity Initiative wipes website pending probe into ‘theft’ of disturbing leaked data
RT | January 22, 2019
The British state-funded Integrity Initiative, exposed last year for conducting Europe-wide political influence campaigns in leaked files, has removed all of its website content “pending an investigation” into the data “theft.”
A group claiming association with the loose hacktivist collective Anonymous has been dumping private Integrity Initiative documents online in various batches since November. The leaks revealed that the Scotland-based, government-funded organization, which bills itself as a non-partisan disinformation-busting charity, was actually using “clusters” of journalists, politicians, and academics to carry out secret anti-Russia campaigns, interfere in domestic politics across Europe and smear anyone who questioned its narratives.
In a surprise move on Monday, the Integrity Initiative abruptly announced on Twitter that it had “temporarily removed” all content from its site “pending an investigation into the theft of data” from the Institute of Statecraft, the II’s London-based parent operation.
In a statement posted on its now mostly bare website, the II claimed the leaks were “part of a campaign to undermine the work” of the Initiative which it said involved “researching, publicising and countering the threat” Europe faces in the in the form of “disinformation” and “hybrid warfare” – ironically, exactly what the shady organization itself was accused of engaging in with its hefty government paycheck.
It remains an open question if, in an effort to save face, the group would accuse Russia of being behind the leaks and even of doctoring the documents. While the statement admitted that some of the leaks were “genuine,” it claimed others were “falsified” – but did not provide any evidence to back up that claim. It is, however, apparent that Russia has been the Initiative’s main target during the course of its questionable work.
The website will be “relaunched shortly” and “analysis” of the hack and its “significance” will be published soon, the statement said. It doesn’t look as though many will be awaiting that analysis with bated breath, however.
Perhaps discouraging for the Integrity Initiative, few seemed upset to see their content disappear. Most responses to the announcement tweet are of the trolling variety, accusing the organization of simply being caught in the act and trying to clean house.
After the II leaks, Scottish newspaper the Daily Record wrote that the revelations – including that the government-funded organization had also conducted a domestic smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn – was “one of the biggest political scandals of the year.”
The scandal received scant coverage by mainstream British media, however. Labour MP Chris Williamson told RT earlier this month that the lack of interest could have something to do with the fact that high profile journalists themselves were seemingly involved in the shady operation.
BuzzFeed’s Cohen Lies Just Latest Example of Embarrassing ‘RussiaGate’ Hysteria
By Kit Klarenberg | Sputnik | January 21, 2019
In a bombshell report, on 17 January BuzzFeed claimed Donald Trump had told his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the specifics of the ‘Trump Tower Moscow’ project — a felony, and indeed an impeachable one.
Other news outlets the world over eagerly regurgitated the story, and Democratic lawmakers on social media and indeed on the floor of the US legislature advocated kickstarting impeachment proceedings.
However, in an unprecedented move, the very next day special counsel Robert Mueller broke with his 20-month-long convention of not commenting on news reports relating to his investigation by announcing the story wasn’t true. Moreover, he was critical of BuzzFeed’s failure to contact his representatives and ask for verification on the story before publication.
History of Fabulism
Not long after Mueller’s denial, more critical voices began scrutinizing the report. Many noted Jason Leopold — one of the reporters on the story — had previously been involved in another epic ‘fake news’ fiasco at BuzzFeed relating to Russia. In November 2017, he authored a story which claimed the FBI was investigating records indicating in August 2016 the Russian Foreign Ministry sent US$30,000 to its embassy in Washington for “election financing”.
A shock story evidently written for maximum ‘clickbait’ value, Leopold — almost certainly consciously — opted to bury the fact the payments related to Russia’s own elections in September 2016, in which expatriate Russians were permitted to vote in their adopted home countries. As of January 2019, the article hasn’t been removed from web, although a qualifier has been added to its introductory paragraph.
Jason Leopold
Others expressed shock Leopold was still employed by any media outlet at all, for as Colombia Journalism Review documented back in 2006, his lengthy career has been typified by controversy, ignominy and dishonesty.
For instance, in August 2002 Leopold wrote an article for Salon claiming then-Secretary of the Army and former Enron vice chair Thomas White knew more about the company’s infamously questionable accounting practices than he’d admitted up to that time. The key piece of evidence for the allegation was an internal Enron email that was apparently leaked to Leopold by an anonymous source — but after he was unable to produce a copy when asked by his editor, and it was revealed he’d plagiarised portions of the piece from the Financial Times, it was pulled from the website.
In a perversely ironic twist, in 2005 Leopold’s memoir (Off the Record), in which he pledged to come clean about all the “lying, cheating and backstabbing” he’d engaged in over the course of his journalistic career and set the ‘record’ straight on his various ignominious departures from media organisations (including the Los Angeles Times and Dow Jones ), was dumped by planned publisher Rowman & Littlefield just before it went to press after one of the book’s sources threatened to sue.
Leopold had claimed the source in question, Steven Maviglio — spokesperson for then-California Governor Gray Davis — had told him he “might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information”, which was apparently totally untrue.
The next year, Leopold again landed in hot water when he published a story for Truthout claiming Karl Rove “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” he was due to be indicted in the Valerie Plame scandal. In the piece, he said multiple anonymous sources had confirmed Rove’s indictment “was imminent” — mere days later prosecutors confirmed Rove would not face charges. Despite this, Truthout chief Marc Ash stood by the story despite a lack of corroboration elsewhere and furious denials from all named in the story for some time.
Standing By
Intriguingly, there were shades of Ash’s response in BuzzFeed’s reaction to Mueller’s denials — namely, the outlet stood by the story, not only refusing to retract it, but “reconfirming” it — and editor-in-chief Ben Smith vehemently defended his decision to publish in a much-ridiculed interview on CNN, claiming the reporting would be “borne out” by future disclosures.
Other outlets have chosen to retract and/or correct their reporting on the story — although, journalist Doug Henwood has noted while New York Times covered the report on the front page of its print edition, its correction was buried on page 11 the next day.
Despite BuzzFeed’s defence of the story, it’s likely to go down as yet another utterly embarrassing mainstream media ‘RussiaGate’ failure in a very long line — stories which have briefly generated borderline-hysteria on social media and cable news, but been proven to be utterly without foundation in short order. Here are some of the most notorious.
Manafort Meeting Never Was
On 27 November 2018, The Guardian published a seismic exclusive report authored by Luke Harding that claimed Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and now-convicted felon, met with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on three separate occasions.
The story stretched believability to breaking point — Manafort somehow managed to enter and exit the Embassy without being photographed, filmed or even noticed, and left no record of his presence in the building’s visitor log — and was based entirely on anonymous sources.
WikiLeaks immediately issued a vehement denial, declaring the story to be completely “fabricated” and noting the paper had given them virtually no time to respond prior to publication. Within hours, the organisation had set up a legal fund seeking donations in order to sue The Guardian for libel, and were calling for the resignation of Editor Katherine Viner. The paper responded by softening the report’s wording significantly, making clear it was based entirely on unverifiable allegations from anonymous sources, rather than anything even approaching actual evidence.
In less than a day, what Harding and Viner had evidently hoped would be the journalistic scoop of the year was shaping up to be the biggest disaster in news reporting since Germany’s Stern magazine published ‘The Hitler Diaries’ in 1983, a disaster that could severely — and enduringly — damage the reputation of The Guardian and land the paper in significant legal hot water. Despite this, the story was uncritically regurgitated by news outlets the world over. As of January 21, neither Harding nor Viner has retracted or apologized for the piece.
Dates Mixed Up
On 9 December 2017, CNN claimed Donald Trump Jr. was offered advanced access to the notorious DNC and Podesta email troves by WikiLeaks — a smoking gun proving the Trump campaign had colluded with WikiLeaks to undermine Hillary Clinton. The story was then backed up by MSNBC, with intelligence and national security reporter Ken Dilanian breathlessly claiming to have “independent confirmation” of the story.
It would be mere hours before the incendiary story would be completely shredded by reality. In truth, Trump Jr. had been apprised of the email dumps’ existence by a member of the public 10 days after their release. The assorted anonymous sources who’d confirmed the story to both networks had evidently all got their dates mixed up, or indeed were lying — or didn’t even exist perhaps, as both networks’ refusal to name their sources may imply.
The pair’s determination to cover up their colossal journalistic failure doesn’t end there — both have deleted every trace of the story from their official websites and YouTube channels, and attempts by individual users to upload their own copies invariably result in copyright claims and deletion.
Just Ain’t Crickets
In another major disaster for MSNBC — and its star reporter Dilanian — in September 2018, the network repeatedly claimed Russia was the primary suspect in “mysterious” attacks giving US diplomatic staff in Cuba “brain injuries”.
“Sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon were likely used on the government workers… [they are] so sophisticated the Americans don’t even fully understand it,” Dilanian said.
Subsequent reports claimed CIA intercepts of Russian communications backed up the conclusion the Kremlin was directing the dastardly brain damaging blasts. Such was the ferocity of the reporting — and the seriousness of the allegations — Republican Senator Cory Gardner appeared on the network to say Russia should now be classified a “terror state”.
MSNBC carried on with their microwave weapon crusade despite academics casting significant doubt on their analysis — it would not be until January 2019 the story would be totally debunked, when two scientists — Alexander Stubbs of Berkeley and Fernando Montealegre-Z of the UK’s University of Lincoln — published a study based on recordings of the sounds embassy personnel complained of hearing, and blamed for their “brain damage”, revealing the ‘microwave weapons’ to in fact be…Caribbean crickets during mating season.
READ MORE:
‘Not Accurate’: Mueller Refutes BuzzFeed Cohen Scoop
Cuban Horror Stories: How US Scares Investors Off From the Island — Pundits
US Questioning Ecuadorian Embassy Staff Over Debunked Assange-Manafort Story
As Guardian’s Manafort-Assange Story Exposed as Fake, Ex-CIA Agent Blames Russia
‘Fake news’ is okay if it’s about #RussiaGate: Top 7 fake ‘collusion’ stories the media pushed
RT | January 21, 2019
BuzzFeed’s ‘bombshell’ claim last week that Donald Trump told ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to congress is just the latest in a long line of ‘Russiagate’ stories that have later turned out to be false.
But BuzzFeed’s rubbished article is part of a phenomenon of what could be termed ‘acceptable fake news’ — fake news that gets a pass from the media because it serves a certain narrative. In this case, it furthers the ‘Russiagate’ narrative, which the mainstream media has been pushing breathlessly for two years. Lacking hard proof that Trump ‘colluded’ with Russia to win the 2016 election, they have clung to any shred of fake evidence they can find.
Last week, one astute Twitter user compiled a list of a whopping 42 Russiagate stories which were billed as bombshells but which ended up needing to be retracted or corrected. Here are seven of the most scandalous instances.
1. MSNBC pushed line that WikiLeaks released ‘fake’ Clinton emails
When WikiLeaks published the emails belonging to Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta in 2016, MSNBC sought to actively encourage its viewers to believe the emails were doctored by Russia.
They based that spurious claim on the fact that a fake transcript of a Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs was drifting around Twitter. The fake transcript had not been published by WikiLeaks, however. Rather, it was the creation of a pro-Clinton troll who had intended to trick Trump supporters into believing it was real so he could later embarrass them for their gullibility. MSNBC reporters who used the fake Twitter transcript to tarnish WikiLeaks’ authentic documents never corrected their false claims.
2. WaPo claims Russia ‘hacked’ the Vermont power grid
In one of the most infamous cases of a botched Russia-related story, the Washington Post claimed that Russia had hacked the Vermont power grid. In its zeal to deliver bombshell proof that Russia was attempting to attack the US, the Post reporters didn’t even bother to contact the utility company which could have told them that there had been no hacking or penetration of the power grid at all. The Post admitted later in an editor’s note that the story was fake.
3. CNN fires three journalists over botched story
It’s not often journalists who publish fake Russia-related ‘bombshells’ face real consequences, but last June, three CNN journalists, including the executive editor of a shiny new ‘investigative’ branch had to resign following the retraction of a false story which claimed Congress was investigating a Russian investment fund “with ties” to Trump’s team. The story quoted a single anonymous source and CNN later admitted that its reporters failed to follow “some standard editorial procedures” before publishing it.
4. Oops? CNN gets date on email wrong, causes mass panic
In a rush to prove that the Trump campaign had advance knowledge of and access to hacked DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, CNN (again) got the date of an email wrong. CNN claimed “multiple” sources had told them the email about the documents had been sent to the Trump campaign on September 4, but in reality, it had been sent on September 14 — a day after the WikiLeaks documents were made public — not, as CNN had claimed, nine days before.
5. ABC’s dud on Michael Flynn and ‘contact’ with Russians
Veteran ABC journalist Brian Ross was suspended after reporting last December that Trump had ordered former adviser Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials during the presidential campaign. It turned out, Trump had made this request of Flynn after he had won the election — not an unusual request for someone about to become the president of the US. Ross left ABC for good a while later after a career littered with embarrassing reporting blunders.
6. Russian supersonic tech or…crickets?
MSNBC reported last year that Russia was likely responsible for a supersonic attack on US diplomats stationed in the Cuba embassy. One ‘expert’ appeared on the channel stating that possible Russian “sophisticated microwaves” targeted the diplomats, while a reporter claimed Russian guilt had been “backed up” by interceptions of Russian communications. Meanwhile, intelligence sources told the New Yorker that no such evidence existed. When the Associated Press later released an audio recording, two US scientists deciphered that the sounds the diplomats had heard were more than likely the sounds of a species of Caribbean crickets during mating season.
7. Guardian claims Manafort had ‘secret meetings’ with Assange
WikiLeaks raised more than $55,000 in donations to sue the Guardian after the British newspaper published a story alleging (without corroborated evidence) that Julian Assange had held secret meetings with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Assange has been living since 2012. The story which WikiLeaks claims is completely false — and which has also been questioned by other journalists — was written by Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter who has been accused before of fabricating stories and who went AWOL after the report was received with serious skepticism.
Unfortunately, the regularity with which these Russiagate stories have turned out to fake still hasn’t raised any red flags with establishment journalists, who seem more eager to bolster a narrative than to uncover actual facts.
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Are the Jews indigenous to Palestine?
By David Miller | Al Mayadeen | August 3, 2022
There is a rising tide of claims from apologists for the crimes of Zionism that they have been misunderstood. Palestinians might be indigenous to Palestine, but the Jews definitely are. What is called the ‘Israel-Palestine’ conflict, they say, is competition over the same small piece of land by two rival groups of indigenous people. But are the Jews indigenous to the Levant? And what are the consequences of the argument?
In fact, most of the power structure of the Zionist state is dominated by Ashkenazi Jews who have no ancestral link to Palestine. Overall despite very significant financial and infrastructural contributions from Western European countries (especially the US, UK and France, for example via the Rothschild family), Eastern European Ashkenazim have been at the centre of the Zionist power structure since the early years of the 20th Century. … continue
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