WaPo article about "russian propaganda" is fake news. AND MORE FAKE NEWS
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Monday, April 27, 2026 21:27
VIEWED: 2771
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Example: so *now* you believe what WaPo is telling you? Or is it just that now it conforms to what you want to read? -IDIOT
When someone tells you something good about themselves, or shades the truth to make themselves look better, or at least not as bad, or hides facts of culpability .... that's expected.
But when an newspaper makes a very public confession of wrongdoing, such as NOT VETTING the facts of a news story, you should believe them, because they have no interest in making themselves look bad. Usually entities confess to something because they're trying to head off something even worse from happening.
YOUR logic isn't broken, dood, it's nonexistent. No wonder you have such a hard time parsing official fake news from the real deal.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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The Mainstream Media is Asking for a Government Bailout Via Censorship
Michael Krieger[
The current controversy is different. Many people in Washington are irate over Wikileaks — not because the email were untrue but because they proved what many had long suspected . . . that Washington is a highly corrupt place full of truly despicable people. For people who make their living on controlling media and information, it was akin to the barbarians breaching the walls of Rome. So the answer is to call for government regulation to combat what will be declared “fake” news or propaganda. It is only the latest effort to convince people to surrender their rights and actually embrace censorship. – From Jonathan Turley’s: Washington Post Issues Correction To “Fake News” Story
Watching Hillary Clinton attack “fake news” and calling for legislative action against free speech she doesn’t like got me thinking. Why is she doing this? Yes, it’s obviously related to her notorious personality trait of never taking responsibility for anything and attaching herself to an invented controversy in order to deflect blame for her monumentally embarrassing loss to Donald Trump. But there’s more going on here. A lot more.
To set the stage, we need to examine the types of people who are most jumping on the “fake news” meme. What you’ll find is that it’s a who’s who of the most contemptible and corrupt people in America. As Glenn Greenwald so accurately noted in his piece published earlier today:
Those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.
But the problem here goes way beyond mere hypocrisy. Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for “solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government or tech giants such as Facebook. But until there is a clear definition of “Fake News,” and until it’s recognized that Fake News is being aggressively spread by the very people most loudly complaining about it, the dangers posed by these solutions will be at least as great as the problem itself.
Just in case you think the above is an exaggeration, is there an individual in America more distrusted and more widely viewed as a compulsive liar than Hillary Clinton? The list of her outright lies is nearly endless (see: Video of the Day – Watch Hillary Clinton Lie for 13 Minutes Straight). Not only that, but Hillary Clinton was more than happy to promote obvious fake news stories one week before the election. Here’s the most egregious example:
Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016
This was fake news, but somehow I doubt Hillary will be looking for Congress to take her to task for legitimizing and spreading it.
Then there’s the downright comical example of Brian Williams. You know, the NBC anchor who literally lost his job for promoting fake news about himself (see: NBC’s Brian Williams is Forced to Admit His Tale of Being on a Downed Helicopter in Iraq Was Pure Fantasy). Now he is one of the “esteemed pundits” railing against the terror of fake news. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Hill reports:
MSNBC anchor Brian Williams, who lost his job with NBC’s nightly news for exaggerating details of his time reporting in Iraq, slammed President-elect Donald Trump and members of his transition team for spreading fake news throughout the election.
Pure comedy, but let’s get serious. At this point, I want to direct your attention to what is perhaps the most astute commentary on the fabricated “fake news” push to date. The following was the concluding paragraph to Jonathan Turley’s, Washington Post Issues Correction To “Fake News” Story:
The current controversy is different. Many people in Washington are irate over Wikileaks — not because the email were untrue but because they proved what many had long suspected . . . thaNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
A Clinton Fan Manufactured Fake News That MSNBC Personalities (Then) Spread to Discredit WikiLeaks Docs
Glenn Greenwald
2016-12-09T13:30:25+00:00
The phrase “Fake News” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.
One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).
Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.
Clinton camp chief strategist @benensonj: "I've seen things" in Wikileaks emails "that aren't authentic" #ThisWeek https://t.co/LPQJBfACqz
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 23, 2016
That the emails in the Wikileaks archive were doctored or faked – and thus should be disregarded – was classic Fake News, spread not by Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by established news outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by design, this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet, hungrily clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to believe it was true. As a result of this deliberate disinformation campaign, anyone reporting on the contents of the emails was instantly met with claims that the documents in the archive had been proven fake.
The most damaging such claim came from MSNBC’s intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance. As I documented on October 11, he tweeted what he – for some bizarre reason – labeled an “Official Warning.” It decreed: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.” That tweet was re-tweeted by more than 4,000 people. It was vested with added credibility by Clinton-supporting journalists like Reid and Frum (“expert to take seriously”).
All of that, in turn, led to an article in something called “The Daily News Bin” with the headline: “MSNBC intelligence expert: WikiLeaks is releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary Clinton.” This classic fake news product – citing Nance and Reid among others – was shared more than 40,000 times on Facebook alone.
Official Warning: #PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done. https://t.co/UuJZrurHAA
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) October 7, 2016
Joe, Malcolm Nance & other experts have validated these emails have been forged & altered by Russia before passing them off to Wikileaks! https://t.co/gZ7rVQ6JJp
— VLB (@BickiDoodle) October 27, 2016
The media (@ABC, @CBSNews, @NBCNews and @PBS) must heed Malcolm Nance: "You should have ZERO CONFIDENCE in the contents" of Wikileaks dumps!
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https://www.thenation.com/article/everyone-wants-to-stop-fake-news-but
-no-one-seems-to-know-what-exactly-it-is/
Everyone Wants to Stop ‘Fake News,’ but No One Seems to Know What Exactly It Is
Like “terrorism,” we are rushing to stop a politically loaded, abstract concept without bothering to define it.
By Adam H. Johnson
Like “terrorism” and “WMD” before it, “fake news,” through sheer repetition of the conceit, is now officially a thing. Something to be combated. Something we must all get behind and destroy. Since the election—and to an extent right before it—the scourge of fake news as a unique, distinct, and morally urgent threat to our democracy has been thrust upon the public. In this discussion the primary focus has been how, not if, we stop it. “Officials” are “worried” and “governments” are “looking into” curbing the “epidemic.” Hillary Clinton emerged Thursday for the first time since her concession speech to warn that “lives are at risk” over fake news and that the “danger” must be “addressed quickly.” Everyone’s on board: Fake news must be stopped.
In a subsequent interview, a researcher from PropOrNot advanced the bizarre theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin had Labor MP Jo Cox killed in some type of “Manchurian candidate” plot. When asked by The New Yorker’s Adrian Chen why they chose to remain anonymous, the PropOrNot spokesperson evoked Cox, insisting that “Russia uses crazy people to kill its enemies.”
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I expect the irony of a 'fake news' hysteric citing a fake news story was unintentional.
Those wanting to proceed with plans to curate and monitor information online—a long held impulse of all governments—are using the specter of “fake news” as a PR bludgeon to justify these broader efforts. On November 29, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius relayed that the US State Department was working on plans to protect “the truth,” including floating the idea of a “global ombudsman for information.” BuzzFeed reported that Congress, in the context of combating Russian fake news, will soon bring back the Cold War–era Active Measures Working Group, originally set up in concert with the CIA and the Defense Department to combat Soviet disinformation.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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http://www.alternet.org/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-
post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and
The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying
Digging deeper into the PropOrNot controversy.
By Mark Ames
Last month, the Washington Post gave a glowing front-page boost to an anonymous online blacklist of hundreds of American websites, from marginal conspiracy sites to flagship libertarian and progressive publications. As Max Blumenthal reported for AlterNet, the anonymous website argued that all of them should be investigated by the federal government and potentially prosecuted under the Espionage Act as Russian spies, for wittingly or unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda.
My own satirical newspaper was raided and closed down by the Kremlin in 2008, on charges of “extremism”—akin to terrorism—which I took seriously enough to leave for home for good. 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.
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.
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, le
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-29/martin-armstrong-exposes-real
-fake-news-did-bbc-get-caught-fabricating-news-start-wa
What follows is shocking evidence that crisis actors, green screens, CGI, and paid propagandists are being used to fake worldwide events in order to scare people into giving up liberties and sending us into war. To say this was shocking would be to put it lightly.
From video proof showing “dead soldiers” killed by “chemical weapons” walking around after they thought the videos stopped recording, to digitally altering sounds to add in “explosions” that never happened, this segment demonstrates some of the most damming evidence against the media ever shown on television.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/washington-post-blacklis
t-story-is-shameful-disgusting-w452543
The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting
The capital's paper of record crashes legacy media on an iceberg
By Matt Taibbi
Last week, a technology reporter for the Washington Post named Craig Timberg ran an incredible story. It has no analog that I can think of in modern times. Headlined "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say," the piece promotes the work of a shadowy group that smears some 200 alternative news outlets as either knowing or unwitting agents of a foreign power, including popular sites like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism.
The meat of the story relied on a report by unnamed analysts from a single mysterious "organization" called PropOrNot – we don't know if it's one person or, as it claims, over 30 – a "group" that seems to have been in existence for just a few months.
Forget that the Post offered no information about the "PropOrNot" group beyond that they were "a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds."
Forget also that the group offered zero concrete evidence of coordination with Russian intelligence agencies, even offering this remarkable disclaimer about its analytic methods:
"Please note that our criteria are behavioral. ... For purposes of this definition it does not matter ... whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide 'useful idiots' of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny."
What this apparently means is that if you published material that meets their definition of being "useful" to the Russian state, you could be put on the "list," and "warrant further scrutiny."
Forget even that in its Twitter responses to criticism of its report, PropOrNot sounded not like a group of sophisticated military analysts, but like one teenager:
"Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject - they're so vewwy angwy!!" it wrote on Saturday.
"Fascists. Straight up muthafuckin' fascists. That's what we're up against," it wrote last Tuesday, two days before Timberg's report.
Any halfway decent editor would have been scared to death by any of these factors. Moreover the vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.
But if that same source also demanded anonymity on the preposterous grounds that it feared being "targeted by Russia's legions of skilled hackers"? Any sane reporter would have booted them out the door. You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.
Yet the Post thought otherwise, and its report was uncritically picked up by other outlets like USA Today and the Daily Beast. The "Russians did it" story was greedily devoured by a growing segment of blue-state America that is beginning to fall victim to the same conspiracist tendencies that became epidemic on the political right in the last few years.
Most high school papers wouldn't touch sources like these. But in November 2016, both the president-elect of the United States and the Washington Post are equally at ease with this sort of sourcing.
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?
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Thanks KIKI for bringing this up. I assume that when I talk about staged videos others have seen staged videos as well, and understand that so-called "reliable sources" such as the BBC and CNN regularly spread "fake news" themselves.
Some of these little vignettes are entirely faked, others are real "false flag" attacks conducted entirely for propaganda purposes, and still others are small vignettes constructed within a larger reality, such as the "rebel" asking the camera crew "Do you want me to run from here to there, or from there to there?" followed by him running and shooting (at nothing) while the crew captures the visuals for the nightly news.
I don't know whether this belongs in the Syria thread or the fake news thread, but here is some fake news from Syria.
Staged pictures of child victims of Sarin gas attack. Dead children are re-located in different places to create the impression that many more are dead than actuality.
Further discussion of staging
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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There used to be a law - the Smith Mundt Act- which prevented the CIA (always a disseminator of propaganda abroad) from spreading propaganda within the borders of the United States. THAT LAW WAS REPEALED in 2013
Of course, with the mainstream media so willing to regurgitate fake news on its own, most recently ...
Hillary Clinton has a 90% chance of winning
Most Clinton-Trump polls
"But Putin ..."
... I'm not sure the government needs an independent Propaganda Department.
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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake
"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"
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Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Washington Post Appends "Russian Propaganda Fake News" Story, Admits It May Be Fake
In the latest example why the "mainstream media" is facing a historic crisis of confidence among its readership, facing unprecedented blowback following Craig Timberg November 24 Washington Post story "Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say", on Wednesday a lengthy editor's note appeared on top of the original article in which the editor not only distances the WaPo from the "experts" quoted in the original article whose "work" served as the basis for the entire article (and which became the most read WaPo story the day it was published) but also admits the Post could not "vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's finding regarding any individual media outlet" in effect admitting the entire story may have been - drumroll - "fake news" and conceding the Bezos-owned publication may have engaged in defamation by smearing numerous websites - Zero Hedge included - with patently false and unsubstantiated allegations.
It was the closest the Washington Post would come to formally retracting the story, which has now been thoroughly discredited not only by outside commentators, but by its own editor.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-07/washington-post-apends-russia
n-propaganda-story-admits-it-may-be-fake
Funny and sad, how comrades' signym and kiki always complain about mainstream media yet insist on quoteing sources like zerohedge.
T
Report On The Investigation Into
Russian Interference In The
2016 Presidential Election
https://www.justice.gov/d9/report.pdf
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