Tucker Carlson has confirmed he is in Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin - and he's doing it because 'Americans are not informed' about the war in Ukraine, he said on Tuesday.

The former Fox News host announced on X that he would be publishing an interview with the Russian despot, following widespread speculation after he was pictured leaving the Kremlin in Moscow on Monday.

Carlson, 54, said the interview would air 'unedited' on his website, without a paywall, and on X, making him the first American to interview Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

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As individuals, citizens, and human beings collectively living through this pandemic, we are grieving, frustrated, and, yes, outraged. By labeling the virus a “hoax” and “conspiracy,” the suit says, Fox News hurt efforts to contain it and to “forestall mass death.”įor some, a lawsuit accusing Fox News of broadcasting misinformation has genuine appeal. It alleges that the country’s most-watched cable news network “knowingly disseminated false, erroneous, and incomplete information” to the public about COVID-19. The suit contains claims for violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act and the tort of “outrage” (otherwise known as “intentional infliction of emotional distress”). On April 2, a nonprofit called the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics sued Fox News in Washington state court. Sherman said Fox News insiders are expressing concern that the network’s “early downplaying” of COVID-19 might open it up to “legal action by viewers who maybe were misled and actually have died from this.”ĭays later, the possibility of a lawsuit was realized. This is what Gabriel Sherman, author of a New York Times-bestselling book about the cable news giant, recently told MSNBC.

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adults, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.Fox News is nervous. 9-10, 2022, among a representative sample of 2,210 U.S. Representatives for CNN did not respond to a request to comment on this story, while Fox News did not make a representative available to comment. The improvement in credibility for both networks says there may be little that can fundamentally change the entrenched public attitudes toward them. While Cuomo’s favorability rating fell after his firing, the network itself saw its credibility rating increase, suggesting that viewers separate the news outlet from its personalities. ĭata also shows that CNN has weathered its recent public relations storms. Tucker Carlson was also recently criticized for his apparent downplaying of the Russian invasion. Uncorroborated comments such as those do not appear to have much of an effect on the network’s credibility among Republicans. Fox host Maria Bartiromo, for instance, falsely suggested last week that increased tensions between the two countries could be a “ruse” drummed up by President Joe Biden’s administration to distract from other issues. Questions regarding Fox News’ credibility will again be front and center throughout the network’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, Morning Consult’s latest data indicates that Republican viewers haven’t turned their backs on Fox News, and still consider the network to be by far the most credible U.S. Gollust resigned from her post last week after an investigation revealed she violated company policies.Īfter losing the 2020 election, Trump made an effort to establish Newsmax and OAN as credible outlets in the conservative media space. And earlier this month, CNN President Jeff Zucker resigned after admitting he had an undisclosed sexual relationship with the network’s Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust. Andrew Cuomo, who was embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. Anchor Chris Cuomo was fired late last year amid questions about his involvement in the affairs of his brother, former New York Gov. Fifty-three percent of adults and 78 percent of Democrats view the network as credible, an increase of 3 and 4 points, respectively.

Despite multiple scandals at the network, CNN also saw its credibility rating increase among the general public and Democrats.

The share of Republicans who said they trust Fox News “a lot” or “some” also jumped 10 points, from 60 percent to 70 percent. Fox News’ credibility rating among Republicans increased 10 points to 69 percent in the past year.

Forty-eight percent of adults consider Fox News to be a credible news outlet, 4 percentage points higher than the share that said the same in a 2021 survey.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — As the world races to find a vaccine and a treatment for COVID-19, there is seemingly no antidote in sight for the burgeoning outbreak of coronavirus conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anti-mask myths and sham cures.

The phenomenon, unfolding largely on social media, escalated this week when President Donald Trump retweeted a false video about an anti-malaria drug being a cure for the virus and it was revealed that Russian intelligence is spreading disinformation about the crisis through English-language websites.

Experts worry the torrent of bad information is dangerously undermining efforts to slow the virus, whose death toll in the U.S. hit 150,000 Wednesday, by far the highest in the world, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. Over a half-million people have died in the rest of the world.

Hard-hit Florida reported 216 deaths, breaking the single-day record it set a day earlier. Texas confirmed 313 additional deaths, pushing its total to 6,190, while South Carolina’s death toll passed 1,500 this week, more than doubling over the past month. In Georgia, hospitalizations have more than doubled since July 1.

“It is a real challenge in terms of trying to get the message to the public about what they can really do to protect themselves and what the facts are behind the problem,” said Michael Osterholm, head of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

He said the fear is that “people are putting themselves in harm’s way because they don’t believe the virus is something they have to deal with.”

Rather than fade away in the face of new evidence, the claims have flourished, fed by mixed messages from officials, transmitted by social media, amplified by leaders like Trump and mutating when confronted with contradictory facts.

“You don’t need masks. There is a cure,” Dr. Stella Immanuel promised in a video that promoted hydroxychloroquine. “You don’t need people to be locked down.”

The truth: Federal regulators last month revoked their authorization of the drug as an emergency treatment amid growing evidence it doesn’t work and can have deadly side effects. Even if it were effective, it wouldn’t negate the need for masks and other measures to contain the outbreak.

None of that stopped Trump, who has repeatedly praised the drug, from retweeting the video. Twitter and Facebook began removing the video Monday for violating policies on COVID-19 misinformation, but it had already been seen more than 20 million times.

Many of the claims in Immanuel’s video are widely disputed by medical experts. She has made even more bizarre pronouncements in the past, saying that cysts, fibroids and some other conditions can be caused by having sex with demons, that McDonald’s and Pokemon promote witchcraft, that alien DNA is used in medical treatments, and that half-human “reptilians” work in the government.

Other baseless theories and hoaxes have alleged that the virus isn’t real or that it’s a bioweapon created by the U.S. or its adversaries. One hoax from the outbreak’s early months claimed new 5G towers were spreading the virus through microwaves. Another popular story held that Microsoft founder Bill Gates plans to use COVID-19 vaccines to implant microchips in all 7 billion people on the planet.

Then there are the political theories — that doctors, journalists and federal officials are conspiring to lie about the threat of the virus to hurt Trump politically.

Social media has amplified the claims and helped believers find each other. The flood of misinformation has posed a challenge for Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, which have found themselves accused of censorship for taking down virus misinformation.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about Immanuel’s video during an often-contentious congressional hearing Wednesday.

“We did take it down because it violates our policies,” Zuckerberg said.

U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat leading the hearing, responded by noting that 20 million people saw the video before Facebook acted.

“Doesn’t that suggest that your platform is so big, that even with the right policies in place, you can’t contain deadly content?” Cicilline asked Zuckerberg.

It wasn’t the first video containing misinformation about the virus, and experts say it’s not likely to be the last.

A professionally made 26-minute video that alleges the government’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, manufactured the virus and shipped it to China was watched more than 8 million times before the platforms took action. The video, titled “Plandemic,” also warned that masks could make you sick — the false claim Facebook cited when it removed the video down from its site.

Judy Mikovits, the discredited doctor behind “Plandemic,” had been set to appear on the show “America This Week” on the Sinclair Broadcast Group. But the company, which operates TV stations in 81 U.S. markets, canned the segment, saying it was “not appropriate” to air.

This week, U.S. government officials speaking on condition of anonymity cited what they said was a clear link between Russian intelligence and websites with stories designed to spread disinformation on the coronavirus in the West. Russian officials rejected the accusations.

Of all the bizarre and myriad claims about the virus, those regarding masks are proving to be among the most stubborn.

New York City resident Carlos Lopez said he wears a mask when required to do so but doesn’t believe it is necessary.

“They’re politicizing it as a tool,” he said. “I think it’s more to try to get Trump to lose. It’s more a scare tactic.”

He is in the minority. A recent AP/NORC poll said 3 in 4 Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — support a national mask mandate.

Still, mask skeptics are a vocal minority and have come together to create social media pages where many false claims about mask safety are shared. Facebook has removed some of the pages — such as the group Unmasking America!, which had nearly 10,000 members — but others remain.

Early in the pandemic, medical authorities themselves were the source of much confusion regarding masks. In February, officials like the U.S. surgeon general urged Americans not to stockpile masks because they were needed by medical personnel and might not be effective in everyday situations.

Public health officials changed their tune when it became apparent that the virus could spread among people showing no symptoms.

Yet Trump remained reluctant to use a mask, mocked his rival Joe Biden for wearing one and suggested people might be covering their faces just to hurt him politically. He did an abrupt about-face this month, claiming that he had always supported masks — then later retweeted Immanuel’s video against masks.

The mixed signals hurt, Fauci acknowledged in an interview with NPR this month.

“The message early on became confusing,” he said.

Many of the claims around masks allege harmful effects, such as blocked oxygen flow or even a greater chance of infection. The claims have been widely debunked by doctors.

Dr. Maitiu O Tuathail of Ireland grew so concerned about mask misinformation he posted an online video of himself comfortably wearing a mask while measuring his oxygen levels. The video has been viewed more than 20 million times.

“While face masks don’t lower your oxygen levels. COVID definitely does,” he warned.

Yet trusted medical authorities are often being dismissed by those who say requiring people to wear masks is a step toward authoritarianism.

“Unless you make a stand, you will be wearing a mask for the rest of your life,” tweeted Simon Dolan, a British businessman who has sued the government over its COVID-19 restrictions.

Trump’s reluctant, ambivalent and late embrace of masks hasn’t convinced some of his strongest supporters, who have concocted ever more elaborate theories to explain his change of heart. Some say he was actually speaking in code and doesn’t really support masks.

O Tuathail witnessed just how unshakable COVID-19 misinformation can be when, after broadcasting his video, he received emails from people who said he cheated or didn’t wear the mask long enough to feel the negative effects.

That’s not surprising, according to University of Central Florida psychology professor Chrysalis Wright, who studies misinformation. She said conspiracy theory believers often engage in mental gymnastics to make their beliefs conform with reality.

“People only want to hear what they already think they know,” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Beatrice Dupuy in New York, Eric Tucker in Washington, and Amy Forliti in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

VISIT WEBSITE

One America News Network Stays True to Trump Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election. “There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,” the OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report. That segment was one in a spate of similar reports from a channel that has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age, an outlet whose reporting has aligned with the former president’s grievances at a time when he is barred from major social media platforms. Some of OAN’s coverage has not had the full support of the staff. In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue. To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Donald J. Trump as “President Trump” and to President Biden as just “Joe Biden” or “Biden.” That practice is not followed by other news organizations, including the OAN competitor Newsmax, a conservative cable channel and news site. OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators. Toward the end of a March 4 news segment that described the attack as the work of “antifa” and “anti-Trump extremists” — and referred to the president as “Beijing Biden” — Mr. Sharp said, “History will show it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who called for this violence.” Investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the Capitol riot. Charles Herring, the president of Herring Networks, the company that owns OAN, defended the reports casting doubt on the election. “Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly took place in the November 2020 election,” he said. “The real question is to what extent.” Herring Networks was founded by Mr. Herring’s father, the tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, who at age 79 runs OAN with Charles and another son, Robert Jr. About 150 employees work for the channel at its headquarters in San Diego. Nielsen does not report viewership statistics for OAN, which is not a Nielsen client. (Charles Herring cited Nielsen’s “heavy fees.”) In a survey last month, Pew Research reported that 7 percent of Americans, including 14 percent of Republicans, had gotten political news from OAN. By contrast, 43 percent of Americans and 62 percent of Republicans had gotten political news from Fox News, the survey found. While OAN appeals to a relatively small audience, its coverage reflects views commonly held by Republicans. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month, about half of Republicans said they believed that the Jan. 6 attack, which left five dead, was largely a nonviolent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists. Six in 10 of Republicans surveyed said they also believed Mr. Trump’s claim that the election was “stolen.” OAN, which started in 2013, gained attention when it broadcast Mr. Trump’s campaign speeches in full before the 2016 election. In recent months, it has courted viewers who may have felt abandoned by Fox News, which on election night was the first news outlet to project Mr. Biden as the winner of Arizona, a key swing state. In a mid-November promotional ad, OAN accused Fox News of joining “the mainstream media in censoring factual reporting.” OAN’s stories “appeal to people who want to believe that the election was not legitimate,” said Stephanie L. Edgerly, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. “These are two mutually reinforcing narratives of people who want to believe it and continue to get that fire stoked by OAN.” Marty Golingan, a producer at the channel since 2016, said OAN had changed in recent years. At the start of his employment, he said, it concentrated more on neutral coverage based on reports from The Associated Press or Reuters. He saw it as a scrappy upstart where he could produce cheeky feature stories, he said. During the Trump presidency, it moved right, Mr. Golingan said. And when he was watching coverage of the pro-Trump mob breaking into the Capitol, he said, he worried that his work might have helped inspire the attack. He added that he and others at OAN disagreed with much of the channel’s coverage. “The majority of people did not believe the voter fraud claims being run on the air,” Mr. Golingan said in an interview, referring to his colleagues. He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.” Charles Herring defended OAN’s coverage. “A review process with multiple checks is in place to ensure that news reporting meets the company’s journalist standards,” he said. “And, yes, we’ve had our fair share of mistakes, but we do our best to keep them to a minimum and learn from our missteps.” Mr. Golingan added that, since Inauguration Day, OAN’s news director, Lindsay Oakley, had reprimanded him for referring to Mr. Biden as “President Biden” in news copy. Ms. Oakley did not reply to requests for comment. “OAN’s staff White House reporters use the term President Biden and then may use Mr. Biden,” Charles Herring said. “The term Biden or Biden administration may also be used.” He declined to reply to a question on the channel’s use of “President Trump” for Mr. Trump. Allysia Britton, a news producer, said she was one of more than a dozen employees who had left OAN in the wake of the Capitol riot. She criticized some of what the channel had reported, saying it was not up to journalistic standards. “Many people have raised concerns,” Ms. Britton said in an interview. “And the thing is, when people speak up about anything, you will get in trouble.” Charles Herring confirmed that about a dozen OAN workers had left in recent months, saying many of them were not high-level employees. Assignments that the elder Mr. Herring takes a special interest in are known among OAN staff as “H stories,” several current and former employees said. The day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Herring instructed OAN employees in an email, which The New York Times reviewed, to “report all the things Antifa did yesterday.” Some “H stories” are reported by Kristian Rouz, an OAN correspondent who had written for Sputnik, a site backed by the Russian government. In a report in May on the pandemic, Mr. Rouz said Covid-19 might have started as a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control,” one that had ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates, and “the deep state.” Ms. Britton, the former OAN producer, recalled checking a website that Mr. Rouz had cited to back some of his reporting. “It literally took me to this chat room where it’s just conservatives commenting toward each other,” she said. In an email to staff last month, Ms. Oakley, the news director, warned producers against ignoring or playing down Mr. Rouz’s work. “His stories should be considered ‘H stories’ and treated as such,” she wrote in the email, which The Times reviewed. “These stories are often slugged and copy-edited by ME as per Mr. H’s instructions.” OAN’s online audience is significant, with nearly 1.5 million subscribers to its YouTube channel. One of its most popular videos, with about 1.5 million views since it went online Nov. 24, criticized Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company whose equipment was used in more than two dozen states last year, including several won by Mr. Trump. Hosted by the OAN White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, the video shows a man who said he had infiltrated Dominion and heard company executives say they would “make sure” Mr. Trump lost. Dominion has sued Fox News and two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, accusing them of making or promoting defamatory claims. A lawyer for Dominion, who did not reply to requests for comment, has said the company is considering further legal action. Mr. Golingan, the producer, said some OAN employees had hoped Dominion would sue the channel. “A lot of people said, ‘This is insane, and maybe if they sue us, we’ll stop putting stories like this out,’” he said. Weeks after Dominion filed its first defamation suits, OAN broadcast a two-hour video in which the chief executive of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, made his case that widespread voter fraud had occurred. YouTube removed the video the day it was posted, saying it violated the platform’s election integrity policy. Last month, an OAN report described Dominion’s “voting machines” as “notorious.” Two of the current and former employees interviewed for this article — Dan Ball, a talk-show host, and Neil W. McCabe, a former reporter — described OAN’s coverage as unbiased. Mr. McCabe, who now writes for The Tennessee Star, said the network gave a “voice to people that are just not covered.” Susan Beachy contributed research. Source link Orbem News #America #network #news #stays #True #Trump

Analysis: Why you won't find Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on British TV

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Analysis: Why you won't find Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on British TV

“The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol … could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of [Fox News hosts] Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

But are the airwaves of any democracy free of this kind of harmful propaganda and downright fiction? The United Kingdom, for one, comes pretty close.

Though the UK media scene is defined in part by a freewheeling and often partisan tabloid press with its own share of conspiracy theories, its TV news channels largely frame their coverage down the middle, with broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV maintaining high levels of public trust. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is no longer on air in the country after failing to generate a significant viewer base.

A big factor in this is media regulator Ofcom, which enforces rules on impartiality and accuracy for all news broadcasters. Those who breach the rules can be censured or fined — putting pressure on TV channels to play stories fairly straight.

Russian state-funded news channel RT, for example, was slapped with a £200,000 ($272,000) penalty for repeatedly breaking impartiality rules in its 2018 coverage of the poisonings of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as well as the conflict in Syria. It has not been fined since.

“What the impartiality rules do is ensure you cannot have the kind of shock jock culture — [a] far right, or indeed far left, one-sided interpretation of events,” said Steven Barnett, a professor of media and communication at the University of Westminster.

The UK system isn’t perfect. A review of BBC coverage ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum found that its main news program was more negative on the European Union than Russian President Vladimir Putin. And two new media ventures expected to launch shortly could again push the limits of what’s allowed. But according to experts, the framework has protected against the kind of disinformation peddled by Fox News in the United States.

No Fox News

Ofcom, which was established in 2003, has two important standards that the news broadcasters it licenses must abide by — “due impartiality” and “due accuracy.”

This does not mean that equal time needs to be given on television and radio to both sides of an issue. But broadcasters do have a responsibility at least to acknowledge opposing viewpoints, and to quickly correct “significant mistakes.”

When Fox News was on the air in the United Kingdom, its top stars were found to have violated the regulator’s rules.

Ofcom said that a Hannity program about President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries didn’t do enough to surface the viewpoints of those who opposed the order. Ofcom also said that a separate Carlson broadcast following the 2017 Manchester terror attack — which included claims that UK authorities had done nothing to stop terrorism or to protect “thousands of underage girls” from rape and abuse — did not adequately reflect alternate perspectives.

Fox News was pulled off air in the United Kingdom later in 2017 when Murdoch, the billionaire chairman of News Corp and Fox News’ parent company, was seeking government approval to purchase the shares he didn’t own of European pay TV network Sky. (He ended up selling his Sky holdings to Comcast.)

21st Century Fox, the network’s parent company at the time, said it made the decision because Fox News had attracted “only a few thousand viewers across the day” in the United Kingdom, and it didn’t make commercial sense to continue broadcasting. But the move also came amid scrutiny from Ofcom, which had previously slammed Fox’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against former network boss Roger Ailes and former star host Bill O’Reilly, calling their alleged conduct “deeply disturbing.”

Such warnings hint at the trouble Fox News could have faced had it stuck it out during the Trump era.

Hefty penalties awarded to other channels, such as RT, have effectively communicated the consequences of slipping up to media executives, said Trevor Barnes, a TV and radio compliance consultant and former Ofcom official.

“They’re aware that if they misbehave, they’ll be hit with a fine,” he said.

The United States, meanwhile, doesn’t have these kinds of rules — and hasn’t since the Reagan era, when the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the so-called Fairness Doctrine for TV and radio stations. Historians believe the demise of this rule, which required broadcasters to present a variety of views on issues of public importance, paved the way for the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and 1990s, which later served as a model for Fox. Those talk radio shows continue to be popular today.

As a cable network, Fox News wouldn’t have been bound by the doctrine, which only applied to broadcast channels. But Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and Appradab contributor, said its removal changed the rules of the game.

“It served as a kind of check,” Zelizer said. “It was always on the mind of everyone who was in the news business.”

Now, even members of the Murdoch family are reckoning with the role Fox News has played. James Murdoch, who made a dramatic break from his family last year when he resigned from the board of News Corp, said in a statement on Friday that “spreading disinformation” has “real world consequences.” While he did not mention Fox News by name, it was clear his focus was on the network controlled by his father and brother.

“Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies. We hope the awful scenes we have all been seeing will finally convince those enablers to repudiate the toxic politics they have promoted once and forever,” James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, said in a joint statement to the Financial Times.

New networks may test the system

The United Kingdom has largely watched the Capitol riot and its aftermath in horror.

“The events … have been the ultimate demonstration of what can happen when those fundamental pillars of democracy break down: accurate information [and] fair information,” Barnett said.

But two outlets expected to debut shortly in the United Kingdom could test the bounds of the regulatory system, including Ofcom’s appetite for enforcement.

Murdoch’s UK operation, which still controls three big British newspapers — The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times — is working on a new video venture, having recently received a license under the name News UK TV. Details haven’t been announced.

Meanwhile, upstart competitor GB News, which recently secured £60 million ($81 million) from investors, is hiring journalists as it prepares to launch a 24-hour news channel.

“Many British people are crying out for a news service that is more diverse and more representative of their values and concerns,” former BBC host Andrew Neil, who will serve as the chairman of GB News, said in a statement last week. Neil was previously the editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times and executive chairman of Sky TV.

Critics fear the News UK TV venture and GB News could move to take on the BBC and fill a perceived gap in right-wing broadcasting, sparking concerns about whether UK regulators are up to the task of maintaining due impartiality, or whether Britain could soon have its own Fox News-type problem.

Both outlets may play things fairly safe at first, and Barnes noted that the rules will give them some latitude.

“There’s no requirement under due impartiality for a channel not to have a bias,” he said. “All it requires is you reflect, to a pretty small degree, what the opposing viewpoint is.”

But Barnett is worried that over time, there could be a slow erosion of norms — combined with an anti-Ofcom push from Murdoch’s powerful papers, who may level criticisms of a “nanny state regulator telling us what we can and can’t say.” News Corp declined to comment.

“I will make a prediction that within a year we will see a concerted attack within the Murdoch press on Ofcom,” he said. And if support for the regulator fades, all bets will be off.

Press Slams Trump for Slew of Pardons

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Dec. 27, 2020.--Showing that it doesn’t matter what they attack 74-year-old President Donald Trump on, CNN’s John Berman slammed him for pardoning what he calls “corrupt Republican congressmen.”  Berman of course excuses his network for spreading four years of lies about Trump for alleged ties to the Kremlin, something fabricated by former Secretary of State and 2016 Democrat nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Berman and his primetime hosts at CNN circulated nightly news for four years about Trump alleged ties to the Russia.  CNN routinely paraded House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on CNN’s nightly line-up, saying without evidence that Trump was a Russian asset, regardless of a lack of proof.  Yet to Berman and other CNN hosts, only Trump or his surrogates lie about everything under the sun, especially the Covid-19 crisis and the sputtering U.S. economy.    

         Pardoning former GOP congressmen, Trump served notice to what he calls the fake news media” that he wouldn’t let the corrupt U.S. law enforcement and intel community get away with murder.  Unlike members of the press, Trump knows what it’s like to be persecuted by the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and National Security Agency [NSA], spending four years defending what he calls the Russian hoax.  Untold numbers of articles appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post claiming Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.   When Trump accused former President Barack Obama of spying on hi campaign, he watched the press laugh in his face.  But whatever lies Democrats or press reported, there were no consequences.  Former President Barack Obama’s White House, Department of Justice [DOJ], FBI, CIA and National Security Agency [NSA], there were not consequences.     

        When 78-year-old President Joe Biden gets inaugurated Jan. 20, 3020, he will be the first President that knowingly participated in a conspiracy while vice president to sabotage Trump’s 2016 campaign.  Biden was president at a Jan. 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting with the national security apparatus, members of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, NSA and other White House officials to set up former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for allegedly violating the 1799 Logan Act for having a few innocent conversations with former Russian Amb. Sergey Kislyak.  Former FBI Direct James Comey was present giving the green light to interview Flynn after the Jan. 20, 2017 inauguration at the White House, asking him about conversations with the Russian government during the transition.  Flynn was charged by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller of lying to FBI agents.         

    When U.S. citizens now think of the DOJ, FBI, CIA and NSA, they have suspicions that they play politics, framing innocent people, accusing them of Russian collusion.  All Democrats and the press talked about for much of Trump’s four years were fake stories published in the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump outlets talking about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.  Trump has former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to thank for letting Obama’s White House use her bogus paid opposition research AKA “The Steele Dossier” to make wild allegations of Russian collusion.  Trump knows that Democrats and the media never accepted his presidency from Day 1, yet they expect Trump to accept that Biden won the Nov. 3 election fair-and-square.  Without proof, Trump tired but failed to make his case of voter fraud to the federal courts.      

       CNN and other corrupt broadcast news networks continue to hammer Trump until the bitter end.  “It’s a good night to be a corrupt Republicans congressman or a confessed liar from the Russian probe or a convicted murderer of Iraqi civilians,” Berman said today on CNN.  Yet Berman never talks about CNN’s four years of lies, with its hosts and pundits all preaching to the choir accusing Trump of Russian collusion.  Even after 76-year-old former Special Counse Robert Muellerl cleared Trump and his campaign of wrong doing March 23, 2019, the fake news media continued to promote the discredited Russian collusion conspiracy.  Yet Berman accuses Trump of inappropriately pardoning anyone connected with the Russian hoax, something to his day CNN and other anti-Trump news outlets promote without evidence or proof.  No, it’s only Trump that lies, not corrupt Democrats and the news media.      

       Trump’s presidency raised many important issues of how a corrupt news media can demonize anyone they seek to destroy politically with impunity.  No one in the fake news has paid any price for spending four years spreading the Russian hoax yet has the nerve to blame Trump for pardoning anyone caught up in the most egregious government conspiracy in U.S. history.  When former Atty. Gen. Bill Barr failed to return indictments for former Obama White House officials, including former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein and others, Trump realized the fix was in. He would get no justice after harassed by his own government for nearly his entire four-year-term.  But to political hacks like Berman, they must continue the cover-up for the fake news industry. 

About the Author

 John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma. Reply  Reply All  Forward

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BBC: Master of Fake News

In its attempts to dissect the global disinformation epidemic, the BBC handily forgets its own history of ‘fake news’.

Earlier this month the BBC aired an informed and informative weeklong series on disinformation and fake news, “a global problem,” as they rightly put it, “challenging the way we share information and perceive the world around us.” 

What’s real? What’s distortion? The series teaches us. I watched as many of the episodes in this series as I could, and the rest I followed on the BBC website. In one episode we learn how “Nigerian police say false information and incendiary images on Facebook have contributed to more than a dozen recent killings in Plateau State – an area already torn by ethnic violence.” In another episode, we learn how in Egypt fake news becomes a weapon of choice to crush dissent. In yet another piece we learn how “smartphones are making it easier for millions of Indians to communicate and share messages on social media. But misinformation is spreading fast and can often turn deadly.”

The series then moved to tell us how “a BBC investigation has found that Russian media and officials presented false claims about a US-funded laboratory in neighbouring Georgia.” In another episode, we were told about how “fake news in Turkey is rampant, and targets many, including the BBC. But some are fighting back.”  

While watching these episodes it suddenly occurred to me, as I am sure you too have noticed, something a bit strange about this series? It is all about non-British, and non-European countries – about India, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Turkey and Thailand, which is of course perfectly fine for, no doubt, fake news is a global issue that includes these countries.

But targeting these non-European countries as the site of fake news par excellence implicitly puts European media and the BBC in particular as the arbiter of truth manifest. Fake news is something that backward black and brown people do, while real news is what the BBC and the rest of white people tell us.

That got me thinking – as we say in New York!

You fake it until you make it

This deliberate exoticism and exorcism of the fake news as something that happens among the dark people and not among the British sounds a bit, how shall I put it politely, strange to an Iranian pair of ears old enough to know the US-UK military coup against Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and the function of official propaganda of their news media in that treacherous act. The holier than thou attitude of the US and UK official media, the BBC in this particular case, could use a bit of historical memory. It’ll teach them some humility.

Long before “fake news” had a name, the BBC was a master of fake news, in fact fake news of the most dangerous, the most vicious consequences, casting nations, not just individuals, into direct calamities. 

What I have in mind is of course the harmul role of the BBC as the propaganda machine of British imperialism around the globe. As well as in enabling and facilitating the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953 in my homeland in particular, by doing precisely what it now goes around finding darker nations doing – indulging in fake news and propaganda.

The role of BBC in the overthrow of Mosaddeq was not out of character or unusual. In a piece titled Why the taboo tale of the BBC’s wartime propaganda battle must be told published by The Guardian, David Boyle writes about characters like Noel Francis Newsome (1906-1976), who “as director of European broadcasts … led what is still the biggest broadcasting operation ever mounted, in 25 different languages for a total of just over 25 hours a day, across three wavelengths.” 

Such pieces of truth are sources of embarrassments for the BBC today, for “it was he who set out the strategy to use news as a weapon on war – it had to be not just true but also recognizably British.”

Here we learn “it was Newsome and Ritchie (his deputy Douglas Ritchie) who really created the myth of the BBC, by using news as a weapon – not quite what the myth suggests – with all the resources of culture and music and humor.”

If you think this too suspicious, then you ought to know: “Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels warned in 1944: ‘There is one way in which the British, despite the narrowness of their political thinking, are ahead of us – they know that news can be a weapon and are experts in its strategy’.”

This is not any brown or black person talking – these are white Germans talking about white British leading the BBC. 

BBC and the CIA/MI6 Coup of 1953

What the British and the BBC did in Iran against Mossadeq was perfectly in tune with their larger wartime and post-war propaganda machinery. Here the role of BBC in vilifying and demonising the character of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq is not even the issue. At issue is a more direct role that BBC Persian has played in that fateful event.

After years of speculative suspicion dismissed as conspiracy theories, BBC Radio 4 finally admitted, in a programme called Document, and subtitled A very British coup, the fact of this treacherous act of the BBC. “Documents reveal,” BBC now admitted, “the true extent of Britain’s involvement in the coup of 1953 which toppled Iran’s democratically elected government and replaced it with the tyranny of the Shah.”

The programme then explicitly explains: “Iran had just nationalised the very oil fields that had powered Britain through two world wars. Downing Street wanted them back. London paid Iranian agents to sow seeds of dissent in Tehran. Then, to win American support for a coup, the men from the Ministry fanned fears of a Russian invasion.”

Then comes the punch line: “Even the BBC was used to spearhead Britain’s propaganda campaign. In fact, Auntie agreed to broadcast the very code word that was to spark revolution.” By “revolution” of course they mean the coup.

The New York Times also reports: “The British, too, sought to sway the shah and assure him their agents spoke for London. A British agent, Asadollah Rashidian, approached him in late July and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC’s Persian-language program – as proof that Mr Rashidian spoke for the British.”

The same fact is reported by The Guardian: “Another man, Asadollah Rashidian, allegedly approached the shah and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC’s Persian language service as proof that Rashidian spoke for British intelligence.”

Sometimes even the paranoids have enemies

“Just because you’re paranoid,” Woody Allen is reported to have said only in half-jest, “doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” The same is true about conspiracy theories about the BBC. Sometimes even the paranoids are right.

The issue of the BBC role in Iranian and other countries’ politics has become so prevalent that scholars have conducted thorough research on the veracity of the matter and published meticulously documented books on the subject.

In an edited volume by Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan contact zones at the BBC World Service 1932-2012, which is an excellent study of diasporic communities and their compradorial services at the BBC,we learn how “when it came to reporting adversely on Mossadeq, for two weeks all Iranian broadcasters disappeared. The BBC had no choice but to bring in English people who spoke Persian because the Iranians had gone on strike.”

In their introduction, the editors cite Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970), whom they identify as “journalist, spy, and British diplomat,” as having said: “for the cost of a small cruiser you could recruit the services of a battle fleet” as justification for the British government funding of the BBC.

Two other scholars, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh have published an even more detailed study, Persian Service: The BBC and British Interests in Iran (2014) in which they examine “the perception” that BBC has been not just a neutral chronicler but in fact an active agent in the politics of Iran and its region at large. They concentrate on BBC Persian Service, trying to craft a neutral ground on which to interrogate both the objectivity of BBC and its perception as a soft power tool in the arsenal of British colonial and postcolonial interests.

The result is a non-committal prose that itself is implicated in equivocating between fact and fake news. In their own words they are trying to find a balance in the “inelegant dance between financial control versus editorial independence” of BBC coverage of four major episodes in recent Iranian history: the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the CIA-MI6 coup against Mossadegh in 1951-1953, the 1979 revolution, and the Green Movement of 2009.

Between fact and fake we think and live

Sreberny and Torfeh’s study is an admirable exercise in judicious scholarship. But their excellent book needed and did happily receive an excellent corrective lens by the preeminent historian of modern Iran, Professor Ervand Abrahamian. In his review of this book, he reminds us how during the wartime period “there was no pretense of objective reporting and impartial analysis. After all, George Orwell learned much about Newspeak and Doublespeak while working for the BBC Indian Department. Some suspect his Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four was modeled on the BBC building in Portland Place, London.”

Imagine that: the BBC that was the model of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth now preaches the world about “fake news!”

Abrahamian also reminds us how the abdication of Reza Shah was in no small measure engineered by the BBC: “Asa Briggs, later in his famous History of Broadcasting, wrote that this was probably the first time in history that a ruler had been hurled from the throne by radio.” 

I think Stephen Sackur should do one of his “Hardtalks” on the history of BBC as fake news.

As for the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953, Abrahamian is equally emphatic: “the British government and the BBC were equally collaborative. The latter throughout the crisis loudly echoed the former’s line that nationalisation of the oil industry would be disastrous for Iran – that it would financially bankrupt the government, that the country would not have the technical know-how to run the industry, and that Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq had refused a series of fair and just offers for compromise. After the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the BBC continued to echo the official line that there had been no military coup but a spontaneous revolt against a “dictatorial regime.”

Is that not fake news – distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the BBC? You were the mother of all fake news when it came to the fate of an entire nation.

When BBC blacklisted British critics

Abrahamian quite gently reminds the authors of this important book of a serious omission: “Even though the book details the close links between the government and the BBC during this crisis, it overlooks one major egregious case. Throughout the crisis, the Foreign Office and the British ambassador explicitly forbade the BBC to send to Tehran any reporters sympathetic to Iran. Professor Elwell-Sutton was explicitly blacklisted despite his outstanding expertise.” The British embassy denounced him as “anti-colonial and anti-British.”

Just to be clear: Abrahamian correctly points to the identically conspiratorial mindset of both the late Shah and the current ruling elite of the Islamic Republic for abusing these facts of BBC collusions with the British colonial interests in the past to conceal their own delusional conspiracies of blaming the BBC when their own actions were the main culprit of calamities that befell Iranians.

Iranians as a result are caught between a rock and a hard place: When BBC actually colludes with the British government to rob them of their democratic aspirations, and when these facts are abused by the Shah and the ruling clergy of the Islamic Republic to ascribe such aspirations to foreign conspiracies.

One must remember these historical facts not as an act of vengeance but as corrective lenses. The seismic changes in Internet possibilities no intelligent follower of news is trapped or condemned into any single site of media platform – BBC or otherwise. We can roam the globe from one news media to another, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to Europe and North America, with each news media, BBC included, giving us a fragment of truth and a lot of fake news. We watch and read them all, trust none completely, nor do we privilege anyone of them with our particular dis/trust. We dis/trust them all equally.

Today the BBC should be neither demonised nor valorised, for it is neither as demonic as its conspiratorial detractors contend nor as angelic as the BBC self-promotional advertisements sing and dance. It is just one click away from the next fusion of fact and fantasy.

This is an article from Aljazeera.

When the BBC did fake news | Media

Earlier this month the BBC aired an knowledgeable and informative weeklong sequence on disinformation and pretend information, “a world drawback,” as they rightly put it, “difficult the best way we share data and understand the world round us.” 

What’s actual? What’s distortion? The sequence teaches us. I watched as lots of the episodes on this sequence as I may, and the remaining I adopted on the BBC web site. In a single episode we learn the way “Nigerian police say false data and incendiary photos on Fb have contributed to greater than a dozen current killings in Plateau State – an space already torn by ethnic violence.”

In one other episode, we learn the way in Egypt faux information turns into a weapon of option to crush dissent. In one more piece we learn the way “smartphones are making it simpler for thousands and thousands of Indians to speak and share messages on social media. However misinformation is spreading quick and might usually flip lethal.”

The sequence then moved to inform us how “a BBC investigation has discovered that Russian media and officers introduced false claims a couple of US-funded laboratory in neighbouring Georgia.” In one other episode, we had been instructed about how “faux information in Turkey is rampant, and targets many, together with the BBC. However some are preventing again.”  

Whereas watching these episodes it immediately occurred to me, as I’m positive you too have seen, one thing a bit unusual about this sequence? It’s all about non-British, and non-European international locations – about India, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Turkey and Thailand, which is after all completely superb for, little doubt, faux information is a world situation that features these international locations.

However focusing on these non-European international locations as the positioning of pretend information par excellence implicitly places European media and the BBC particularly because the arbiter of fact manifest. Faux information is one thing that backward black and brown individuals do, whereas actual information is what the BBC and the remainder of white individuals inform us.

That acquired me pondering – as we are saying in New York. 

You faux it till you make it

This deliberate exoticism and exorcism of the faux information as one thing that occurs among the many darkish individuals and never among the many British sounds a bit, how shall I put it politely, unusual to an Iranian pair of ears sufficiently old to know the US-UK navy coup towards Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and the operate of official propaganda of their information media in that treacherous act. The holier than thou perspective of the US and UK official media, the BBC on this explicit case, may use a little bit of historic reminiscence. It’s going to educate them some humility.

Lengthy earlier than “faux information” had a reputation, the BBC was a grasp of pretend information, actually faux information of probably the most harmful, probably the most vicious penalties, casting nations, not simply people, into direct calamities. 

What I keep in mind is after all the harmul position of the BBC because the propaganda machine of British imperialism across the globe. In addition to in enabling and facilitating the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953 in my homeland particularly, by doing exactly what it now goes round discovering darker nations doing – indulging in faux information and propaganda.

The position of BBC within the overthrow of Mosaddeq was not out of character or uncommon. In a bit titled Why the taboo story of the BBC’s wartime propaganda battle have to be instructed revealed by The Guardian, David Boyle writes about characters like Noel Francis Newsome (1906-1976), who “as director of European broadcasts … led what continues to be the most important broadcasting operation ever mounted, in 25 completely different languages for a complete of simply over 25 hours a day, throughout three wavelengths.” 

Such items of fact are sources of embarrassments for the BBC at the moment, for “it was he who set out the technique to make use of information as a weapon on struggle – it needed to be not simply true but in addition recognizably British.”

Right here we be taught “it was Newsome and Ritchie (his deputy Douglas Ritchie) who actually created the parable of the BBC, through the use of information as a weapon – not fairly what the parable suggests – with all of the sources of tradition and music and humor.”

In the event you suppose this too suspicious, then you definately should know: “Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels warned in 1944: ‘There may be a method through which the British, regardless of the narrowness of their political pondering, are forward of us – they know that information generally is a weapon and are specialists in its technique’.”

This isn’t any brown or black individual speaking – these are white Germans speaking about white British main the BBC. 

BBC and the CIA/MI6 Coup of 1953

What the British and the BBC did in Iran towards Mossadeq was completely in tune with their bigger wartime and post-war propaganda equipment. Right here the position of BBC in vilifying and demonising the character of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq isn’t even the difficulty. At situation is a extra direct position that BBC Persian has performed in that fateful occasion.

After years of speculative suspicion dismissed as conspiracy theories, BBC Radio four lastly admitted, in a programme referred to as Doc, and subtitled A really British coup, the actual fact of this treacherous act of the BBC. “Paperwork reveal,” BBC now admitted, “the true extent of Britain’s involvement within the coup of 1953 which toppled Iran’s democratically elected authorities and changed it with the tyranny of the Shah.”

The programme then explicitly explains: “Iran had simply nationalised the very oil fields that had powered Britain by two world wars. Downing Road wished them again. London paid Iranian brokers to sow seeds of dissent in Tehran. Then, to win American assist for a coup, the boys from the Ministry fanned fears of a Russian invasion.”

Then comes the punch line: “Even the BBC was used to spearhead Britain’s propaganda marketing campaign. In truth, Auntie agreed to broadcast the very code phrase that was to spark revolution.” By “revolution” after all they imply the coup.

The New York Instances additionally experiences: “The British, too, sought to sway the shah and guarantee him their brokers spoke for London. A British agent, Asadollah Rashidian, approached him in late July and invited him to pick out a phrase that will then be broadcast at prearranged occasions on the BBC’s Persian-language program – as proof that Mr Rashidian spoke for the British.”

The identical reality is reported by The Guardian: “One other man, Asadollah Rashidian, allegedly approached the shah and invited him to pick out a phrase that will then be broadcast at prearranged occasions on the BBC’s Persian language service as proof that Rashidian spoke for British intelligence.”

Typically even the paranoids have enemies

“Simply since you’re paranoid,” Woody Allen is reported to have mentioned solely in half-jest, “does not imply they are not out to get you.” The identical is true about conspiracy theories concerning the BBC. Typically even the paranoids are proper.

The problem of the BBC position in Iranian and different international locations’ politics has turn out to be so prevalent that students have performed thorough analysis on the veracity of the matter and revealed meticulously documented books on the topic.

In an edited quantity by Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan contact zones on the BBC World Service 1932-2012, which is a wonderful research of diasporic communities and their compradorial providers on the BBC, we learn the way “when it got here to reporting adversely on Mossadeq, for 2 weeks all Iranian broadcasters disappeared. The BBC had no selection however to herald English individuals who spoke Persian as a result of the Iranians had gone on strike.”

Of their introduction, the editors cite Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970), whom they determine as “journalist, spy, and British diplomat,” as having mentioned: “for the price of a small cruiser you could possibly recruit the providers of a battle fleet” as justification for the British authorities funding of the BBC.

Two different students, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh have revealed an much more detailed research, Persian Service: The BBC and British Pursuits in Iran (2014) through which they study “the notion” that BBC has been not only a impartial chronicler however actually an lively agent within the politics of Iran and its area at massive. They think about BBC Persian Service, making an attempt to craft a impartial floor on which to interrogate each the objectivity of BBC and its notion as a mushy energy instrument within the arsenal of British colonial and postcolonial pursuits.

The result’s a non-committal prose that itself is implicated in equivocating between reality and pretend information. In their very own phrases they’re looking for a stability within the “inelegant dance between monetary management versus editorial independence” of BBC protection of 4 main episodes in current Iranian historical past: the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the CIA-MI6 coup towards Mossadegh in 1951-1953, the 1979 revolution, and the Inexperienced Motion of 2009.

Between reality and pretend we predict and reside

Sreberny and Torfeh’s research is an admirable train in even handed scholarship. However their wonderful ebook wanted and did fortunately obtain a superb corrective lens by the preeminent historian of recent Iran, Professor Ervand Abrahamian. In his assessment of this ebook, he reminds us how through the wartime interval “there was no pretense of goal reporting and neutral evaluation. In any case, George Orwell discovered a lot about Newspeak and Doublespeak whereas working for the BBC Indian Division. Some suspect his Ministry of Reality in Nineteen Eighty-4 was modeled on the BBC constructing in Portland Place, London.”

Think about that: the BBC that was the mannequin of Orwell’s Ministry of Reality now preaches the world about “faux information!”

Abrahamian additionally reminds us how the abdication of Reza Shah was in no small measure engineered by the BBC: “Asa Briggs, later in his well-known Historical past of Broadcasting, wrote that this was most likely the primary time in historical past ruler had been hurled from the throne by radio.” 

I believe Stephen Sackur ought to do considered one of his “Hardtalks” on the historical past of BBC as faux information.

As for the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953, Abrahamian is equally emphatic: “the British authorities and the BBC had been equally collaborative. The latter all through the disaster loudly echoed the previous’s line that nationalisation of the oil trade could be disastrous for Iran – that it might financially bankrupt the federal government, that the nation wouldn’t have the technical know-how to run the trade, and that Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq had refused a sequence of truthful and simply gives for compromise. After the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the BBC continued to echo the official line that there had been no navy coup however a spontaneous revolt towards a “dictatorial regime.”

Is that not faux information – distinguished women and gents of the BBC? You had been the mom of all faux information when it got here to the destiny of a complete nation.

When BBC blacklisted British critics

Abrahamian fairly gently reminds the authors of this vital ebook of a severe omission: “Although the ebook particulars the shut hyperlinks between the federal government and the BBC throughout this disaster, it overlooks one main egregious case. All through the disaster, the International Workplace and the British ambassador explicitly forbade the BBC to ship to Tehran any reporters sympathetic to Iran. Professor Elwell-Sutton was explicitly blacklisted regardless of his excellent experience.” The British embassy denounced him as “anti-colonial and anti-British.”

Simply to be clear: Abrahamian accurately factors to the identically conspiratorial mindset of each the late Shah and the present ruling elite of the Islamic Republic for abusing these details of BBC collusions with the British colonial pursuits prior to now to hide their very own delusional conspiracies of blaming the BBC when their very own actions had been the principle wrongdoer of calamities that befell Iranians.

Iranians consequently are caught between a rock and a tough place: When BBC truly colludes with the British authorities to rob them of their democratic aspirations, and when these details are abused by the Shah and the ruling clergy of the Islamic Republic to ascribe such aspirations to international conspiracies.

One should keep in mind these historic details not as an act of vengeance however as corrective lenses. The seismic modifications in Web prospects no clever follower of reports is trapped or condemned into any single website of media platform – BBC or in any other case. We will roam the globe from one information media to a different, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to Europe and North America, with every information media, BBC included, giving us a fraction of fact and quite a lot of faux information. We watch and browse all of them, belief none fully, nor will we privilege anybody of them with our explicit dis/belief. We dis/belief all of them equally.

Immediately the BBC needs to be neither demonised nor valorised, for it’s neither as demonic as its conspiratorial detractors contend nor as angelic because the BBC self-promotional commercials sing and dance. It is only one click on away from the subsequent fusion of reality and fantasy.

The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyTrumpworld is, as you would expect, not very happy right now.Following a wave of House Democrats backing the impeachment of President Donald Trump over allegations he pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate his potential political rival, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally announced on Tuesday afternoon that the House is moving forward with an impeachment inquiry.And like clockwork, pro-Trump media lashed out over the historic news, using many of the same tactics the president’s allies used against former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. As Pelosi launched the impeachment investigation, Trump’s media supporters claimed Trump had done nothing wrong, suggested that the whistleblower complaint against him was the result of an elaborate deep-state conspiracy, and claimed the real blame for the growing scandal lie with the man Trump sought to have investigated, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, rather than the president. First, the president predictably raged on Twitter, unleashing a couple of tried-and-true favorites (“PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT,” “A total Witch Hunt!”), complained that the Democrats ruined his day at the United Nations, and then just named off some Democratic lawmakers.Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, who recently credited Trump for making weekends possible, spent much of his Tuesday night broadcast railing against the “radical DIMMS” for opening an impeachment inquiry. At one point, he brought on another one of Fox’s top Trump boosters, Jeanine Pirro, to rally by the president’s side.“What happened today was disgusting,” Pirro exclaimed, adding that nobody knows what was said on the president’s Ukrainian call at the center of the whistleblower complaint.“We do. The president said what was said,” Dobbs replied. “He said it was perfect. And he said somebody needs to look into Biden. And, by the way, he’s right on both counts.”Fox wasn’t the only conservative network running interference for the president. One America News CEO Robert Herring, who frequently tries to woo Trump into watching and promoting the conservative cable network over rival Fox, tweeted that his channel “has a lot of information to release on Ukraine that will leave President Trump very happy…”. Meanwhile, OAN reporter and former Pizzagate conspiracy theory promoter Jack Posobiec demanded that Biden “release all of his calls with the leaders of Ukraine and China.”Pro-Trump websites tried to suggest that the whistleblower complaint was some kind of setup by the whistleblower’s lawyers. The Federalist and the Gateway Pundit, a popular conservative blog that regularly runs hoaxes, seized on one lawyer’s history of working for Democrats. The Washington Examiner, meanwhile, claimed that the whistleblower’s two lawyers work for a group that “offers to pay officials who leak against Trump.” In fact, however, the whistleblower aid group only offers temporary housing help for whistleblowers who could lose their jobs. Trump’s internet fanbase rallied to his side, as well. On The_Donald, the largest Reddit forum for Trump supporters, moderators pinned a meme that implied Democrats were pursuing impeachment because of “butthurt” to the top of the page. Later during Fox’s primetime broadcast, host Tucker Carlson began his program by insisting he had “no idea” why the Democrats were looking into impeaching the president, wondering why it was “somehow criminal” for the president to ask about “Joe Biden’s ne’er do well son” receiving “600 grand a year from Russian oligarchs.”“We have been trying to understand what the Democrats are alleging here,” he continued. “We have come to the conclusion that they are saying it was okay for Biden’s son to take this money.”Interestingly, just a few hours earlier, Fox News anchor Shep Smith pointed out that any allegations of wrongdoing against Biden or his son are “baseless” and the narrative that’s being pushed by Trump and his supporters is a “conspiracy theory.”One of Carlson’s guests, The Federalist’s Sean Davis, sang a familiar tune, complaining that this was “Russia all over again” and that there was “no actual evidence anywhere of any wrongdoing,” all while dismissing the allegations as “rumors and gossip.”Another of the Fox News host’s guests, Trump ally Joe diGenova, took a potshot at one of Carlson’s colleagues. Earlier on Smith’s program, Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said that Trump committed a “crime” with his call,  prompting diGenova to call the Fox News analyst a “fool.” And then there was Sean Hannity, who has been described as the White House shadow chief of staff. The Fox News star delivered a lengthy, rambling, at-times incomprehensible, show-opening monologue in which he completely defended the president’s actions while simultaneously raging against the “Deep State.” After Fox News correspondent Ed Henry reported that one of his sources is saying that the whistleblower has “political bias” against Trump and the transcript of the call won’t show a “smoking gun” but will include some portions that will “raise eyebrows,” Hannity then demanded that Biden share his communications.“Is Joe Biden going to release his conversations?” Hannity exclaimed. “I would like to demand that Joe Biden now release all of his conversations that he had when he was vice president with Ukraine. Especially now in light of what we learned about Joe Biden.”The coup de grace, however, was delivered by Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett. The conservative commentator, who has spent the past couple of years railing against the Russia investigation, claimed that it was actually Trump’s legal duty to ask Ukraine to go after Biden.“The president is duty-bound under the take care clause of the Constitution,” he declared. “If he knows of a particularly corrupt act by a vice president trying to extort a foreign country to shutdown a probe that involves his son.”“The president is duty-bound to ask that foreign country, investigate, produce the evidence, give it to us,” Jarrett concluded. “If he doesn’t do it, it is a dereliction of his constitutional duty!”Hannity, meanwhile, was extremely pleased with that response, adding that “the president had a legal responsibility in lieu of the fact that Russia tried to influence our elections.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Watch цirst Man,ҠThen Watch These Movies

Damien Chazelle‘s last movie, La La Land, wore a lot of its influences on its sleeve. In fact, there were 24 movies I could recommend to fans of the Oscar-winning musical to watch afterward. With his Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man, the only earlier movie with blatant DNA visible and audible onscreen is 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which the new film pays homage. Of course, there are also tons of other precursors involving real-life and fictional space missions. So many, that this week’s Movies to Watch After… is focused on titles directly related in subject matter.

There were some more random movies I thought of while watching First Man, such as Loving during the home-life scenes. And as Justin Chang points out in his review for the Los Angeles Times, the climactic landing on the Moon shares something with Dorothy’s arrival in Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz. But I’m going with a streamlined lesson here, even if it means overlapping with numerous listicles released lately in anticipation of Chazelle’s entry into the subgenre of astronaut dramas. Below, I highlight 10 films and one miniseries, but each specific recommendation comes with additional suggestions.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Inspired by the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Georges Melies’ iconic sci-fi short was not the filmmaker’s first work involving the Moon. The previous works, known as A Nightmare and The Astronomer’s Moon, are centered around dreams and the Moon being a creature sort of existing on the same plane as the Earth. A Trip to the Moon depicts the first mission to the Moon, which is also famously portrayed as a giant face, by spacecraft. Melies is more interested in fantasy, however, than the real physics of space travel, which Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon” is astoundingly prescient about.

Many sci-fi movies released in the years ahead of NASA’s actual missions are also total fantasies — see Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent picture Woman in the Moon — though some such as the 1958 Verne adaptation From the Earth to the Moon and 1950’s Destination Moon do also try for technical accuracy. There have been cinematic trips to the Moon made after the real visits that ignored scientific fact, too, such as the 1989 Wallace and Gromit short A Grand Day Out and Pixar’s 2011 short La Luna, as well as Terry Gilliam’s Melies-inspired 1989 feature The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Countdown (1967)

Throughout the 1960s, more sci-fi movies were made that attempted to correspond with the actual space missions. They range from Richard Lester’s silly Space Race satire from 1963, The Mouse on the Moon, to John Sturges’ drama Marooned, which came out just after Armstrong’s historical feat and deals with astronauts in an emergency situation that eerily sort of prophesized the Apollo 13 mission’s problems, except here a rescue effort was needed. Then there’s the early Robert Altman movie Countdown, which opened in the US in 1968 within months of the release of 2001. Based on the 1964 novel “The Pilgrim Project,” the serious drama is very much attuned to the real US space program and its competition with the Soviets.

NASA even cooperated with the production of Countdown, and Altman filmed the launch of the Gemini 11 to be used as a mission launch in his movie. The book was also inspired by a real proposal to NASA of a one-way trip to the Moon, submitted around the time that Neil Armstrong was being interviewed to become an astronaut, as depicted in First Man including his own take on how to achieve a lunar mission. The new film also references how NASA kept having to rethink and evolve their missions, and that’s part of the scenario of Countdown, that NASA has to go with their alternative plan for Project Pilgrim, sending James Caan to the Moon to try to beat the Russians, a plan that would basically purposefully strand the first man on the Moon there until the Apollo program was perfected and could send a mission to retrieve the astronaut.

High School (1968)

While 2001 seems to be the only explicit influence on First Man, editor Tom Cross told The Hollywood Reporter of some of the less obvious inspirations: “We watched movies like The Battle of Algiers and The French Connection…A lot of our conversations had to do with the Maysleses and D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman, and those cinema verite documentaries of the 1960s — how they were put together and the ways you could join shots in such a way that it felt emotionally continuous, but actually wasn’t.”

Chazelle also referenced the documentary influence to The Washington Post; “If 2001 is the grand movie-movie treatment of space and the greatest possible version of that, you’re never going to beat that…(We thought), could we do the documentary version of that? Could we do the gritty, camera on the shoulder, 16mm, cinema verite version of space and make it feel like D.A. Pennebaker had crawled into the capsule with the astronauts?”

Neither Pennebaker nor the other named documentarians made any films about NASA or actual space travel, but Wiseman does have one film involving a space mission — well, it’s a simulation with students at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School featured in the classic feature High School. A pretty authentic-looking simulation with kids dressed as astronauts or playing members of a mission command. Twenty years later, Wiseman made Missile, which deals with nuclear missile command silos, and it features a memorial service for the Challenger astronauts killed in 1986.

Moonwalk One (1970)

As for docs about the actual Moon landing, the first to arrive was 1969’s Footprints on the Moon: Apollo 11, but this is the best-remembered — and is referenced by Chazelle to The Hollywood Reporter. While the earlier film is mostly a straight presentation of the record of the Moon landing, Moonwalk One chronicles a lot more of the preparations for Apollo 11 and the routines of Armstrong and the other astronauts as well as a lot of the aftermath, including the parades and other recognitions of the achievement. And, of course, there’s all the stuff on the lunar surface, including the planting of the American flag. Where Footprints puts the mission in the context of Verne and fantasy, Moonwalk One does so in the context of scientific history.

In the almost 50 years since Apollo 11, many other docs have been about the first Moon landing and subsequent missions. Another essential acknowledged by Chazelle is Al Reinert’s Oscar-nominated 1989 feature For All Mankind, which focuses specifically on the Apollo missions and features narration from Apollo 11 pilot Michael Collins (played by Lukas Haas in First Man) and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber in First Man) among others. There’s also 2007’s In the Shadow of the Moon, which includes interviews with 10 Apollo astronauts, including Collins, Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin. And if you saw First Man on an IMAX screen, you’ll appreciate the 2005 IMAX doc Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D.

Capricorn One (1977)

Considering how well the Moon scenes were produced for movies like Countdown and 2001, the claims that the Apollo 11 mission was a fake would seem to have some weight. And this movie, out almost a decade later, suggests the concept of faking a space mission to Mars that certainly hints at what happened with an attempt to go to the Moon. Director Peter Hyams apparently got the idea while working on the CBS broadcast of Apollo 11, years before the first public claim of a Moon landing conspiracy theory in the mid-1970s. What Capricorn One supposes is, had NASA astronauts not wanted to agree to the faking of a space mission, they’d have been assassinated and their deaths would publicly be presented as a re-entry disaster.

If this entertaining thriller starring the amazing trio of James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and O.J. Simpson, plus Elliott Gould as an investigative reporter, isn’t suggestive enough, how about the supposed hints made by 2001 director Stanley Kubrick in his 1980 Stephen King adaptation The Shining that he had staged the Moon landing? Wait, what? For that claim, watch Rodney Ascher’s cult hit documentary Room 237. Other recent movies have recently dramatized the concept that Apollo 11 was fake, including Moonwalkers from 2015, but better is the documentary-style Operation Avalanche released a year later.

The post Watch ‘First Man,’ Then Watch These Movies appeared first on Film School Rejects.

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One America News Network Stays True to Trump Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election. “There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,” the OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report. That segment was one in a spate of similar reports from a channel that has become a kind of Trump TV for the post-Trump age, an outlet whose reporting has aligned with the former president’s grievances at a time when he is barred from major social media platforms. Some of OAN’s coverage has not had the full support of the staff. In interviews with 18 current and former OAN newsroom employees, 16 said the channel had broadcast reports that they considered misleading, inaccurate or untrue. To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Donald J. Trump as “President Trump” and to President Biden as just “Joe Biden” or “Biden.” That practice is not followed by other news organizations, including the OAN competitor Newsmax, a conservative cable channel and news site. OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators. Toward the end of a March 4 news segment that described the attack as the work of “antifa” and “anti-Trump extremists” — and referred to the president as “Beijing Biden” — Mr. Sharp said, “History will show it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who called for this violence.” Investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the Capitol riot. Charles Herring, the president of Herring Networks, the company that owns OAN, defended the reports casting doubt on the election. “Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly took place in the November 2020 election,” he said. “The real question is to what extent.” Herring Networks was founded by Mr. Herring’s father, the tech entrepreneur Robert Herring, who at age 79 runs OAN with Charles and another son, Robert Jr. About 150 employees work for the channel at its headquarters in San Diego. Nielsen does not report viewership statistics for OAN, which is not a Nielsen client. (Charles Herring cited Nielsen’s “heavy fees.”) In a survey last month, Pew Research reported that 7 percent of Americans, including 14 percent of Republicans, had gotten political news from OAN. By contrast, 43 percent of Americans and 62 percent of Republicans had gotten political news from Fox News, the survey found. While OAN appeals to a relatively small audience, its coverage reflects views commonly held by Republicans. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month, about half of Republicans said they believed that the Jan. 6 attack, which left five dead, was largely a nonviolent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists. Six in 10 of Republicans surveyed said they also believed Mr. Trump’s claim that the election was “stolen.” OAN, which started in 2013, gained attention when it broadcast Mr. Trump’s campaign speeches in full before the 2016 election. In recent months, it has courted viewers who may have felt abandoned by Fox News, which on election night was the first news outlet to project Mr. Biden as the winner of Arizona, a key swing state. In a mid-November promotional ad, OAN accused Fox News of joining “the mainstream media in censoring factual reporting.” OAN’s stories “appeal to people who want to believe that the election was not legitimate,” said Stephanie L. Edgerly, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. “These are two mutually reinforcing narratives of people who want to believe it and continue to get that fire stoked by OAN.” Marty Golingan, a producer at the channel since 2016, said OAN had changed in recent years. At the start of his employment, he said, it concentrated more on neutral coverage based on reports from The Associated Press or Reuters. He saw it as a scrappy upstart where he could produce cheeky feature stories, he said. During the Trump presidency, it moved right, Mr. Golingan said. And when he was watching coverage of the pro-Trump mob breaking into the Capitol, he said, he worried that his work might have helped inspire the attack. He added that he and others at OAN disagreed with much of the channel’s coverage. “The majority of people did not believe the voter fraud claims being run on the air,” Mr. Golingan said in an interview, referring to his colleagues. He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.” Charles Herring defended OAN’s coverage. “A review process with multiple checks is in place to ensure that news reporting meets the company’s journalist standards,” he said. “And, yes, we’ve had our fair share of mistakes, but we do our best to keep them to a minimum and learn from our missteps.” Mr. Golingan added that, since Inauguration Day, OAN’s news director, Lindsay Oakley, had reprimanded him for referring to Mr. Biden as “President Biden” in news copy. Ms. Oakley did not reply to requests for comment. “OAN’s staff White House reporters use the term President Biden and then may use Mr. Biden,” Charles Herring said. “The term Biden or Biden administration may also be used.” He declined to reply to a question on the channel’s use of “President Trump” for Mr. Trump. Allysia Britton, a news producer, said she was one of more than a dozen employees who had left OAN in the wake of the Capitol riot. She criticized some of what the channel had reported, saying it was not up to journalistic standards. “Many people have raised concerns,” Ms. Britton said in an interview. “And the thing is, when people speak up about anything, you will get in trouble.” Charles Herring confirmed that about a dozen OAN workers had left in recent months, saying many of them were not high-level employees. Assignments that the elder Mr. Herring takes a special interest in are known among OAN staff as “H stories,” several current and former employees said. The day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Herring instructed OAN employees in an email, which The New York Times reviewed, to “report all the things Antifa did yesterday.” Some “H stories” are reported by Kristian Rouz, an OAN correspondent who had written for Sputnik, a site backed by the Russian government. In a report in May on the pandemic, Mr. Rouz said Covid-19 might have started as a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control,” one that had ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates, and “the deep state.” Ms. Britton, the former OAN producer, recalled checking a website that Mr. Rouz had cited to back some of his reporting. “It literally took me to this chat room where it’s just conservatives commenting toward each other,” she said. In an email to staff last month, Ms. Oakley, the news director, warned producers against ignoring or playing down Mr. Rouz’s work. “His stories should be considered ‘H stories’ and treated as such,” she wrote in the email, which The Times reviewed. “These stories are often slugged and copy-edited by ME as per Mr. H’s instructions.” OAN’s online audience is significant, with nearly 1.5 million subscribers to its YouTube channel. One of its most popular videos, with about 1.5 million views since it went online Nov. 24, criticized Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company whose equipment was used in more than two dozen states last year, including several won by Mr. Trump. Hosted by the OAN White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, the video shows a man who said he had infiltrated Dominion and heard company executives say they would “make sure” Mr. Trump lost. Dominion has sued Fox News and two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, accusing them of making or promoting defamatory claims. A lawyer for Dominion, who did not reply to requests for comment, has said the company is considering further legal action. Mr. Golingan, the producer, said some OAN employees had hoped Dominion would sue the channel. “A lot of people said, ‘This is insane, and maybe if they sue us, we’ll stop putting stories like this out,’” he said. Weeks after Dominion filed its first defamation suits, OAN broadcast a two-hour video in which the chief executive of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, made his case that widespread voter fraud had occurred. YouTube removed the video the day it was posted, saying it violated the platform’s election integrity policy. Last month, an OAN report described Dominion’s “voting machines” as “notorious.” Two of the current and former employees interviewed for this article — Dan Ball, a talk-show host, and Neil W. McCabe, a former reporter — described OAN’s coverage as unbiased. Mr. McCabe, who now writes for The Tennessee Star, said the network gave a “voice to people that are just not covered.” Susan Beachy contributed research. Source link Orbem News #America #network #news #stays #True #Trump

Media Blames Trump for Playing Golf

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Dec. 25, 2020.--Blaming 74-year-old President Donald Trump for spending Christmas and playing golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, the media continues its relentless attacks on the lame duck president with only four weeks left to his one-and-done presidency.  Trump was hated by the media because he called them out for pushing “fake news,” something that will remain in the national spotlight for years to come, if not indefinitely.  When you look at Trump’s real value as president if may very well be exposing the media for serving as a propaganda tool the Democrat Party. Never before had the media been so blatant taking sides in a U.S. presidential election.  Trump often called out the fake news at his campaign rallies, further antagonizing the press, spending all its resources to defeat Trump on Nov. 3.  When Trump says the election was rigged, he’s probably not that far off.     

        Commenting on whether or not the president played golf is another example of how the fake news media pits itself against Trump.  Trump gave it his best shot but the deck was stacked against him over the last four years with the press, both broadcast and print, spending much of their coverage on totally fake stories about his alleged ties with Russia.  Day-after-day, nigh-after-night, the media spread the fake narrative that Trump had secret ties to Russia, all stemming from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s paid opposition research AKA “The Steele Dosser,” a pile of rubbish accusing Trump of being a Russian asset.  Democrats and the media pursued the bogus narrative for all four years of Trump’s presidency, only backing off briefly when 76-year-old Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his Final Report March 23, 2019, finding there were no Russian ties.   

          But none of this mattered to Democrats and the media, relentlessly pursuing the fake narrative to hammer down Trump’s approval ratings, while he helped improve the U.S. economy and create foreign policy breakthroughs in the Middle East.  Whatever good Trump did for the U.S. economy and foreign policy, the media establishment wouldn’t report it, so eventually the public was completely brainwashed to think Trump was only doing harm to the country.  When it came to the coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19 global pandemic, Trump was systematically attacked by Democrats and the press while his administration pushed drug companies to come up with vaccines in record time.  Even now, while vaccines are rolled out in record time, the media mentions nothing about Trump, only about the waves of new Covid-19 cases swamping emergency rooms and hospitals around the country.    

         President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris told voters routinely before the Nov. 3 election that you couldn’t trust any vaccine developed under Trump’s watch.  Now that Joe and Kamala won the election, they’re all in on the vaccines, urging the same Americans that they told to avoid vaccines to now get them.  Blaming Trump now for trying to delay the bipartisan Covid-19 relief bill, the media talks about Trump playing golf at Mar-a-Lago while the rest of the country suffers.  Trump asked Congress to give $2,000 in direct payments to individuals or $4,000 a family, compared to the paltry $600 payments agreed to by Democrats and Republicans.  Yet the media blames Trump for delaying the $900 billion Covid-relief bill that spends much of the cash on Latin American governments, some enemies of the U.S., flooding the Mexican border with caravans of illegal immigrants.        

     Taking shots at Trump until he’s out of office, the media blames Trump for refusing to accept the results of the Nov. 3 election, when he has plenty of evidence that the deck was stacked against him.  Texas Secretary of State Ken Paxton said in his filing to the U.S. Supreme Court that it was impossible to uncover widespread fraud because universal mail-in ballots made it difficult to prove fraud.  Paxton’s brief to the High Court was prepared by Chapman University constitutional law expert John Eastman who said emphatically that universal mail-in ballots made detecting fraud next to impossible.   Yet all the media says is that Trump’s a sore loser, when more U.S. citizens voted for Trump than any presidential election in U.S. history, claiming that seven million more voted for Biden.  Like every other issue over the last four years, the media sided with the Democrats fake narrative.      

       Democrats and the press spend the final days of Trump’s presidency criticizing him for his decisions on pardons.  But if you really look at the bulk of the pardons, they clearly make a statement about what Trump thinks of the Russian hoax that consumed Democrats and the press for the last four years.  Weighing a possible pardon for National Security whistleblower Eric Snowden, Trump looks to make a statement about the same spying operations that harassed his campaign and presidency for four years.  Pardoning Snowden would throw Democrats and the media for a loop since they favored a Snowden’s padon.  Trump saw firsthand the dangers to a national security apparatus gone amok, with coveted U.S. law enforcement and intel agencies participating in a four-year conspiracy to undermine Trump’s 2016 and presidency.  But the media can only talk about Trump playing golf and Mar-a-Lago.

 About the Author 

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.  Reply  Reply All  Forward

New Post has been published on https://acqro.in/bbc-master-of-fake-news/

BBC: Master of Fake News

In its attempts to dissect the global disinformation epidemic, the BBC handily forgets its own history of ‘fake news’.

Earlier this month the BBC aired an informed and informative weeklong series on disinformation and fake news, “a global problem,” as they rightly put it, “challenging the way we share information and perceive the world around us.” 

What’s real? What’s distortion? The series teaches us. I watched as many of the episodes in this series as I could, and the rest I followed on the BBC website. In one episode we learn how “Nigerian police say false information and incendiary images on Facebook have contributed to more than a dozen recent killings in Plateau State – an area already torn by ethnic violence.” In another episode, we learn how in Egypt fake news becomes a weapon of choice to crush dissent. In yet another piece we learn how “smartphones are making it easier for millions of Indians to communicate and share messages on social media. But misinformation is spreading fast and can often turn deadly.”

The series then moved to tell us how “a BBC investigation has found that Russian media and officials presented false claims about a US-funded laboratory in neighbouring Georgia.” In another episode, we were told about how “fake news in Turkey is rampant, and targets many, including the BBC. But some are fighting back.”  

While watching these episodes it suddenly occurred to me, as I am sure you too have noticed, something a bit strange about this series? It is all about non-British, and non-European countries – about India, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Turkey and Thailand, which is of course perfectly fine for, no doubt, fake news is a global issue that includes these countries.

But targeting these non-European countries as the site of fake news par excellence implicitly puts European media and the BBC in particular as the arbiter of truth manifest. Fake news is something that backward black and brown people do, while real news is what the BBC and the rest of white people tell us.

That got me thinking – as we say in New York!

You fake it until you make it

This deliberate exoticism and exorcism of the fake news as something that happens among the dark people and not among the British sounds a bit, how shall I put it politely, strange to an Iranian pair of ears old enough to know the US-UK military coup against Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, and the function of official propaganda of their news media in that treacherous act. The holier than thou attitude of the US and UK official media, the BBC in this particular case, could use a bit of historical memory. It’ll teach them some humility.

Long before “fake news” had a name, the BBC was a master of fake news, in fact fake news of the most dangerous, the most vicious consequences, casting nations, not just individuals, into direct calamities. 

What I have in mind is of course the harmul role of the BBC as the propaganda machine of British imperialism around the globe. As well as in enabling and facilitating the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953 in my homeland in particular, by doing precisely what it now goes around finding darker nations doing – indulging in fake news and propaganda.

The role of BBC in the overthrow of Mosaddeq was not out of character or unusual. In a piece titled Why the taboo tale of the BBC’s wartime propaganda battle must be told published by The Guardian, David Boyle writes about characters like Noel Francis Newsome (1906-1976), who “as director of European broadcasts … led what is still the biggest broadcasting operation ever mounted, in 25 different languages for a total of just over 25 hours a day, across three wavelengths.” 

Such pieces of truth are sources of embarrassments for the BBC today, for “it was he who set out the strategy to use news as a weapon on war – it had to be not just true but also recognizably British.”

Here we learn “it was Newsome and Ritchie (his deputy Douglas Ritchie) who really created the myth of the BBC, by using news as a weapon – not quite what the myth suggests – with all the resources of culture and music and humor.”

If you think this too suspicious, then you ought to know: “Hitler’s propaganda chief Goebbels warned in 1944: ‘There is one way in which the British, despite the narrowness of their political thinking, are ahead of us – they know that news can be a weapon and are experts in its strategy’.”

This is not any brown or black person talking – these are white Germans talking about white British leading the BBC. 

BBC and the CIA/MI6 Coup of 1953

What the British and the BBC did in Iran against Mossadeq was perfectly in tune with their larger wartime and post-war propaganda machinery. Here the role of BBC in vilifying and demonising the character of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq is not even the issue. At issue is a more direct role that BBC Persian has played in that fateful event.

After years of speculative suspicion dismissed as conspiracy theories, BBC Radio 4 finally admitted, in a programme called Document, and subtitled A very British coup, the fact of this treacherous act of the BBC. “Documents reveal,” BBC now admitted, “the true extent of Britain’s involvement in the coup of 1953 which toppled Iran’s democratically elected government and replaced it with the tyranny of the Shah.”

The programme then explicitly explains: “Iran had just nationalised the very oil fields that had powered Britain through two world wars. Downing Street wanted them back. London paid Iranian agents to sow seeds of dissent in Tehran. Then, to win American support for a coup, the men from the Ministry fanned fears of a Russian invasion.”

Then comes the punch line: “Even the BBC was used to spearhead Britain’s propaganda campaign. In fact, Auntie agreed to broadcast the very code word that was to spark revolution.” By “revolution” of course they mean the coup.

The New York Times also reports: “The British, too, sought to sway the shah and assure him their agents spoke for London. A British agent, Asadollah Rashidian, approached him in late July and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC’s Persian-language program – as proof that Mr Rashidian spoke for the British.”

The same fact is reported by The Guardian: “Another man, Asadollah Rashidian, allegedly approached the shah and invited him to select a phrase that would then be broadcast at prearranged times on the BBC’s Persian language service as proof that Rashidian spoke for British intelligence.”

Sometimes even the paranoids have enemies

“Just because you’re paranoid,” Woody Allen is reported to have said only in half-jest, “doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” The same is true about conspiracy theories about the BBC. Sometimes even the paranoids are right.

The issue of the BBC role in Iranian and other countries’ politics has become so prevalent that scholars have conducted thorough research on the veracity of the matter and published meticulously documented books on the subject.

In an edited volume by Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan contact zones at the BBC World Service 1932-2012, which is an excellent study of diasporic communities and their compradorial services at the BBC,we learn how “when it came to reporting adversely on Mossadeq, for two weeks all Iranian broadcasters disappeared. The BBC had no choice but to bring in English people who spoke Persian because the Iranians had gone on strike.”

In their introduction, the editors cite Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970), whom they identify as “journalist, spy, and British diplomat,” as having said: “for the cost of a small cruiser you could recruit the services of a battle fleet” as justification for the British government funding of the BBC.

Two other scholars, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh have published an even more detailed study, Persian Service: The BBC and British Interests in Iran (2014) in which they examine “the perception” that BBC has been not just a neutral chronicler but in fact an active agent in the politics of Iran and its region at large. They concentrate on BBC Persian Service, trying to craft a neutral ground on which to interrogate both the objectivity of BBC and its perception as a soft power tool in the arsenal of British colonial and postcolonial interests.

The result is a non-committal prose that itself is implicated in equivocating between fact and fake news. In their own words they are trying to find a balance in the “inelegant dance between financial control versus editorial independence” of BBC coverage of four major episodes in recent Iranian history: the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the CIA-MI6 coup against Mossadegh in 1951-1953, the 1979 revolution, and the Green Movement of 2009.

Between fact and fake we think and live

Sreberny and Torfeh’s study is an admirable exercise in judicious scholarship. But their excellent book needed and did happily receive an excellent corrective lens by the preeminent historian of modern Iran, Professor Ervand Abrahamian. In his review of this book, he reminds us how during the wartime period “there was no pretense of objective reporting and impartial analysis. After all, George Orwell learned much about Newspeak and Doublespeak while working for the BBC Indian Department. Some suspect his Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four was modeled on the BBC building in Portland Place, London.”

Imagine that: the BBC that was the model of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth now preaches the world about “fake news!”

Abrahamian also reminds us how the abdication of Reza Shah was in no small measure engineered by the BBC: “Asa Briggs, later in his famous History of Broadcasting, wrote that this was probably the first time in history that a ruler had been hurled from the throne by radio.” 

I think Stephen Sackur should do one of his “Hardtalks” on the history of BBC as fake news.

As for the CIA/MI6 coup of 1953, Abrahamian is equally emphatic: “the British government and the BBC were equally collaborative. The latter throughout the crisis loudly echoed the former’s line that nationalisation of the oil industry would be disastrous for Iran – that it would financially bankrupt the government, that the country would not have the technical know-how to run the industry, and that Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq had refused a series of fair and just offers for compromise. After the overthrow of Mosaddeq, the BBC continued to echo the official line that there had been no military coup but a spontaneous revolt against a “dictatorial regime.”

Is that not fake news – distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the BBC? You were the mother of all fake news when it came to the fate of an entire nation.

When BBC blacklisted British critics

Abrahamian quite gently reminds the authors of this important book of a serious omission: “Even though the book details the close links between the government and the BBC during this crisis, it overlooks one major egregious case. Throughout the crisis, the Foreign Office and the British ambassador explicitly forbade the BBC to send to Tehran any reporters sympathetic to Iran. Professor Elwell-Sutton was explicitly blacklisted despite his outstanding expertise.” The British embassy denounced him as “anti-colonial and anti-British.”

Just to be clear: Abrahamian correctly points to the identically conspiratorial mindset of both the late Shah and the current ruling elite of the Islamic Republic for abusing these facts of BBC collusions with the British colonial interests in the past to conceal their own delusional conspiracies of blaming the BBC when their own actions were the main culprit of calamities that befell Iranians.

Iranians as a result are caught between a rock and a hard place: When BBC actually colludes with the British government to rob them of their democratic aspirations, and when these facts are abused by the Shah and the ruling clergy of the Islamic Republic to ascribe such aspirations to foreign conspiracies.

One must remember these historical facts not as an act of vengeance but as corrective lenses. The seismic changes in Internet possibilities no intelligent follower of news is trapped or condemned into any single site of media platform – BBC or otherwise. We can roam the globe from one news media to another, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to Europe and North America, with each news media, BBC included, giving us a fragment of truth and a lot of fake news. We watch and read them all, trust none completely, nor do we privilege anyone of them with our particular dis/trust. We dis/trust them all equally.

Today the BBC should be neither demonised nor valorised, for it is neither as demonic as its conspiratorial detractors contend nor as angelic as the BBC self-promotional advertisements sing and dance. It is just one click away from the next fusion of fact and fantasy.

This is an article from Aljazeera.

Trump has been torture for foreign correspondents in Russia Thomson Reuters Last week, President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing the Russian government to designate non-Russian media as “foreign agents,” meaning their funding and activities will come under intense scrutiny. This will create more hurdles for foreign correspondents working in the country. CNN, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle are expected to be in the firing line, according to Russian media. MOSCOW — It has never been harder to be a foreign correspondent in post-Cold War Russia than it is now, and not just for the obvious reasons. It’s not only the Russian government’s worsening secrecy and mistrust that’s making our lives in the foreign press corps difficult. It’s also the cognitive dissonance now inherent to our work. Amid the investigation into alleged collusion between U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign and the Kremlin, public demand for reporting on Russia has never been higher — but it’s nearly impossible for any journalists in Russia to add substance to the story that’s on everyone’s mind. The newfound threat of being labeled a foreign agent by the Kremlin makes the job even harder. Last week, President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing the Russian government to designate non-Russian media as “foreign agents,” meaning their funding and activities will come under intense scrutiny. CNN, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle are expected to be in the firing line, according to Russian media. But even before the new law, the Kremlin already did a fantastic job of muzzling the foreign press. It’s no accident that nearly all of the major developments in the Trump-Russia story have been reported from within the United States, rather than Russia. We in Moscow are unable to independently verify and corroborate the latest news about the country in which we are based. Consider the recent news that two former aides to Trump’s presidential campaign were charged on possible collusion with the Kremlin, with a third pleading guilty of lying to the FBI. One might think that foreign correspondents would treat this as an exciting challenge: In a non-Russian context, we would jump on the phones to contact our well-honed government sources and complement Washington’s reporting with details and nuance. Instead, most journalists in Russia I know reacted with blanket frustration. “I hate this story,” lamented one journalist at an American newspaper. “What is the point of us even being here?” asked a Western television producer. This is largely because, contrary to common belief, it has been a long time since foreign journalists have been able to cultivate, gain, or develop Kremlin sources. And if we experienced any success at doing so now, we wouldn’t be here for much longer. Viktor Rezunkov/RFE/RL Our work is closely monitored by the Russian government; it is no secret that our communications are tapped. We abide by an unwritten rulebook of self-censorship. Straying can and has meant ejection. The tidbits of information we do manage to secure could have been collected from outside Russia. U.S. officials here tell us that Washington has solid proof of Russian election meddling, but exposure of that information would jeopardize the safety of those involved in gathering and providing it. When we ask the Russian foreign ministry about the claims, we are met with a uniform, and at times hostile, denial. The only cracks that have been etched in the collusion story from this side of the Atlantic have been courtesy of Russian journalists. In mid-October TV Rain, the country’s sole independent television channel, recorded the first interview with a member from the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin’s notorious “troll factory.” The troll told the web-based outlet that they were forced to watch the Netflix series House of Cards to understand American politics. A day later, Russia’s RBC media group published a massive report into the factory’s finances and focus on the U.S. elections last year, detailing how its trolls had incited racial hatred on both sides, and stirred up debates on immigration and gun rights. Unsurprisingly, TV Rain and RBC are among the few major Russian media outlets not run by the state. It is a strange sensation being so near a story you cannot access — something like being in a warzone without ever having a clear view of the front line. The story’s players are tantalizingly close to hand. My Moscow apartment is a 15-minute walk from VEB, the state-owned development bank whose head, Sergei Gorkov, met with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner soon after the presidential election. When congressional officials in March revealed the sit-down, journalists in Moscow flooded the bank with requests for interviews. They weren’t granted them. As I spent weeks piecing together a story on Gorkov I often passed VEB’s large, semicircular building with salmon-tinted windows. But the bank I was writing about might as well have been several time zones away, or in a different country altogether. Physical proximity to it meant nothing in terms of my ability to write about it. During the summer, many foreign reporters gathered for the annual boat party, an informal event that has taken place in recent years. On the invitation, the dress code read, “Rain: Cosy Bear. Shine: Fancy Bear,” a play on the hacking groups linked by security experts to the Russian government. Putin had recently ordered Washington to cut the size of its diplomatic staff by hundreds, in response to fresh U.S. sanctions slapped on Russia for election interference. And on that warm August evening, as we circled the Kremlin several times, we talked about how this was the closest we’d get, at least for a while. Unlike the White House, but perhaps similar to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People , the Kremlin is a heavily fortified bastion of secrecy, both physically and symbolically. Russian authorities keep a tight lid on the information allowed out to the general population. The most journalists can do is sift through the same set of meager clues offered by state-run media about policymakers’ views. Like Russians across the country, we tune in each Sunday evening to watch news programs on state-run television by hosts Vladimir Soloviev and Dmitry Kiselyov . The leading pundits deliver their views on the happenings of the week, in what are widely seen as choreographed shows designed to deliver the Kremlin line. But this is less journalism than guesswork. The resulting reports often add to, rather than diminish, the cloud of mystery surrounding Russiagate. Thomson Reuters It wasn’t always like this. When I first started reporting from Russia, just over a decade ago, nobody doubted the significance of the country’s politics. But we could see the story around us, and we had access. We could call Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov on the phone (today he is almost impossible to get hold of), we would get interviews for (some) government ministers and senior executives, without waiting the obligatory maximum six weeks only to then be told that their schedules are full. Editors in the West also had wider-ranging interest in Russia stories back then; nowadays, the focus (with some exceptions, such as Foreign Policy’s reporting about Russia’s hearts-and-minds campaign in Syria , growing dissent in the Russian heartland and the church’s mounting campaign against abortion ) tends to be trained narrowly on Trump. And that may be related to the biggest problem that foreign correspondents now face, especially those who write for U.S. audiences. The discussion among Americans seems increasingly on the verge of veering into the realm of conspiracy theorizing. Yes, there were various Russian efforts to sow discord in the United States and influence the presidential election. (Though this was not the first time that Moscow has tried to do this. And the reverse has also taken place, notably when the U.S. financially backed Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential elections.) But even if we were to gain access to the upper echelons of Russian government, there’s plenty of reason to doubt we would ever find a way to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together into a single master plan. In recent weeks, independent Russian journalists have painstakingly tried to explain what the West, namely the U.S. media, has been consistently getting wrong about this story. The bottom line: The Russian government is a chaotic institution, not a streamlined machine. Putin is no arch strategist, but someone who acts on compulsion, and often at cross-purposes with himself. And so it’s unlikely Putin ever signed off on a clear plan about how, and to what extent, to interfere in the U.S. election. The motley, continually expanding cast of Russian characters to appear in the scandal were almost certainly trying to impress the Kremlin, not acting on orders from it. A lot of guesswork has always gone into trying to figure out what Putin’s Kremlin wants — and that includes people with power, as well as foreign journalists. NOW WATCH: Here’s why your jeans have that tiny front pocket December 3, 2017 at 01:58PM

Trump has been torture for foreign correspondents in Russia

Thomson Reuters

Last week, President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing the Russian government to designate non-Russian media as “foreign agents,” meaning their funding and activities will come under intense scrutiny.

This will create more hurdles for foreign correspondents working in the country. 

CNN, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle are expected to be in the firing line, according to Russian media.

MOSCOW — It has never been harder to be a foreign correspondent in post-Cold War Russia than it is now, and not just for the obvious reasons.

It’s not only the Russian government’s worsening secrecy and mistrust that’s making our lives in the foreign press corps difficult. It’s also the cognitive dissonance now inherent to our work.

Amid the investigation into alleged collusion between U.S. President Donald Trump’s election campaign and the Kremlin, public demand for reporting on Russia has never been higher — but it’s nearly impossible for any journalists in Russia to add substance to the story that’s on everyone’s mind.

The newfound threat of being labeled a foreign agent by the Kremlin makes the job even harder. Last week, President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing the Russian government to designate non-Russian media as “foreign agents,” meaning their funding and activities will come under intense scrutiny.

CNN, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle are expected to be in the firing line, according to Russian media.

But even before the new law, the Kremlin already did a fantastic job of muzzling the foreign press. It’s no accident that nearly all of the major developments in the Trump-Russia story have been reported from within the United States, rather than Russia. We in Moscow are unable to independently verify and corroborate the latest news about the country in which we are based.

Consider the recent news that two former aides to Trump’s presidential campaign were charged on possible collusion with the Kremlin, with a third pleading guilty of lying to the FBI.

One might think that foreign correspondents would treat this as an exciting challenge: In a non-Russian context, we would jump on the phones to contact our well-honed government sources and complement Washington’s reporting with details and nuance.

Instead, most journalists in Russia I know reacted with blanket frustration. “I hate this story,” lamented one journalist at an American newspaper. “What is the point of us even being here?” asked a Western television producer.

This is largely because, contrary to common belief, it has been a long time since foreign journalists have been able to cultivate, gain, or develop Kremlin sources. And if we experienced any success at doing so now, we wouldn’t be here for much longer.

Viktor Rezunkov/RFE/RLOur work is closely monitored by the Russian government; it is no secret that our communications are tapped. We abide by an unwritten rulebook of self-censorship. Straying can and has meant ejection.

The tidbits of information we do manage to secure could have been collected from outside Russia. U.S. officials here tell us that Washington has solid proof of Russian election meddling, but exposure of that information would jeopardize the safety of those involved in gathering and providing it.

When we ask the Russian foreign ministry about the claims, we are met with a uniform, and at times hostile, denial.

The only cracks that have been etched in the collusion story from this side of the Atlantic have been courtesy of Russian journalists. In mid-October TV Rain, the country’s sole independent television channel, recorded the first interview with a member from the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin’s notorious “troll factory.”

The troll told the web-based outlet that they were forced to watch the Netflix series House of Cards to understand American politics. A day later, Russia’s RBC media group published a massive report into the factory’s finances and focus on the U.S. elections last year, detailing how its trolls had incited racial hatred on both sides, and stirred up debates on immigration and gun rights. Unsurprisingly, TV Rain and RBC are among the few major Russian media outlets not run by the state.

It is a strange sensation being so near a story you cannot access — something like being in a warzone without ever having a clear view of the front line. The story’s players are tantalizingly close to hand.

My Moscow apartment is a 15-minute walk from VEB, the state-owned development bank whose head, Sergei Gorkov, met with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner soon after the presidential election. When congressional officials in March revealed the sit-down, journalists in Moscow flooded the bank with requests for interviews. They weren’t granted them.

As I spent weeks piecing together a story on Gorkov I often passed VEB’s large, semicircular building with salmon-tinted windows. But the bank I was writing about might as well have been several time zones away, or in a different country altogether. Physical proximity to it meant nothing in terms of my ability to write about it.

During the summer, many foreign reporters gathered for the annual boat party, an informal event that has taken place in recent years. On the invitation, the dress code read, “Rain: Cosy Bear. Shine: Fancy Bear,” a play on the hacking groups linked by security experts to the Russian government.

Putin had recently ordered Washington to cut the size of its diplomatic staff by hundreds, in response to fresh U.S. sanctions slapped on Russia for election interference. And on that warm August evening, as we circled the Kremlin several times, we talked about how this was the closest we’d get, at least for a while.

Unlike the White House, but perhaps similar to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the Kremlin is a heavily fortified bastion of secrecy, both physically and symbolically. Russian authorities keep a tight lid on the information allowed out to the general population. 

The most journalists can do is sift through the same set of meager clues offered by state-run media about policymakers’ views. Like Russians across the country, we tune in each Sunday evening to watch news programs on state-run television by hosts Vladimir Soloviev and Dmitry Kiselyov.

The leading pundits deliver their views on the happenings of the week, in what are widely seen as choreographed shows designed to deliver the Kremlin line. But this is less journalism than guesswork. The resulting reports often add to, rather than diminish, the cloud of mystery surrounding Russiagate.

Thomson ReutersIt wasn’t always like this. When I first started reporting from Russia, just over a decade ago, nobody doubted the significance of the country’s politics. But we could see the story around us, and we had access. We could call Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov on the phone (today he is almost impossible to get hold of), we would get interviews for (some) government ministers and senior executives, without waiting the obligatory maximum six weeks only to then be told that their schedules are full.

Editors in the West also had wider-ranging interest in Russia stories back then; nowadays, the focus (with some exceptions, such as Foreign Policy’s reporting about Russia’s hearts-and-minds campaign in Syria, growing dissent in the Russian heartland and the church’s mounting campaign against abortion) tends to be trained narrowly on Trump.

And that may be related to the biggest problem that foreign correspondents now face, especially those who write for U.S. audiences. The discussion among Americans seems increasingly on the verge of veering into the realm of conspiracy theorizing. 

Yes, there were various Russian efforts to sow discord in the United States and influence the presidential election. (Though this was not the firsttime that Moscow has tried to do this. And the reverse has also taken place, notably when the U.S. financially backed Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential elections.)

But even if we were to gain access to the upper echelons of Russian government, there’s plenty of reason to doubt we would ever find a way to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together into a single master plan.

In recent weeks, independent Russian journalists have painstakingly tried to explain what the West, namely the U.S. media, has been consistently getting wrong about this story. The bottom line: The Russian government is a chaotic institution, not a streamlined machine. Putin is no arch strategist, but someone who acts on compulsion, and often at cross-purposes with himself.

And so it’s unlikely Putin ever signed off on a clear plan about how, and to what extent, to interfere in the U.S. election. The motley, continually expanding cast of Russian characters to appear in the scandal were almost certainly trying to impress the Kremlin, not acting on orders from it. A lot of guesswork has always gone into trying to figure out what Putin’s Kremlin wants — and that includes people with power, as well as foreign journalists.

NOW WATCH: Here’s why your jeans have that tiny front pocket

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The Attack on “Fake News” is Really an Attack on Alternative Media

By Dave Lindorff, ICH, November 08, 2017

These are tough days to be a serious journalist. Report a story now, with your facts all lined up nicely, and you’re still likely to have it labeled “fake news” by anyone whose ox you’ve gored--and even by friends who don’t share your political perspective. For good measure, they’ll say you’ve based it on “alternative facts.”

Historians say the term “fake news” dates from the late 19th-century era of “yellow journalism,” but the term really took off in 2016, a little over a year ago, during Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. It described several different things, from fact-free, pro-Trump online media to sensationalistic and largely untrue stories whose only goal was eyeballs and dollars. During the primary season, Trump himself began labeling all mainstream media stories about him as “fake news.” The idea that there could be different truths, while dating at least back to the administration of President George W. Bush, when his consigliere Karl Rove claimed that the administration “made its own” reality, gained currency when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, caught making stuff up in a TV interview, claimed that she was relying on “alternative facts.”

That dodge would be fine, on its own. Most people are primed to believe that politicians lie--whatever party or persuasion they represent--so their attempts to deny it when called a conjurer of falsehoods posing tend to be recognized as such.

The corporate media--The New York Times, The Washington Post, the network news programs and even National Public Radio--have all responded to being called liars and “fake news” fabricators by promoting themselves as “the reality-based community” (NPR), or claiming they are fighting the good fight against ignorance, as demonstrated by the Post’s new masthead slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Times has stuck with its hoary “All the news that’s fit to print” slogan, but has added a page-three daily feature listing “noteworthy facts from today’s paper” and has taken to calling out Trump administration whoppers as “lies.”

Last December Congress passed a new law, promptly signed by then-President Barack Obama, that enacted an Orwellian amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Called the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, this measure tasks the State Department, in consultation with the Department of Defense, the director of national intelligence and an obscure government propaganda organization called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, to establish a “Center for Information Analysis and Response.” The job of this new center, funded by a $160 million, two-year budget allocation, would be to collect information on “foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts” and “proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests.”

What is “fake news”? The target keeps moving. This might all seem laughable, but as a journalist who has worked in this field for 45 years, in both mainstream newspapers and television and in the alternative media, and as a long-time freelancer who has written for publications as widely varied as Business Week, the Nation, the Village Voice and a collectively run news site called ThisCantBeHappening.net, I have watched as this obsession with “fake news” has turned into an attack on alternative news and alternative news organizations.

Last Nov. 24, The Washington Post published a McCarthyite-style front-page article declaring that some 200 news sites on the web were actually witting or unwitting “purveyors of pro-Russian propaganda.” The article, by Post National Security Reporter Craig Timberg, was based on the work of a shady outfit called PropOrNot, whose owner-organizers were kept anonymous by Timberg and whose source of funding was left unexplained. PropOrNot, Timberg wrote, had developed a list of sites which it had determined to be peddling “pro-Russia propaganda.”

For one of the sites on the list, the prominent left-wing journal Counterpunch, founded decades ago by former Village Voice and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, PropOrNot offered up two articles as justification for its designation. One of those articles was by me. It was a piece I’d actually written for ThisCantBeHappening, which had been republished with credit by Counterpunch. The reviewer, a retired military intelligence officer named Joel Harding (who I discovered is linked to Fort Belvoir outside Washington, home to the U.S. Army’s Information Operations Command, or INSCOM), labeled my article “absurdly pro-Russian propaganda.”

In fact, the article was a pretty straightforward report on the Sept. 29, 2016 findings by the joint Dutch-Australian investigation into the July 2014 shoot-down of a Malaysian jumbo passenger jet over Ukraine, which concluded that Russia was the culprit. I noted in the article that this investigation was not legitimate, because two nations--Russia and Ukraine--were known to possess the Buk missiles and launchers that had brought down the plane, but only one of them, Ukraine, was permitted to offer evidence. Russian offers of evidence in the case were repeatedly rebuffed. The report also failed to mention that the Ukrainian government had received veto power over any conclusions reached by the investigators.

Was my report “fake news” or propaganda? Not at all.

The fake news in this case has been what has been written and aired by virtually all of the U.S. media, including the Times, the Post and all the major networks, about that horrific tragedy. They all continue to state as fact that a Russian Buk missile downed that plane, though no honest investigation has been conducted. (Technically it is true that the Buk missiles are all “Russian,” in that they were all manufactured in Russia. Left unsaid is that Ukraine’s military had Buk launchers since their nation was part of the Soviet Union and continued to purchase them after independence.)

“Labeling news reports that you don’t like as ‘fake news’ is the laziest form of media criticism,” says Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a New York-based journalism review. “It’s like putting your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la’ really loudly. Both the government and the corporate media have reasons for not wanting the public to hear points of view that are threats to their power.”

While Kellyanne Conway claimed her right to offer “alternative facts” as a way to justify getting caught in a lie, there are also alternative facts which are real but don’t get reported in the corporate media. A classic example was in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the entire corporate media reported as fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was attempting to develop a nuclear bomb.

There were plenty of alternative news organizations who quoted UN inspectors saying that none of that was true and there were no WMDs or WMD programs in Iraq, but they were simply blacked out by the corporate media like the Times, the Post and the major news networks.

These days another dubious story is that the Russians “hacked” the server of the Democratic National Committee. It may have happened that way, but in fact, the vast intelligence system the U.S. has constructed to monitor all domestic and foreign telecommunications has offered up no hard evidence of such a hack. National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have suggested that some evidence indicates a DNC insider must have been involved.

There is certainly fake news all over the internet, and baseless conspiracies run rampant on both the left and the right. But all too often, articles like mine cited by PropOrNot (a genuine purveyor of fake news!) are being labeled as propaganda in what Naureckas says is simply “the use of irony as a defense mechanism” by news organizations that themselves are actually guilty of publishing really fake news, as the Post did with its PropOrNot blacklist “scoop.”

“What the government and the corporate media are trying to do, with the help of the big internet corporations,” argues Mickey Huff, director of the Project Censored organization in California, “is basically to shut down alternative news sites that question the media consensus position on issues.”

Already, Huff charges, there are reports that Facebook is slowing down certain sites that have links on its platform, in a misguided response to charges that it sold ad space to Russian government-linked organizations accused of trying to influence last November’s presidential election.

An end to internet neutrality, the equal access to high-speed internet for surfing and downloading that has been guaranteed to all users--but that is now under attack by the Trump administration, its Federal Communications Commission and a Republican-led Congress--would make it that much easier for such a shutdown of alternative media to happen.

The real answer, of course, is for readers and viewers of all media, mainstream or alternative, to become critical consumers of news. This means not just looking at articles critically, including this one, but going to multiple sources for information on important issues. Relying on just the Times or the Post, or on Fox News or NPR, will leave you informationally malnourished--not just uninformed but misinformed. Even if you were to read both those papers and watch both those networks, you’d often be left with an incomplete version of the truth.

To get to the truth, we need to also check out alternative news sources, whether of the left, right or center--and we need to maintain the critical distinction between unpopular or unorthodox points of view and blatant lies or propaganda. Without such a distinction, and the freedom to make such decisions for ourselves, maintaining democracy will be impossible.