De reguliere (massa-) media in de VS en de rest van het westen, lepelen deze 'studies' op als was het de waarheid en het leven, hoe beroerd die 'studies' ook in elkaar steken, precies zoals die media de leugens van de Democratische Partij, plus die van de geheime diensten CIA, NSA en FBI, keer op keer blijven herhalen, terwijl er geen nanometer bewijs wordt gegeven..... Aan de andere kant zijn er stapels bewijzen van het tegendeel: zoals het bewijs dat een medewerker van het Clinton campagneteam de documenten lekte, waarin te vinden is hoe Clinton haar democratische concurrent Bernie Sanders de voorverkiezing tot democratisch presidentskandidaat heeft ontstolen..........
The New York Times (NYT), CNN en The Washington Post spelen ook hier weer een prominente kwalijke rol, door de bevindingen van deze ngo's over te nemen. Zo nam de NYT 'de constatering' over dat een groot aantal 'aan Rusland gelinkte' Twitteraccounts, zijn gebruikt in het 'NFL-schandaal', u weet wel de de VS voetbalspelers, die 'niet in de houding wensten te staan' bij het spelen van het VS volkslied......
Met andere woorden: alles wat er mis gaat in de VS wordt intussen toegeschreven aan Rusland.....
Lees het volgende uiterst getailleerd artikel van Robert Parry op Consortium News, overgenomen door Anti-Media. Uiteraard zal dit artikel, zoals intussen zoveel andere, de reguliere media niet halen, daar dan de door deze media maandenlang gebrachte anti-Russische propaganda als één grote leugen zal worden ontmaskerd.......... De westerse bevolking zou daarna pas echt weten, wie er m.n. nepnieuws (of: 'fake news') brengen: de reguliere media.........
The Truth About Russiagate: What the Media Doesn’t Want You to Know
September
28, 2017 at 10:41 pm
Written
by Robert
Parry
As
the U.S. government doles out tens of millions of dollars to “combat
Russian propaganda,” one result is a slew of new “studies” by
“scholars” and “researchers” auditioning for the loot,
reports Robert Parry.
(CN) — The
“Field of Dreams” slogan for America’s NGO's should be: “If
you pay for it, we will come.” And right now, tens of millions of
dollars are flowing to non-governmental organizations if they will
buttress the thesis of Russian “meddling” in the U.S. democratic
process no matter how sloppy the “research” or how absurd the
“findings.”
And,
if you think the pillars of the U.S. mainstream media – The
Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and others – will apply
some quality controls, you haven’t been paying attention for the
past year or so. The MSM is just as unethical as the NGOs are.
So,
we are now in a phase of Russiagate in which NGO “scholars”
produce deeply biased reports and their nonsense is treated as
front-page news and items for serious discussion across the MSM.
Yet,
there’s even an implicit confession about how pathetic some of this
“scholarship” is in the hazy phrasing that gets applied to the
“findings,” although the weasel words will slip past most
unsuspecting Americans and will be dropped for more definitive
language when the narrative is summarized in the next day’s
newspaper or in a cable-news “crawl.”
For
example, a Times front-page
story on
Thursday reported that “a network of Twitter accounts suspected of
links to Russia seized on both sides of the [NFL players kneeling
during the National Anthem] issue with hashtags, such as #boycottnfl,
#standforouranthem and #takeaknee.”
The
story, which fits neatly into the current U.S. propaganda meme that
the Russian government somehow is undermining American democracy by
stirring up dissent inside the U.S., quickly spread to other news
outlets and became the latest “proof” of a Russian “war”
against America.
However,
before we empty the nuclear silos and exterminate life on the planet,
we might take a second to look at the Times phrasing: “a network of
Twitter accounts suspected of links to Russia.”
The
vague wording doesn’t even say the Russian government was involved
but rather presents an unsupported claim that some Twitter accounts
are “suspected” of being part of some “network” and that this
“network” may have some ill-defined connection – or “links”
– to “Russia,” a country of 144 million people.
‘Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon’
It’s
like the old game of “six degrees of separation” from Kevin
Bacon. Yes, perhaps we are all “linked” to
Kevin
Bacon somehow but that doesn’t prove that we know Kevin Bacon or
are part of a Kevin Bacon “network” that is executing a grand
conspiracy to sow discontent by taking opposite sides of issues and
then tweeting.
Yet
that is the underlying absurdity of the Times article by Daisuke
Wakabayashi and Scott Shane. Still, as silly as the article may be
that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. The Times’ high-profile
treatment of these gauzy allegations represents a grave danger to the
world by fueling a growing hysteria inside the United States about
being “at war” with nuclear-armed Russia. At some point, someone
might begin to take this alarmist rhetoric seriously.
Yes,
I understand that lots of people hate President Trump and see
Russiagate as the golden ticket to his impeachment. But that doesn’t
justify making serious allegations with next to no proof, especially
when the outcome could be thermonuclear war.
However,
with all those millions of dollars sloshing around the NGO world and
Western academia – all looking for some “study” to fund that
makes Russia look bad – you are sure to get plenty of takers. And,
we should now expect that new “findings” like these will fill in
for the so-far evidence-free suspicions about Russia and Trump
colluding to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton.
If
you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where
Russiagate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:
“Since
last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a
bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy
research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter
accounts — human users and suspected bots alike — they have
linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts
pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.
“Of
80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25
percent ‘had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,’ the
researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton,
falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa — short for
anti-fascist — protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack
in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea’s
use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal
investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign
chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for
President Trump’s earlier wiretapping claims.”
The Neocons, Again!
So,
let’s stop and unpack this Times’ reporting. First, this Alliance
for Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization
but a neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on its
advisory board such
neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom
House president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners
such as former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.
How
many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was
hiding WMDs back in 2003?
This
group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty
of patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make
billions of dollars from the New Cold War.
The
neocons also have been targeting
Russia for regime change for
years because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief
obstacle to their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for
“regime change” in Syria and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.
Russiagate has served the neocons well as a very convenient way to
pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives into the neocon agenda
because Russiagate is sold as a powerful weapon for the anti-Trump
Resistance.
The
Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million
accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate
for a front-page story in the Times, don’t you think?
And,
there’s the definitional problem of what constitutes
“anti-Americanism” in a news article. And what does it mean to be
“linked to Russian influence operations”? Does that include
Americans who may not march in lockstep to the one-sided State
Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and Syria? Any
deviation from Official Washington’s groupthink makes you a “Moscow
stooge.”
And,
is it a crime to be “critical” of Hillary Clinton or to note that
the U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump’s claims about
being wiretapped only for us to find out later that the
FBI apparently was wiretapping his
campaign manager?
However,
such questions aren’t going to be asked amid what has become a
massive Russiagate groupthink, dominating not just Official
Washington, but across much of America’s political landscape and
throughout the European Union.
Why the Bias?
Beyond
the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the
introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S.
government, NATO and European institutions to support
the business of
“combatting Russian propaganda.”
For example, last December, President Obama signed into law a $160 million funding mechanism entitled the “Combating Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.” But that amounts to only a drop in the bucket considering already existing Western propaganda projects targeting Russia.
So,
a scramble is on to develop seemingly academic models to “prove”
what Western authorities want proven: that Russia is at fault for
pretty much every bad thing that happens in the world, particularly
the alienation of many working-class people from the
Washington-Brussels elites.
The
truth cannot be that establishment policies have led to massive
income inequality and left the working class struggling to survive
and thus are to blame for ugly political manifestations – from
Trump to Brexit to the surprising support for Germany’s far-right
AfD party. No, it must be Russia! Russia! Russia! And there’s a lot
of money on the bed to prove that point.
There’s
also the fact that the major Western news media is deeply invested in
bashing Russia as well as in the related contempt for Trump and his
followers. Those twin prejudices have annihilated all professional
standards that would normally be applied to news judgments regarding
these flawed “studies.”
On
Thursday, The Washington Post ran its own
banner-headlined story drawn
from the same loose accusations made by that neocon-led Alliance for
Securing Democracy, but instead the Post sourced the claims to Sen.
James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. The headline read: “Russian trolls are
stoking NFL controversy, senator says.”
The
“evidence” cited by Lankford’s office was one “Twitter
account calling itself Boston Antifa that gives its geolocation as
Vladivostok, Russia,” the Post reported.
By
Thursday, Twitter had suspended the Boston Antifa account, so I
couldn’t send it a question, but earlier this month, Dan Glaun, a
reporter for Masslive.com, reported
that the people behind
Boston Antifa were “a pair of anti-leftist pranksters from Oregon
who started Boston Antifa as a parody of actual anti-fascist groups.”
In
an email to me on Thursday, Glaun cited an
interview that
the Boston Antifa pranksters had done with right-wing radio talk show
host Gavin McInnes last April.
And,
by the way, there are apps
that let you manipulate your
geolocation data on Twitter. Or, you can choose to believe that the
highly professional Russian intelligence agencies didn’t notice
that they were telegraphing their location as Vladivostok.
Mindless Russia Bashing
Another
example of this mindless Russia bashing appeared just below the
Post’s story on Lankford’s remarks. The Post sidebar cited
a “study” from researchers at Oxford University’s Project on
Computational Propaganda asserting that “junk news” on Twitter
“flowed more heavily in a dozen [U.S.] battleground states than in
the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016
presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted
the most pivotal voters.” Cue the spooky Boris and Natasha music!
Of
course, any Americans living in “battleground states” could tell
you that they are inundated with all kinds of election-related
“junk,” including negative TV advertising, nasty radio messages,
alarmist emails and annoying robo-calls at dinner time. That’s why
they’re called “battleground states,” Sherlock.
But
what’s particularly offensive about this “study” is that it
implies that the powers-that-be must do more to eliminate what these
“experts” deem “propaganda” and “junk news.” If you read
deeper into the story, you discover that the researchers applied a
very subjective definition of what constitutes “junk news,” i.e.,
information that the researchers don’t like even if it is truthful
and newsworthy.
The
Post article by Craig
Timberg, who apparently is using Russiagate to
work himself off the business pages and onto the national staff,
states that “The researchers defined junk news as ‘propaganda and
ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political
news and information.’
“The
researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from
WikiLeaks – which published embarrassing posts about Democrat
Hillary Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman’s emails –
as ‘polarizing political content’ for the purpose of the
analysis.”
So,
this “study” lumped together “junk news” with accurate and
newsworthy information, i.e., WikiLeaks’ disclosure of genuine
emails that contained such valid news as the contents of Clinton’s
speeches to Wall Street banks (which she was trying to hide from
voters) as well as evidence of the unethical tactics used by the
Democratic National Committee to sabotage Sen. Bernie Sanders’s
campaign.
Also
dumped into the researchers’ bin of vile “disinformation” were
“reports from Russia,” as if everything that comes out of Russia
is, ipso facto, “junk news.”
And,
what, pray tell, is “conspiratorial political news”? I would
argue that the past year of evidence-lite allegations about “Russian
meddling” in the U.S. election accompanied by unsupported
suspicions about “collusion” with the Trump campaign would
constitute “conspiratorial political news.” Indeed, I would say
that this Oxford “research” constitutes “conspiratorial
political news” and that Timberg’s article qualifies as “junk
news.”
Predictable
Outcome
Given
the built-in ideological bias of this “research,” it probably
won’t surprise you that the report’s author, Philip N. Howard,
concludes that “junk news originates from three main sources that
the Oxford group has been tracking: Russian operatives, Trump
supporters and activists part of the alt-right,” according to the
Post.
I suppose
that since part of the “methodology” was to define “reports
from Russia” as “junk news,” the appearance of “Russian
operatives” shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but the whole
process reeks of political bias.
Further
skewing the results, the report separated out information from
“professional news organizations [and] political parties” from
“some ‘junk news’ source,” according to the Post. In other
words, the “researchers” believe that “professional news
organizations” are inherently reliable and that
outside-the-mainstream news is “junk” – despite the MSM’s
long record of getting major stories wrong.
The
real “junk” is this sort of academic or NGO research that starts
with a conclusion and packs a “study” in such a way as to
guarantee the preordained conclusion. Or as the old saying goes,
“garbage in, garbage out.”
Yet,
it’s also clear that if you generate “research” that feeds the
hungry beast of Russiagate, you will find eager patrons doling out
dollars and a very receptive audience in the mainstream media.
In
a place like Washington, there are scores if not hundreds of reports
generated every day and only a tiny fraction get the attention of the
Times, Post, CNN, etc., let alone result in published articles. But
“studies” that reinforce today’s anti-Russia narrative are sure
winners.
So,
if you’re setting up a new NGO or you’re an obscure academic
angling for a lucrative government grant as well as some flattering
coverage in the MSM, the smart play is to join the new gold rush in
decrying “Russian propaganda.”
[For
more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Rise of the New McCarthyism”;
“WPost
Pushes More Dubious Russia-Bashing”;
“The
Crazy Imbalance of Russiagate”;
and “More
Holes in Russiagate Narrative.”]
Zie ook: 'FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web........'
en: 'Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election'
en: 'Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump'
en: 'Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media'
en: 'CIA chef Pompeo waarschuwt voor complot van WikiLeaks om de VS op alle mogelijke manieren neer te halen....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'
en: 'Russische 'hacks' door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence'
en: 'Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'
en: ''Russiagate' een verhaal van a t/m z westers 'fake news.....''
en: ''Fake News' hysterie willens en wetens gelanceerd om sociale media tot zwijgen te brengen, Rusland te demoniseren en daarmee de waarheid te verbergen........'
en: 'Rusland zou onafhankelijkheid Californië willen uitlokken met reclame voor borsjt.......'
en: 'Clinton te kakken gezet: Donna Brazile (Democratische Partij VS) draagt haar boek op aan Seth Rich, het vermoorde lid van DNC die belastende documenten lekte'
en: 'CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8.....' (zie ook de andere links onder dat bericht)
en: 'Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'
en: 'Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), 'Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws.....' Oei!!'
en: 'Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show'
en: 'RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links......'
en: 'Pompeo (CIA opperhoofd met koperen fluit): heeft alle aanwijzingen dat Rusland de midterm verkiezingen zal manipuleren......'
en: ''Russiagate' een complot van CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton en het DNC...........'
en: 'Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show'
en: 'Kaspersky Lab (antivirus) aangevallen met agressief 'Grapperhaus virus''
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