'Russiagate' een verhaal van a t/m z westers 'fake news.....'

Een bericht 'bijna uit de oude doos' van 1 september jl., dat echter nog even actueel is: de ontleding van 'Russiagate' in een propagandaslag van de reguliere (massa-) media.

Bijvoorbeeld de samenwerking van Trump met Vladimir Putin over een te bouwen 'Trumptower' in Moskou. Ondanks het feit dat dit verhaal later nepnieuws bleek te zijn, blijft dit verhaal herhaald worden..... De WashingtonPost, de New York Times en de reguliere media die deze twee kranten volgen, zien in het mislukken van de bouw van deze toren het bewijs dat Rusland de verkiezing van Trump heeft gekocht. Uiteraard vertellen deze media er niet bij, dat Putin geen vinger heeft uitgestoken om het al bij voorbaat mislukte project te redden en als daar al iets over gemeld werd, is dit weggemoffeld op een plek waar de meeste mensen die niet zullen hebben gelezen........

Dan speelt er ook nog Oekraine in een strijd tussen de VS en Rusland (overgortemn met een dikke saus van anti-Rusland, anti-Putin propaganda, daarover moet niet vergeten worden, dat Janoekovytsj aanbood verkiezingen uit te schrijven, voordat een door de VS georganiseerde opstand tot een coup leidde, waarbij hij moest aftreden t.b.v. van de uiterst corrupte VS en neonazi-vriend Porosjenko...... De VS (o.l.v. Obama en Hillary Clinton) kocht deze coup voor maar liefs 4 miljard dollar....... Oekraïne is intussen zo goed als failliet en is bovendien in chaos gedompeld...... Overigens zijn de hiervoor staande feiten een aanvulling op het artikel na mijn schrijven.

Wat betreft 'Russiagate' is het nu topgraaier Zuckerberg van Facebook, die is gezwicht onder de druk van de geheime diensten in de VS en heeft verklaard dat (in feite) de Russische overheid reclames heeft gekocht, waarmee Trump de verkiezingen kon winnen. Het gaat hier om een bedrag van $ 100,000 en dat op een reclamebudget voor die verkiezingen, waarbij vergeleken die $ 100,000 een fooi is en toch heeft Rusland daarmee Trump aan de macht geholpen....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!

Lees het volgende uitstekende stuk van Robert Parry, eerder geplaatst op Consortium News en overgenomen van Anti-Media:

Russiagate: What You’re Not Being Told About the Media’s Misleading Propaganda

September 1, 2017 at 7:31 am
Written by Robert Parry

The U.S. mainstream media is touting a big break in Russiagate, emails showing an effort by Donald Trump’s associates to construct a building in Moscow. But the evidence actually undercuts the “scandal.”

(CN) — There is an inherent danger of news organizations getting infected by “confirmation bias” when they want something to be true so badly that even if the evidence goes in the opposite direction they twist the revelation to fit their narrative. Such is how The Washington Post, The New York Times and their followers in the mainstream media are reacting to newly released emails that actually show Donald Trump’s team having little or no influence in Moscow.

On Tuesday, for instance, the Times published a front-page article designed to advance the Russiagate narrative, stating: “A business associate of President Trump promised in 2015 to engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency.”

Wow, that sounds pretty devastating! The Times is finally tying together the loose and scattered threads of the Russia-influencing-the-U.S.-election story. Here you have a supposed business deal in which Putin was to help Trump both make money and get elected. That is surely how a casual reader or a Russiagate true believer would read it – and was meant to read it. But the lede is misleading.

The reality, as you would find out if you read further into the story, is that the boast from Felix Sater that somehow the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow would demonstrate Trump’s international business prowess and thus help his election was meaningless. What the incident really shows is that the Trump organization had little or no pull in Russia as Putin’s government apparently didn’t lift a finger to salvage this stillborn building project.

But highlighting that reality would not serve the Times’ endless promotion of Russiagate. So, this counter-evidence gets buried deep in the story, after a reprise of the “scandal” and the Times hyping the significance of Sater’s emails from 2015 and early 2016. For good measure, the Times includes a brief and dishonest summary of the Ukraine crisis.

The Times reported: “Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, said he had lined up financing for the Trump Tower deal with VTB Bank, a Russian bank that was under American sanctions for involvement in Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy in Ukraine. In another email, Mr. Sater envisioned a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow. ‘I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,’ Mr. Sater wrote.”

But the idea that Russia acted “to undermine democracy in Ukraine” is another example of the Times’ descent into outright propaganda. The reality is that the U.S. government supported – and indeed encouraged – a coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych even after he offered to move up scheduled elections so he could be voted out of office through a democratic process.

After Yanukovych’s violent ouster and after the coup regime dispatched military forces to crush resistance among anti-coup, mostly ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the east, Russia provided help to prevent their destruction from an assault spearheaded by neo-Nazis and other extreme Ukrainian nationalists. But that reality would not fit the Times’ preferred Ukraine narrative, so it gets summarized as Moscow trying “to undermine democracy in Ukraine.”

Empty Boasts

However, leaving aside the Times’ propagandistic approach to Ukraine, there is this more immediate point about Russia-gate: none of Sater’s boastful claims proved true and this incident really underscored the lack of useful connections between Trump’s people and the Kremlin. One of Trump’s lawyers, Michael Cohen, even used a general press email address in a plea for assistance from Putin’s personal spokesman.

Deeper in the story, the Times admits these inconvenient facts: “There is no evidence in the emails that Mr. Sater delivered on his promises, and one email suggests that Mr. Sater overstated his Russian ties. In January 2016, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asking for help restarting the Trump Tower project, which had stalled. But Mr. Sater did not appear to have Mr. Peskov’s direct email, and instead wrote to a general inbox for press inquiries.”

The Times added: “The project never got government permits or financing, and died weeks later. … The emails obtained by The Times make no mention of Russian efforts to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the hacking of Democrats’ emails.”

In other words, the Russia-gate narrative – that somehow Putin foresaw Trump’s election (although almost no one else did) and sought to curry favor with the future U.S. president by lining Trump’s pockets with lucrative real estate deals while doing whatever he could to help Trump win – is knocked down by these new disclosures, not supported by them.

Instead of clearing the way for Trump to construct the building and thus – in Sater’s view – boost Trump’s election chances, Putin and his government wouldn’t even approve permits or assist in the financing.

And, this failed building project was not the first Trump proposal in Russia to fall apart. A couple of years earlier, a Moscow hotel plan died apparently because Trump would not – or could not – put up adequate financing for his share, overvaluing the magic of the Trump brand. But one would think that if the Kremlin were grooming Trump to be its Manchurian candidate and take over the U.S. government, money would have been no obstacle.

Along the same lines, there’s the relative pittance that RT paid Gen. Michael Flynn to speak at the TV network’s tenth anniversary in Moscow in December 2015. The amount totaled $45,386 with Flynn netting $33,750 after his speakers’ bureau took its cut. Democrats and the U.S. mainstream media treated this fact as important evidence of Russia buying influence in the Trump campaign and White House, since Flynn was both a campaign adviser and briefly national security adviser.

But the actual evidence suggests something quite different. Besides Flynn’s relatively modest speaking fee, it turned out that RT negotiated Flynn’s rate downward, a fact that The Washington

Post buried deep inside an article on Flynn’s Russia-connected payments. The Post wrote, “RT balked at paying Flynn’s original asking price. ‘Sorry it took us longer to get back to you but the problem is that the speaking fee is a bit too high and exceeds our budget at the moment,’ Alina Mikhaleva, RT’s head of marketing, wrote a Flynn associate about a month before the event.”

Yet, if Putin were splurging to induce Americans near Trump to betray their country, it makes no sense that Putin’s supposed flunkies at RT would be quibbling with Flynn over a relatively modest speaking fee; they’d be falling over themselves to pay him more.

So, what the evidence really indicates is that Putin, like almost everybody else in the world, didn’t anticipate Trump’s ascendance to the White House, at least not in the time frame of these events – and thus was doing nothing to buy influence with his entourage or boost his election chances by helping him construct a glittering Trump Tower in Moscow.

But that recognition of reality would undermine the much beloved story of Putin-Trump collusion, so the key facts and the clear logic are downplayed or ignored – all the better to deceive Americans who are dependent on the Times, the Post and the mainstream media.

By Robert Parry / Republished with permission / Consortium News / Report a typo
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Zie ook:
'Putin vraagt en Trump levert: een lijst met 'alle goede zaken die Trump voor Rusland regelde''

'Russiagate: VS en buitenlandse geheime diensten hebben de VS presidentsverkiezingen in 2016 gemanipuleerd'

'Russiagate: nog overtuigd van bestaan daarvan? Lees dit!' (en zie de links in dat bericht)

'Geen rectificaties voor meer dan 2 jaar brengen van fake news over het kwaadaardig sprookje Russiagate'

'Russiagate gelovigen krijgen nieuwe klap: WikiLeaks kreeg de DNC mails van een klokkenluider, niet van Rusland.....'

'Tulsi Gabbard (pres. kandidaat VS) krijgt volgens NBC Russische steun op claim van firma die 'Russische data' fabriceert voor Republikeinen'

'De verregaande anti-Russische propaganda in de VS en de rest van het westen'

'De VS dreigt de grondwet te wijzigen ten voordele van censuur en de afschaffing van de vrijheid op meningsuiting'

 'WhatsApp beperking in strijd tegen fake news'

'Als Martin Luther King nog zou leven was hij onderwerp van censuur en was zijn Facebook pagina verwijderd'

'Massamedia VS vallen keihard door de mand met 'vers' geschoten Russiagate bok >> publiek wordt om vertrouwen gevraagd'

'Jacht in VS op alternatief (echt) nieuws in volgend stadium: journalist wordt vastgehouden zonder aanklacht'

'NewsGuard, het nieuwste wapen van Big Brother VS tegen de alternatieve media'

'Netflix censureert aflevering van humoristisch programma, 'na een geldig verzoek' op grond van Saoedische wetgeving....'

'Lichtgelovige 'atheïst' gelooft Russiagate leugens....'

Britse militaire geheime dienst bedient zich van moddergooien en andere manipulaties om Europese en VS politiek te manipuleren, zo blijkt uit gelekte documenten'

'Bedrijf dat voor 'Russische bots' waarschuwde, heeft een leger met nep-Russische bots'

''Fake news': alternatieve media en bloggers in het westen zouden onzin brengen, echter niet als dit soort groepen wat roepen in landen die het westen niet welgevallig zijn'

'Waarom de burgers van de VS de illegale oorlogen steunen'

'Democraten deden zich voor als Russen in false flag operatie om Roy Moore (Republikein) zwart te maken tijdens verkiezing.....'

'Der Spiegel, groot bestrijder van 'fake news' bracht zelf jarenlang dit soort 'nieuws''

'BBC: Rusland 'misbruikt humor' om Russiagate te ontkrachten..... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

'Uitgelekte telefoongesprekken tussen Trump en Putin bewijzen dat 'Russiagaters gelijk hebben......''

'WikiLeaks belooft The Guardian 1 miljoen dollar als het haar leugens i.z. Assange en Russiagate kan bewijzen.......' (zie ook de links naar Russiagate berichten in dat bericht)

'New York Times 'bewijzen' voor Russiagate vallen door de mand......'

'Facebook gebruikte 'fake news' beschuldiging om de aandacht voor schandalen af te leiden'

'Politico rapport bevestigt: Russiagate is een hoax'

'Obama gaf toe dat de DNC e-mails expres door de DNC werden gelekt naar Wikileaks....!!!!'

'De Israëlische manipulatie van de VS presidentsverkiezingen, gaat veel verder dan wat men Rusland in de schoenen schuift.....'

'FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web........'

''Russiagate' een complot van CIA, FBI, Hillary Clinton en het DNC...........'

'Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian Gov Hacking of 2016 Election'

'Democraten VS kochten informatie over Trump >> Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump'

'Russia Is Trolling the Shit out of Hillary Clinton and the Mainstream Media'

'Mediaorgaan Sinclair dwingt 'TV ankers' propaganda op te lezen' (Sinclair bedient rond de 70% van de VS bevolking van 'lokaal nieuws')

'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!'

'Russische 'hacks' door deskundigen nogmaals als fake news doorgeprikt >> Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence'

'Rusland krijgt alweer de schuld van hacken, nu van oplichters Symantec en Facebook....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

 'Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen........'

'CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8.....' (zie ook de andere links onder dat bericht)
'Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

'Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), 'Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws.....' Oei!!'

'Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show'

'RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links......'

'Alarm Code Geel: Lara Rense (NOS) voedt Rusland-haat'

'Kaspersky Lab (antivirus) aangevallen met agressief 'Grapperhaus virus''

Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen........

De VS regering geeft tientallen miljoenen dollars uit, om 'Russische propaganda' te bestrijden, het gevolg is een berg 'studies' door 'deskundige' ngo's, die desgevraagd (tegen een fikse beloning) bevestigen wat de overheid de VS burgers op de mouwen spelt: 'Rusland heeft de VS presidentsverkiezingen gemanipuleerd........'

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.”]

By Robert Parry / Republished with permission / Consortium News / Report a typo

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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''

New York Times met schaamteloze anti-Russische propaganda en 'fake news....'

Robert Parry legt op Consortium News uit, in een artikel overgenomen door Anti-Media, waar goed journalistiek werk o.a. aan moet voldoen: een teken dat een artikel het product is van slordige of oneerlijke journalistiek, kan gezien worden als de kern van het verhaal als feit wordt neergezet, terwijl dit niet bewezen is, of onderdeel is van een serieuze discussie. Veelal wordt zo'n artikel het fundament voor andere (niet bewezen) claims, waarmee een verhaal 'wordt gebouwd', dat gefundeerd is op los zand....

Dergelijke journalistiek zou niet in de reguliere media terecht mogen komen, echter tegenwoordig is het tegendeel vaak de praktijk, zoals we zien in de reguliere westerse (massa-) media. Neem de berichtgeving over de illegale oorlogen van de VS tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en nu weer tegen Syrië. 'Voldongen' leugens werden en worden als feiten en de enige waarheid neergezet.......

Hetzelfde geldt voor alle belachelijke claims, dat Rusland de VS verkiezingen zou hebben gemanipuleerd middels hacken en het publiceren van artikelen door o.a. Sputnik en Russia Today (RT). Daarbij worden  naast een 'tsunami' aan berichten op Facebook en Twitter, nu ook advertenties genoemd, die werden geplaatst op Facebook....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Voor al deze zogenaamde feiten, is geen nanometer bewijs, maar ze worden desondanks door diezelfde reguliere media en het merendeel van de westerse politici als de enige waarheid gezien, dit terwijl het overtuigende bewijs van het tegendeel terzijde wordt geschoven.........

Parry schrijft over een artikel dat afgelopen vrijdag over 3 pagina's werd geplaatst in the New York Times (NYT). Daarin wordt betoogt dat Rusland 'een leger van nep-Amerikanen' heeft gebruikt om de VS verkiezingen te beïnvloeden....... Of wat dacht u van: 'met een vloed aan Facebook en Twitterberichten hebben bedriegers haat en verdeeldheid gezaaid in de VS.....' ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Ja, ze durven wel hè, terwijl die zogenaamde Amerikanen elkaar al een paar eeuwen de strot kunnen afbijten!! (neem alleen al de nog steeds bestaande grove discriminatie van gekleurden in de VS....)

Facebook weigert intussen nog steeds om de advertenties vrij te geven, die volgens haar door de Russische overheid werden geplaatst....... Kortom Facebook beschuldigt een land van uiterst grove handelingen en stelt daarna vrolijk dat men maar moet geloven op de blauwe ogen van de redactie........

Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van Parry en zegt het voort!

Has the New York Times Gone Completely Insane?

September 16, 2017 at 11:31 am

Written by Robert Parry

Crossing a line from recklessness into madness, The New York Times published a front-page opus suggesting that Russia was behind social media criticism of Hillary Clinton, reports Robert Parry.

(CN) For those of us who have taught journalism or worked as editors, a sign that an article is the product of sloppy or dishonest journalism is that a key point will be declared as flat fact when it is unproven or a point in serious dispute – and it then becomes the foundation for other claims, building a story like a high-rise constructed on sand.

This use of speculation as fact is something to guard against particularly in the work of inexperienced or opinionated reporters. But what happens when this sort of unprofessional work tops page one of The New York Times one day as a major “investigative” article and reemerges the next day in even more strident form as a major Times editorial? Are we dealing then with an inept journalist who got carried away with his thesis or are we facing institutional corruption or even a collective madness driven by ideological fervor?

What is stunning about the lede story in last Friday’s print edition of The New York Times is that it offers no real evidence to support its provocative claim that – as the headline states – “To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans” or its subhead: “Flooding Twitter and Facebook, Impostors Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.”

In the old days, this wildly speculative article, which spills over three pages, would have earned an F in a J-school class or gotten a rookie reporter a stern rebuke from a senior editor. But now such unprofessionalism is highlighted by The New York Times, which boasts that it is the standard-setter of American journalism, the nation’s “newspaper of record.”

In this case, it allows reporter Scott Shane to introduce his thesis by citing some Internet accounts that apparently used fake identities, but he ties none of them to the Russian government. Acting like he has minimal familiarity with the Internet – yes, a lot of people do use fake identities – Shane builds his case on the assumption that accounts that cited references to purloined Democratic emails must be somehow from an agent or a bot connected to the Kremlin.

For instance, Shane cites the fake identity of “Melvin Redick,” who suggested on June 8, 2016, that people visit DCLeaks which, a few days earlier, had posted some emails from prominent Americans, which Shane states as fact – not allegation – were “stolen … by Russian hackers.”

Shane then adds, also as flat fact, that “The site’s phony promoters were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

The Times’ Version

In other words, Shane tells us, “The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

Besides the obvious point that very few Americans watch RT and/or Sputnik and that Shane offers no details about the alleged falsity of those “fire hose of stories,” let’s examine how his accusations are backed up:

“An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages.”

Note the weasel words: “suspected”; “believe”; ‘linked”; “fingerprints.” When you see such equivocation, it means that these folks – both the Times and FireEye – don’t have hard evidence; they are speculating.

And it’s worth noting that the supposed “army of fake Americans” may amount to hundreds out of Facebook’s two billion or so monthly users and the $100,000 in ads compare to the company’s annual ad revenue of around $27 billion. (I’d do the math but my calculator doesn’t compute such tiny percentages.)

So, this “army” is really not an “army” and we don’t even know that it is “Russian.” But some readers might say that surely we know that the Kremlin did mastermind the hacking of Democratic emails!

That claim is supported by the Jan. 6 “intelligence community assessment” that was the work of what President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts, you are hand-picking the conclusions.

Agreeing with Putin

But some still might protest that the Jan. 6 report surely presented convincing evidence of this serious charge about Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intervening in the U.S. election to help put Donald Trump in the White House. Well, as it turns out, not so much, and if you don’t believe me, we can call to the witness stand none other than New York Times reporter Scott Shane.

Shane wrote at the time: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

So, even Scott Shane, the author of last Friday’s opus, recognized the lack of “hard evidence” to prove that the Russian government was behind the release of the Democratic emails, a claim that both Putin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published a trove of the emails, have denied. While it is surely possible that Putin and Assange are lying or don’t know the facts, you might think that their denials would be relevant to this lengthy investigative article, which also could have benefited from some mention of Shane’s own skepticism of last January, but, hey, you don’t want inconvenient details to mess up a cool narrative.

Yet, if you struggle all the way to the end of last Friday’s article, you do find out how flimsy the Times’ case actually is. How, for instance, do we know that “Melvin Redick” is a Russian impostor posing as an American? The proof, according to Shane, is that “His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.”

As it turns out, the Times now operates with what must be called a neo-McCarthyistic approach for identifying people as Kremlin stooges, i.e., anyone who doubts the truthfulness of the State Department’s narratives on Syria, Ukraine and other international topics.

Unreliable Source

In the article’s last section, Shane acknowledges as much in citing one of his experts, “Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media.” Shane quotes Weisburd as admitting how hard it is to differentiate Americans who just might oppose Hillary Clinton because they didn’t think she’d make a good president from supposed Russian operatives: “Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”

According to Shane, “Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts ‘Kremlin trolls’ based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American, pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from Moscow.”

One of Weisburd’s “Kremlin trolls” turned out to be 66-year-old Marilyn Justice who lives in Nova Scotia and who somehow reached the conclusion that “Hillary’s a warmonger.” During the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, she reached another conclusion: that U.S. commentators were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias perhaps because they indeed were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias.

Shane tracked down another “Kremlin troll,” 48-year-old Marcel Sardo, a web producer in Zurich, Switzerland, who dares to dispute the West’s groupthink that Russia was responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, and the State Department’s claims that the Syrian government used sarin gas in a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013.

Presumably, if you don’t toe the line on those dubious U.S. government narratives, you are part of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. (In both cases, there actually are serious reasons to doubt the Western groupthinks which again lack real evidence.)

But Shane accuses Sardo and his fellow-travelers of spreading “what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.” In other words, if you examine the evidence on MH-17 or the Syrian sarin case and conclude that the U.S. government’s claims are dubious if not downright false, you are somehow disloyal and making Russian officials “gleeful at their success,” as Shane puts it.

But what kind of a traitor are you if you quote Shane’s initial judgment after reading the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian election meddling? What are you if you agree with his factual observation that the report lacked anything approaching “hard evidence”? That’s a point that also dovetails with what Vladimir Putin has been saying – that “IP addresses can be simply made up. … This is no proof”?

So is Scott Shane a “Kremlin troll,” too? Should the Times immediately fire him as a disloyal foreign agent? What if Putin says that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and your child is taught the same thing in elementary school, what does that say about public school teachers?

Out of such gibberish come the evils of McCarthyism and the death of the Enlightenment. Instead of encouraging a questioning citizenry, the new American paradigm is to silence debate and ridicule anyone who steps out of line.

You might have thought people would have learned something from the disastrous groupthink about Iraqi WMD, a canard that the Times and most of the U.S. mainstream media eagerly promoted.

But if you’re feeling generous and thinking that the Times’ editors must have been chastened by their Iraq-WMD fiasco but perhaps had a bad day last week and somehow allowed an egregious piece of journalism to lead their front page, your kind-heartedness would be shattered on Saturday when the Times’ editorial board penned a laudatory reprise of Scott Shane’s big scoop.

Stripping away even the few caveats that the article had included, the Times’ editors informed us that “a startling investigation by Scott Shane of The New York Times, and new research by the cybersecurity firm FireEye, now reveal, the Kremlin’s stealth intrusion into the election was far broader and more complex, involving a cyberarmy of bloggers posing as Americans and spreading propaganda and disinformation to an American electorate on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. …

“Now that the scheming is clear, Facebook and Twitter say they are reviewing the 2016 race and studying how to defend against such meddling in the future. … Facing the Russian challenge will involve complicated issues dealing with secret foreign efforts to undermine American free speech.”

But what is the real threat to “American free speech”? Is it the possibility that Russia – in a very mild imitation of what the U.S. government does all over the world – used some Web sites clandestinely to get out its side of various stories, an accusation against Russia that still lacks any real evidence?

Or is the bigger threat that the nearly year-long Russia-gate hysteria will be used to clamp down on Americans who dare question fact-lite or fact-free Official Narratives handed down by the State Department and The New York Times?

By Robert Parry / Republished with permission / Consortium News / Report a typo

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Zie ook: 'JULIAN ASSANGE OFFERS U.S. GOVERNMENT PROOF RUSSIA WASN’T SOURCE OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEAKS, SAYS WSJ' (op Stan van Houcke die het overnam van Global Research)