In dit artikel o.a. aandacht voor journalist Sharyl Attkisson, die zich afvroeg of 'fake news' (nepnieuws in de labels direct onder dit bericht) echt is, of zelf een gefabriceerde term is. Ofwel of 'fake news' een vehikel is waarmee men terechte kritiek op de berichtgeving van de reguliere (massa-) media en het brengen van artikelen 'met een iets andere kijk op de waarheid' (ofwel veelal waarachtig nieuws), als niet ter zake doend en als onzin afschildert......
Zoals de regelmatige lezer van dit blog weet, ben ik overtuigd van het laatste: de term 'fake news' is verzonnen om sociale media, die de waarheid blootleggen, de mond te snoeren......
Lees en oordeel zelf:
What You’re Not Being Told About Fake News and Russian Propaganda
February
19, 2018 at 7:03 am
Written
by The
Mind Unleashed
(TMU) — “Is
‘fake news’ real?” asked
investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson during a Tedx
talk this
month — posing the paradoxical question in the context of its
explosion in popularity during the 2016 presidential election — or
is the term, fake
news,
itself, a fabrication?
In
its absurd extreme, identifiably fake news appears on supermarket
shelves as tabloid magazines, in ‘reports’ on human births of
alien hybrid babies and other blatant fabrications; while its more
pernicious iteration, issued by traditional pillars of journalism —
such as the New York Times and Washington
Post, among many others — manifests in reports citing
unsubstantiated sources and unnamed ‘officials,’ and often favors
corporate sponsors as well as the political establishment.
Fake
news isn’t new to the media landscape, in other words, but
the catchphrase, as a descriptor, is.
Thus,
what if fake news — peddled to the public as a pressing problem in
need of solution — is itself a deception,
intentionally constructed to silence legitimate critique, opposing
viewpoints, and dissent?
Attkisson,
who surmised the abrupt entrée of an artificial problem must have
had assistance, investigated the origins of the phrase, ‘fake
news,’ and its employment as accusation and insinuation, whether or
not accompanied by substantiating evidence. And she was frighteningly
on point.
“What
if the whole anti-fake news campaign was an effort on somebody’s
part to keep us from seeing or believing certain websites and stories
by controversializing them or labeling them as fake news?” the
seasoned journalist and winner of the Edward R. Murrow award for
investigative reporting asks.
Weighing
the evidence, timeline, and money trail Attkisson discovered —
coupled with the resulting heavy-handed crackdown on social media and
video-sharing platforms, as well as by search engines and
advertisers, on the fictitious false information crisis — not only
does it seem likely the term was premeditated and unleashed as a
propaganda device, but as a loaded weapon inherently threatening to
the future of the free press as protectively enshrined in the First
Amendment.
With
decades of experience, Attkisson’s hunch — that the specific term
‘fake news’ did not spread like acrid wildfire of its own
volition — found factual corroboration.
In
mid-September 2016, the nonprofit group, First Draft — funded in
part, according
to an
archive of the site, by grants from the “John
S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Open
Society Foundation and
the Ford Foundation” —
announced its mission “to
tackle malicious hoaxes and fake news reports.”
“First
Draft — a project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and
Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government — uses research-based methods to fight mis- and
disinformation online. Additionally, it provides practical and
ethical guidance in how to find, verify and publish content sourced
from the social web,” the
site’s About section states.
“The
goal was supposedly to separate wheat from chaff,” Attkisson
explains, “to
prevent unproven conspiracy talk from figuring prominently in
internet searches. To relegate today’s version of the alien baby
story to a special internet oblivion.”
However
innocuous-sounding that agenda, just one month passed before First
Draft’s battle against fake news found a megaphone in the
president, as Obama abruptly “insisted in
a speech that he too thought somebody needed to step in and curate
information of this wild, wild west media environment,” she
notes.
But
there hadn’t been
a ruckus, much less a few lone voices, griping about fake news as an
issue of any import — or even complaining, at all.
“Nobody
in the public had been clamoring for any such thing,” Attkisson
continues, “yet,
suddenly, the topic of fake news dominates headlines on a daily
basis. It’s as if the media had been given its marching orders.
“Fake
news, they insisted, was an imminent threat to American Democracy.”
Aware “few
themes arise” in
the mass media environment “organically,” the
seasoned investigator followed the money to First Draft’s funders —
to discern which interested parties might be backing the rally
against fake news. Google, in fact, financed the group “around
the start of the election cycle” —
Google, whose parent company Alphabet’s CEO Eric
Schmidt both
acted as adviser and multi-million-dollar donor to the presidential
campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Mirroring
Obama’s lament, Clinton soon championed quashing fake news as a
priority — and her “surrogate, David Brock of Media
Matters, privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook
to join the effort,” she adds.
“I’m
not the only one who thought that the whole thing smacked of the
roll-out of a propaganda campaign.”
Indeed,
the nascent fake
news allegation almost exclusively centered around
conservative-leaning outlets, journalists, and articles perceived as
favoring then-candidate Trump — and repeatedly alongside
allegations those media entities were acting directly, indirectly, or
haplessly at the behest of the Russian government — while the
majority of the mud-slinging was levied without
proof or the flimsiest of supporting evidence.
To
wit, a succession of pieces published by mass media dispensed with
the indispensable journalistic protocols of source- and fact-checking
— then shied away from accepting responsibility for the incendiary
and damaging claims once a furious backlash ensued.
Although
Attkisson did not mention them specifically in the roughly ten-minute
Tedx talk at the University of Nevada, two lists published at the
height of the Fake News Scare — both of which were either
republished or alluded and linked to by multiple corporate outlets —
came into public purview under highly suspect circumstances, each
lending albeit indirect credence to the hypothesis a propaganda
crusade was underway.
On
November 13, 2016, Merrimack College associate professor Melissa
Zimdars out of the blue made public a Google document entitled,
“False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’
Sources,” she later described as essentially a worksheet intended
for colleagues and students to offer one another tips for avoiding
disseminating fake news.
“So
… I posted it to Facebook to my friends, you know, ‘Hey, media
and communication people, if you think of other examples you come
across,’” she
explained of the list’s creation to USA
Today College in
an interview, “and
so many of them sent me Facebook messages or comments and emails and
I looked through them or through some of the people sent me blogs or
other sources.”
Admittedly,
without vetting whether or not each (or even a few) of the sites
conjured from that Facebook post deserved a place on the inflammatory
list, Zimdars committed the precise journalistic fraud putatively
motivating its formation in the first place — as did the Los
Angeles Times,
whose piece,
“Want
to keep fake news out of your newsfeed? College professor creates
list of sites to avoid,” let loose the unverified, unchecked, and
unauthenticated aggregation, with its purely subjective guidelines,
onto a populace stirred to frenzy over fake news, to expectedly viral
results.
Critics
and listees — many of which cogently included established if
smaller conservative and pro-Trump outlets, as well as those covering
the deluge of corruption allegations spawned from a series of leaks
against then-candidate Clinton, John Podesta, and the Democratic
National Committee — lambasted Zimdars, the Times, and other
propagators for failing the integrity litmus test. Slapped with
requests for removal and a firestorm of fury, Zimdars temporarily
revoked public access to the contentious list with vows to edit and
update information as appropriate, and authored an editorial
defense,
appearing in the Post on
November 18, titled, “My ‘fake news list’ went viral. But
made-up stories are only part of the problem.”
Despite
the mayhem and arguable damage it caused to myriad legitimate sources
listed among the obvious disinformation outlets, Zimdars’ list is
once again open to the public — on Google Docs.
After
having established itself as a defender of
the associate professor’s worksheet, the Washington
Post took
the L.A.
Times’
lead, issuing an article on November 24 almost wholly pertaining to a
list it failed to embed or even link — only the name of the
problematic organization, PropOrNot, provided clues for readers
dedicated enough to search on their own. And they did in droves.
But
the Post’s reckless foray into tabloidesque journalism
— perhaps wary of negative perception beginning to foment against
the anti-fake news brigade — crossed several lines demarcating
standards of journalism; and weaved another narrative of equally
dubious stature into the already unraveling anti-disinformation war:
Russia.
“Russian
propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election,
experts say,” the outlet proclaimed
in the title for
the article — whose un-accompanying blacklist pegged hundreds of
independent, conservative,
pro-Bernie Sanders, pro-Trump, and even left-leaning and
award-winning sites as suddenly verboten due to direct or indirect
Russian influence, or for acting as Russia’s “useful
idiots” —
all while vocally preserving the anonymity of the “four
sets of researchers” responsible.
Among them, PropOrNot.
“The
flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a
sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread
misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat
Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining
faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked
the operation,” the
piece’s lede contends.
But,
devoid named sources to question, transparency of methodologies, nor
any other potentially mitigating factors which would have allowed
independent verification contained in the original article, outrage
this time included the Post’s competition.
In
fact, several organizations listed as ‘allies’ by PropOrNot
immediately disavowed the claim. Eliot Higgins of research-focused
Bellingcat, one of several entities named as such, tweeted
that prior to the Post’s article, he had never heard of PropOrNot —
incidentally indicating a lack of contact by reporters from the media
organization — and, further, he “never
gave permission to them to call Bellingcat ‘allies.’”
Behind
Every Piece of Fake News You See.” Effectively destroying every
facet of the Post’s anathema piece, Ingram points out there
is “also
little data available on the PropOrNot report, which describes a
network of 200 sites who it says are ‘routine peddlers of Russian
propaganda,’ which have what it calls a ‘combined audience of 15
million Americans.’ How is that audience measured? We don’t know.
Stories promoted by this network were shared 213 million times, it
says. How do we know this? That’s unclear.”
Ultimately
forced into addressing the resulting chaos, the Washington
Post article eventually
bore a note from the editor — not a retraction — asserting [with
emphasis added],
“The
Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets
of researchers who have examined what
they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American
democracy and interests.
One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists
on public anonymity,
which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its
view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian
propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included
on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not
on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and
conclusions. The
Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for
the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media
outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since
publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites
from its list.”
To
reiterate, the Post did not retract the article abruptly conflating
fake news with Russian propaganda — regardless the brazen if
planned distancing of itself from the content therein — and has
never divulged its justification for publishing such threadbare work,
nor for allowing the empty allegations to remain available for the
world to read online in perpetuity.
On
January 8, 2017, amid continued outrage over specious and vapid fake
news and Russian propaganda accusations, Washington
Post columnist
Margaret Sullivan declared the entirety of the outlet’s relentless
anti-fake news jihad null, titling an article,
“It’s time to retire the tainted term ‘fake news,’”
positing the term’s mere monthslong duration may have served a
purpose at its advent, but “its
meaning already is lost.”
Attkisson
notably emphasizes, however, the term never imparted a steel
definition nor universally agreed-upon guidelines delineating
precisely what it constitutes. That ambiguity disputably explains
placing the term front and center in a propaganda campaign — as it
is sharply suggested by Attkisson’s funding investigation of First
Draft with bulk of the aforementioned body of evidence — for doubt
before persuasion wields power.
For
its irresponsible reporting of the unsubstantiated blacklist, false
claims Russia
had hacked into
Vermont’s power grid, and all-out push to — for all intents and
purposes — vilify or discredit opposing but legitimate viewpoints,
the Washington
Post and
its controversial owner Jeff
Bezos,
also CEO of Amazon,
garnered praise from failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,
who professed without a hint of irony to an audience May 31, 2017, at
the annual Code Conference, as quoted
by CNBC,
“I
think Jeff Bezos saved The Washington Post. But newspapers, like the
Post, the Journal, the Times, others — still drive news. … It was
a very good use of his financial resources. Because now we have a
very good newspaper again operating in Washington, and driving news
elsewhere.”
All
bold tit-for-tat back-patting aside, Clinton’s adoration for an
ostensive news organization, which displayed an egregious lack
of journalistic standards on several occasions might be only telling,
were the audacious effort to mute dissenting and critical voices —
who had reported factually on damning evidence of layers of
corruption plaguing the former secretary of state’s campaign,
officials, and party as divulged by Wikileaks — not also tandemly
gaining momentum.
It
has been theorized the work of journalists not employed by
traditional, corporate mass media organizations had — in wading
through the vitriol of election season to report the avalanche of
information dumped in leaks and pivotal to outcome, yet ignored by
mass media — assisted in stoking rage against the establishment and
was responsible for the concurrent astronomical success of the
Sanders campaign, to the detriment and consternation of Clinton.
Whether
or not that hypothesis holds weight, that responsible reporting
picked up mainstream’s slack, as the big-name outlets instead
trained their audiences’ attentions on questioning Wikileaks,
whistleblowers, and similar diversions. In short, the widely-varied
body of independent media became essential for the dissemination of
accurate information. But that vitality, under the vacuous premise of
combating fake news, is being strangled by oppressive social
media algorithms,
yanked advertising and
sponsor dollars, and other tactics perhaps comprising the truer
imminent threat to vestiges of democracy: censorship,
through suppression and omission,
of a free press.
This
debilitating loss — the neutering of media still upholding its duty
to question government and report facts for their own sake — to a
concerted effort to solve the manufactured fake news problem would be
irrevocable tragedy.
Attkisson
— a noted dissenting
voice, critical of
lapdog media, herself — stopped short of a definitive conclusion
regarding a coordinated propaganda campaign, warning,
“What
you need to remember is that when interests are working this hard to
shape your opinion, their
true goal might
just be to add another layer between you and the truth.”
Zie ook: 'VS begint 'troll farm', alsof Hollywood en de massamedia al niet genoeg VS propaganda maken..........'
en: 'Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump' (artikel in Nederlands)
en: 'BBC World Service en BNR met 'fake news' over Ghouta........'
en: 'Syrische nonnen spreken zich uit tegen de oorlogspropaganda van westerse mogendheden en de reguliere westerse (massa-) media'
en: 'Massamedia VS vergeven van CIA 'veteranen', alsof die media nog niet genoeg 'fake news' ofwel leugens brengen........'
en: 'Russiagate, of: hoe de media u belazeren met verhalen over Russische bemoeienis met de VS presidentsverkiezingen........'
en: 'BBC publieksmanipulatie via het nieuws: Rusland steunt de slechteriken......' (met daaronder meerdere links naar BBC propaganda berichten, dan wel berichten over die propaganda)
en: 'FBI, de spin in het Russiagate web........'
en: 'Anti-Russische-Putin propaganda op Radio1, ofwel Godfroid uit de bocht met 10 km/u........'
en: 'BBC gaat met stafleden scholen af in de strijd tegen 'fake news...' ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'
en: 'Trump administratie manipuleert de bevolking middels 'fake news' richting oorlog met Iran.................'
en: 'RT America één van de eerste slachtoffers in een heksenjacht op westerse alternatieve media en nadenkend links......'
en: 'Ollongren gesteund door Thomas Boesgaard (AD), 'Rusland verpakt het nepnieuws gekoppeld aan echt nieuws.....' Oei!!' (ja ook deze D66 plork gaat plat op de bek!)
en: 'Syrië: Vlaamse pater roept op niet langer de westerse anti-Syrië propaganda te geloven!'
en: 'Kajsa Ollongren (D66 vicepremier): Nederland staat in het vizier van Russische inlichtingendiensten....... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'
en: 'Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show'
en: 'Ollongren (D66 minister) schiet een levensgrote bok met fake news show'
en: ''BBC Propaganda' 'Ken Loach just proved beyond doubt that the BBC is brainwashing the British public'' [VIDEO]
en: 'Extracting Aleppo from the Propaganda: Interviewwith Eva Bartlett, an independent western journalists covering the horrific conflict in Syria'. (van Information Clearing House, inclusief mogelijkheid tot vertaling)
en: 'CIA Chief Admits the Agency’s Role in the Syrian War' (de bloedige rol wel te verstaan.....) (een artikel met mogelijkheid tot vertaling)
en: 'Former UK Ambassador to Syria Debunks Aleppo Propaganda' (met mogelijkheid tot vertaling
en: 'Aleppo, de propagandaslag o.a. middels grove leugens in de reguliere westerse media en politiek...........'
en: 'Iraakse strijdmacht gaf grif toe dat tot hun orders voor West-Mosul ook het vermoorden van vrouwen en kinderen behoorde........'
en: 'Raqqa >> BBC World Service en 'onafhankelijke journalistiek': 'Er zijn veel burgers omgekomen bij de strijd in de straten in Raqqa........''
en: 'Massamedium CBS (VS) tegen reality check. Logisch wel, gezien de hoeveelheid fake news op die zender.....'
en: 'SOHR, het orgaan dat door de reguliere media wordt aangehaald i.z. Syrië, is gevestigd in Coventry'
en: 'De Russiagate samenzweringstheorie dient de machthebbers.........'
Mijn excuus voor de belabberde weergave.
en: 'Iraakse strijdmacht gaf grif toe dat tot hun orders voor West-Mosul ook het vermoorden van vrouwen en kinderen behoorde........'
en: 'Raqqa >> BBC World Service en 'onafhankelijke journalistiek': 'Er zijn veel burgers omgekomen bij de strijd in de straten in Raqqa........''
en: 'Massamedium CBS (VS) tegen reality check. Logisch wel, gezien de hoeveelheid fake news op die zender.....'
en: 'SOHR, het orgaan dat door de reguliere media wordt aangehaald i.z. Syrië, is gevestigd in Coventry'
en: 'De Russiagate samenzweringstheorie dient de machthebbers.........'
Mijn excuus voor de belabberde weergave.
