There was a rec-listed diary recently celebrating the “righteous takedowns” by Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald of recent Washington Post article titled Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say. I think the Washington Post is a mixed bag when it comes to reporting. But I am less concerned with defending this particular article than I am with pushing back on the notion that liberals, Democrats and other concerned citizens who are worried about the Russian government and other foreign entities tampering with our elections are McCarthyite red-baiters indulging conspiracy theories.
First, the well-documented and indisputable facts of this election cycle justify deep concern about the Russian government and other foreign entities (such as Wikileaks) using espionage and propaganda techniques in an effort to influence our election:
FACT: The DNC and members of the Clinton Campaign had their emails hacked.
FACT: The hacked emails were released by Wikileaks in a manner clearly intended to cause maximum harm to the Clinton Campaign.
FACT: Many stories that were highly embarrassing and damaging to the Clinton Campaign were heavily reported on as a result of the hacks.
FACT: Many false stories about Hillary Clinton were heavily circulated during the campaign and repeated by the Trump Campaign as facts.
FACT: High ranking members of the U.S. intelligence community and U.S. government have publicly stated that the Russians were behind the hacking and were attempting to influence our election and those statements have been backed up by allied foreign governments.
Those facts are not open to serious dispute and they alone justify serious concern by anybody who cares about the integrity of our elections. Wikileaks methods, motives and sources need to be heavily investigated. Taibbi, as is his journalistic was smugly sardonic about such concerns:
The "Russians did it" story was greedily devoured by a growing segment of blue-state America that is beginning to fall victim to the same conspiracist tendencies that became epidemic on the political right in the last few years.
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Hedges says the Post piece was an "updated form of Red-Baiting."
"This attack signals an open war on the independent press," he says. "Those who do not spew the official line will be increasingly demonized in corporate echo chambers such as the Post or CNN as useful idiots or fifth columnists."
Glenn Greenwald couldn’t wait to get into the body of his story to uncork his McCarthyism charge. Here’s the title to his story:
Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group.
I don’t want to spend too much time defending the Washington Post article, because frankly it is a red herring. For some reason, Greenwald and Taibbi saw this article as being particularly vulnerable to attack and, frankly, it is lacking on specifics. Much more so than other articles I’ve read on the same topic. But Greenwald and Taibbi frame their arguments about the contents of the article very dishonestly.
First, they completely mischaracterize the methodology that the main group cited in the article says they use for determining whether websites have participated in disseminating propaganda.
This is how ProprNot describes their methodology in their report:
We at PropOrNot do not reach our conclusions lightly. We have arrived at them after systematically employing a combination of manual and automated analysis, building on the work of other researchers and journalists, in order to map out a related collection of websites, social media, video, and other outlets, which:
1. Include official state-owned and semi-official Russian propaganda outlets, such as Russia Today ,Sputnik News , Russia Insider , etc.;
2. Consistently cite official state-owned and semi-official Russian propaganda outlets, including the Russian defense ministry and other official spokespeople;
3. Consistently reuse text directly from official state-owned and semi-official Russian propaganda outlets and government spokespeople, often without attribution;
4. Have a history of generally echoing the Russian propaganda "line", by using themes, arguments, talking points, images, and other content similar to those used by official state-owned and semi-official Russian propaganda outlets;
5. Have a history of echoing the Russian propaganda "line" in ways unrelated to the purported focus of their branding, and in sequence with (at the same time as, or shortly after) official state-owned and semi-official Russian propaganda outlets;
6. Qualify as propaganda under a rigorous definition: “A systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specific target audiences for political, ideological, and religious purposes, through the controlled transmission of deceptive, selectively-omitting, and one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels”;
7. Have in many cases already been called out by other fact-checkers, researchers, journalists, or
Those are the first 7 of 18 separate criteria they list. Then they say a great deal more about about their methodology:
Please bear in mind that these characteristics of propaganda outlets are motivation-agnostic. They are independent of questions about whether the sites we’ve identified are being knowingly directed and paid by Russian intelligence officers, or whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point--if they display these characteristics, they are at the very least acting as " useful
idiots " of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny.
We have been following recent reporting about for-profit political, commercial, and other kinds of clickbait, hoax, and fake-news sites, and while our automated tools and our manual techniques have occasionally identified sites as Russian propaganda which others have recently identified as commercially or otherwise motivated, if they meet our criteria, we see no reason not to flag them. Our tools are evolving, but because we focus on behavior, not motivation, we are less interested in why any particular outlet echoes or spreads Russian propaganda, than on w hether they do. Whether for money or out of ideological affinity, the end results are the same.
Methodology
We use a combination of manual and automated analysis, including analysis of content, timing, technical indicators, and other reporting, in order to initially identify (“red-flag”) and then confirm an outlet as echoing, repeating, and referring its audience to Russian propaganda.
Our volunteers have developed multiple suites of software tools, leveraging publicly available data and commercial analytics services (like Quantcast , Alexa , SimilarWeb , uStat , SiteLinks , My Web of Trust, AnalyzeID , SocialBlade , and Buzzsumo , among others), in order to discover and perform automated analysis of Russian propaganda outlets, but everything we do is in principle replicable using manual searching and data entry.
We started our automated analysis from the domains and social-media accounts of Russian official and semi-official media outlets, including:
rt.com
sputniknews.com
therussophile.com
russia-insider.com
strategic-culture.org
katehon.org
theduran.com
www.fort-russ.com
thesaker.is
pravda.ru
tass.ru
We also drew on other public investigative journalistic reporting which highlights outlets and social media accounts as particularly and unusually pro-Russian, and, after doing our own research sometimes use them as starting points as well.
I’ve only reproduced here about maybe 25 percent of what they say on their methodology. If you’re curious, the rest is in their report.
Here is how Glenn Greenwald characterizes the methodology:
PropOrNot does not articulate its criteria in detail, merely describing its metrics as “behavioral” and “motivation-agnostic.” That is to say, even if a news source is not technically a Russian propaganda outlet and is not even trying to help the Kremlin, it is still guilty of being a “useful idiot” if it publishes material that might in some way be convenient or helpful for the Russian government. In other words, the website conflates criticism of Western governments and their actions and policies with Russian propaganda. News sites that do not uncritically echo a pro-NATO perspective are accused of being mouthpieces for the Kremlin, even if only unwitting ones.
And Taibbi:
Forget also that the group offered zero concrete evidence of coordination with Russian intelligence agencies, even offering this remarkable disclaimer about its analytic methods:
"Please note that our criteria are behavioral. ... For purposes of this definition it does not matter ... whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide 'useful idiots' of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny."
What this apparently means is that if you published material that meets their definition of being "useful" to the Russian state, you could be put on the "list," and "warrant further scrutiny."
As far as I’m concerned Greenwald and Taibbi are both essentially lying about PropOrNot’s methodology, which is puzzling to me because all a person has to do is click through the links and read for themselves in order to expose their dishonesty. I guess they count on most of their fans just uncritically accepting their characterizations.
Taibbi and Greenwald both also make a real point of emphasizing just how lazy the report is.
Taibbi:
The thrust of Timberg's astonishingly lazy report is that a Russian intelligence operation of some kind was behind the publication of a "hurricane" of false news reports during the election season, in particular stories harmful to Hillary Clinton. The piece referenced those 200 websites as "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda."
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[T]he vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.
Greenwald:
This Post report was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media over the last 48 hours, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of U.S. journalists and pundits with large platforms hailing it as an earth-shattering exposé. It was the most-read piece on the entire Post website on Friday after it was published.
Yet the article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics.
Taibbi and Greenwald both also spend a great deal of time fulminating against the anonymity of the creators of the report. But strangely, they both completely steer clear of the most explosive aspects of the report. The report contains very detailed allegations against specific outlets, the first being a case study they did on zerohedge:
New York Magazine ran an extensive profile of the site, titled The Dow Zero Insurgency , in September 2009, doing some research into the site’s apparent founder, Daniel Ivandjiiski, and including this comment about Zerohedge’s tone:
“It’s nihilist, and that kind of vision lends itself to all manner of overreaching and conspiracy,” says Felix Salmon of Reuters. “You need some kind of critical judgment to separate out the [stories] that make sense and the ones that don’t. Zero Hedge just seems to not care about that. It doesn’t matter if it’s not true.”
In November 2011, the Streetwise Professor blog did some excellent digging , and is to our knowledge the first writer to systematically compare ZeroHedge to Russia Today/RT:
‘ZH’s editorial line on the US and European economies parallels almost exactly that of RT. Moreover, although ZH is unsparing in its criticism of virtually every Western government leader, it never whispers the slightest word of reproach about Vladimir Putin or Russia. Indeed, a tweet mentioning that fact almost immediately drew a response from ZH: a link to a ZH piece spouting a common line of Russian propaganda argument about the superior fiscal foundation of Russia as compared to the US.’
Our followup research and content analysis has confirmed that that seems to be the case. The Streetwise Professor story goes on to make the connection that the the father of Zerohedge’s founder appears to have been a Bulgarian intelligence officer during the Cold War:
‘Its creator is Daniel Ivandjiiski, a native of Bulgaria. Daniel has a very dodgy past, including losing a job and his securities license for insider trading.
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Three years later, in November 2014, the Streetwise Professor Blog ran a followup story about Zerohedge, called How Do You Know That Zero Hedge is a Russian Information Operation? Here’s How, which analyzed a particularly egregious case in which ZeroHedge echoed a deeply misleading story on an obscure Russian-language website, Iskra News , blaming the U.S. for Ukrainian gold going missing from the central-bank vault:
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Then, in April 2016, Bloomberg ran a story called Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge, Wall Street's Renegade Blog , which extensively quoted a disgruntled former employee of Zerohedge named Colin Lokey, who described “writing as many as 15 posts a day of as many as 1,500 words each”, and getting some very relevant quotes:
‘Lokey, who said he wrote much of the site’s political content, claimed there was pressure to frame issues in a way he felt was disingenuous. “I tried to inject as much truth as I could into my posts, but there’s no room for it. “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft,” Lokey wrote, describing his take on the website's politics…
“I can’t be a 24-hour cheerleader for Hezbollah, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Trump anymore. It’s wrong. Period. I know it gets you views now, but it will kill your brand over the long run,” Lokey texted Ivandjiiski. “This isn’t a revolution. It’s a joke.”’
Meanwhile, in February 2016, Andrew Aaron Weisburd’s blog Aktivnyye Meropriyatiya|Active Measures published an analysis of SimilarWeb referrer data, highlighting ZeroHedge, and building out a network graph of sites which refer their audience to each other, titled The Fringes of Disinfo: A Network Based on Referrers . We at PropOrNot replicated and evaluated that initial work, and found it to contain a significant number of false positives. While meeting narrow technical criteria of interlinkage, many sites in his network did not have key characteristics of Russian propaganda, in terms of content or other “tells”, which we outlined earlier in this report.
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Weisburd’s comment from that post bears repeating here:
‘To the extent any of these sites are involved in supporting Russian objectives that run counter to Western interests, they - and more to the point, the people who operate them - should be of interest to the security services of the Western countries in which they live, work, and acquire services related to their websites. At the same time, one frequently finds direct links from these websites to Russia and individuals in Russia clearly associated with the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services. It is always worthwhile to look for criminal activity occurring on the periphery of such websites, particularly on the backend of the operations, involving people who host the sites, register the domain names, and otherwise provide logistical support. And finally, many sites involved in Kremlin disinformation work now solicit donations online, raising the distinct possibility that the online fundraising accounts are being used to move or launder funds.’
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We at PropOrNot conducted our own research into ZeroHedge, and found that it definitely qualifies as Russian propaganda according to both our “initial red-flag” and “detailed” criteria. We also replicated and extended Andrew Aaron Weisburd’s research above, and collected all relevant public-record information about the site, the people involved, etc, along with what we could about its finances, audience, and
reach.
Again, this is only a fraction of the allegations about zerohedge contained in the report. I would figure these sort of detailed allegations would be what someone trying to take down a report would really make a meal of.
Here’s what the hyper-diligent, super hardworking Taibbi had to say on the zerohedge allegations:
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Greenwald gave a more detailed rebuttal:
Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute, along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the publishing site WikiLeaks.
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While blacklisting left-wing and libertarian journalists, PropOrNot also denies being McCarthyite. Yet it simultaneously calls for the U.S. government to use the FBI and DOJ to carry out “formal investigations” of these accused websites, “because the kind of folks who make propaganda for brutal authoritarian oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of bad business.” The shadowy group even goes so far as to claim that people involved in the blacklisted websites may “have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws.”
You might recognize the quoted language in that second paragraph from my earlier excerpt from the report relating to zerohedge. Greenwald doesn’t bother to mention the specific allegations against zerohedge. He just implies that the report calls for the FBI to investigate all “left-wing and libertarian journalists.”
I think it is particularly dishonest of Glenn Greenwald to come out and savage Wikileaks’ and Russian critics without acknowledging how deeply personal this is for him. Transferring stolen documents to Wikileaks under circumstances involving Russian collaboration is kind of his biggest claim to fame.
I can see why the McCarthyism charge suggests itself. Russia is involved and allegations of malfeasance and/or useful idiocy by people wittingly or unwittingly collaborating in Russian propaganda. But if you examine what McCarthyism really was, it is quickly obvious that the comparison is lazy, superficial, stupid and deeply unfair. McCarthyism is not accusing individuals or organizations of collaborating with Russians. McCarthyism is making shit up out of whole cloth and recklessly destroying lives for the purpose of self-promotion.
We have a right to question where the hell this coordinated propaganda attack that helped sow confusion during this election came from and we have a right to try to take steps to stop it from happening in the future. No one should let self-interested, lazy, dishonest alt-media reporters scare them off from this issue with a bunch of name calling. I’ve enjoyed some of Greenwald and Taibbi’s reporting at times. They’ve been the enemy of my enemy at times. But Greenwald and Taibbi are not straight-shooters or honest brokers. And I’ve certainly never seen a lick of evidence that they give a shit about progressive politics. As far as I’m concerned Greenwald and Taibbi are ruthless self-promoters at heart. And don’t ever believe a word they say without confirming it with one of the reliable sources they hold in so much contempt.