memoirs, in collusion...

Have you ever wondered why Blair Howard and Bush have ALL written their "autobiography"?... One could suspect a collusion. And there is. It is a well orchestrated way to frame the debate about the Iraq war in a sea of other titillating subjects — including the foetus of George W Bush's unborn sibling his mother kept in a pickle jar or the sexual celebration of Blair's political victory, with Cherie. Like in a well tuned orchestra, Blair, Howard and Bush, all play an Iraq tune, with counterpoints and slightly different notes BUT IN HARMONY... The theme tune of the song is that "Saddam deserved to be taken out" and the WORLD IS BETTER FOR IT. Conspiracy? You bet.

They have the knack to absolved themselves from the most heinous crime: an illegal war... And the worst part is that the media at large is letting them get away with it...

So far I haven't seen any serious journalists  — even the small gang of renegades, Fisk, Loyd, Pilger, whose works are sharp but not penetrating the main media stream and even Gore Vidal — explain like I have done here that the way the US, the UK and Australia attacked Iraq indicates that the weapons of mass destruction was a crock. My major premise as mentioned several times on this site, is that one does not attack a country that one claims to have strong armament when one knows zip about the position of such strong armament... 

We also knew that Bush, Blair and Howard were lying before going to war against Iraq. The difficult part is to irrefutably prove this fact with proper DOCUMENTATION, and second, our debate "has been (still is)" framed by the mantra that Saddam was not a very nice fellow and that "we should be grateful" that Bush, Blair and Howard took him out. 

Bollocks. The act is a war crime.

read more:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

 

 

Meanwhile at Brainwahington Post:

In an ironically false news story from the Washington Post about Russian propaganda “stealing the US election,” the newspaper promoted a website called PropOrNot, which has created a Chrome extension to censor websites that it does not agree with and deems to be “fake news.”

Sites that PropOrNot is accusing of peddling Russian propaganda include extremely popular news websites on several sides of the political spectrum, including The Drudge Report, TruthOut, Blackagendareport, Sputnik News, and even Wikileaks.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201611251047854990-washington-post-fake-news-propornot/

No wonder the Clintons refused to meet with the Haitian protesters. Each time the protesters showed up, the Clintons were nowhere to be seen. They have never directly addressed the Haitians’ claims.

 

Strangely enough, they have never been required to do so. The progressive media scarcely covered the Haitian protest. Somehow the idea of Haitian black people calling out the Clintons as aid money thieves did not appeal to the grand pooh-bahs at CBS News, the New York Times, and NPR.

 

For most Democrats, the topic is both touchy and distasteful. It’s one thing to rob from the rich but quite another to rob from the poorest of the poor. Some of the Democratic primary support for Bernie Sanders was undoubtedly due to Democrats’ distaste over the financial shenanigans of the Clintons. Probably these Democrats considered the Clintons to be unduly grasping and opportunistic, an embarrassment to the great traditions of the Democratic party. —

 

Dinesh D’​Souza is the author of Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437883/hillarys-america-secret-his...

You really know that masses of people are living within a mind-control matrix when the greatest, most pervasive purveyors of fake news denounce others for the practice.

And yet they do so without the slightest hint of awareness about their own monstrous hypocrisy.

"Fake news" has become a hot issue following the surprise US election victory of maverick business tycoon Donald Trump. Supposedly serious Western media outlets have highlighted the spread of hoax stories purporting to be news reports as having swayed the presidential race in Trump’s favor against his rival, Democrat career politician Hillary Clinton. One such hoax "report" was that Pope Francis had allegedly given his blessing to Trump just before the November 8 poll, which presumably prompted some American Catholics on board the Republican’s election ticket. No doubt, the internet is a plentiful source of false rumor and other bizarre, tall stories. But now, it seems, Western corporate media giants are calling for Facebook and other social networking sites to weed out "fake news". Given how wrong the US media called the election and also their rabid bias against Trump, the hunt for a scapegoat is understandable.

US media mogul Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, seems ready to comply with demands to provide a team of censors against the spread of fictive reports. Even though, he claims that the vast majority of news links on his worldwide network are to genuine, factual content.

This is setting a sinister precedent for abusive, systematic censorship. Unfortunately, control of global information is prone to subjective Western cultural and political bias. Already we see how it is Western media outlets who are making an issue over "fake news" and it is Western-based internet companies like Facebook and Google who are taking on the mantle of filtering out content. It is not hard, therefore, to imagine how this train of thought could be applied eventually to non-Western news services that supply information critical of Western government interests an conduct. Take, for example, the war in Syria.

Russian news media have provided many important, documented reports and analyses on how Washington and its Western allies are systematically colluding with jihadi terror groups to prosecute a covert, criminal war for regime change against the elected government of Syria. By contrast, the Western corporate media have rarely if ever given any coverage to such verifiable violations by their governments in Syria. Or in any other recent conflict for that matter, such as in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Georgia. Of course, this is because Western media outlets are part of the ideological, propaganda matrix that serves to conceal the crimes of Western governments, which, in turn, serve to facilitate the strategic interests of Western corporations.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201611231047764979-west-weaponizing-fake-news/

 

See also: sour grapes... in the other candidates...

 

Meanwhile, Andrew Smith, of the Guardian, tell us without cracking his hypocritical hippocratic horseface:

One day, I suspect, we will look back in disbelief that we let the net-induced friction on civil society reach this pitch, because if we didn’t know before, we know now that our stark choice is between social networks’ bottom line and democracy. I know which I prefer. Or will we let the algos decide?

Donald Trump met with reporters and editors of the New York Times on Tuesday and told them they were unfair to him — before saying he has “great respect” for the Gray Lady and launching into a wide-ranging discussion of key issues.

“I will say the Times was the roughest of all,” the president-elect told the journalists at the newspaper’s Midtown headquarters.

After getting that off his chest, Trump went on to explain that he had an “open mind” about climate change, wanted nothing to do with the alt-right movement and couldn’t easily dispose of his numerous properties.

read more:

http://nypost.com/2016/11/23/trump-i-have-great-respect-for-unfair-new-y...

 

Meanwhile, I would advise Trump to choose Guliani ahead of Romney, but I don't know any of these characters well enough to say more.

A few days before the 2016 election I contacted several publishers and told them they were on a list to be dealt with/ taken down after what was supposed to be a Clinton victory. This effort was against news sites and websites that spoke or wrote against current US policies that Clinton supported. As I was writing this Glen Greenwald’s great article came out specifically about propornot. That plays a small part in this.

Journalists that said or wrote anything damaging to the Clinton campaign or supported her opponents in any way were targeted. News sites and journalists that failed to criticize Vladimir Putin, or worse; they were sympathetic of this or that Russian or Syria policy at any time are on the lists.

The implication isn’t that Hillary Clinton had anything to do with this. She didn’t, at least not directly. We’re going to take a clear look at this, who is behind it, and why. The political stakes and stakeholders go far beyond the presidency. It was about setting the next 20 years of US policy, cabinet positions, and redefining what the United States of America is.

Long before this election, I became aware of an Inform & Influence Operation (IIO) against the American public. While researching this I came across a list of news sites that were going to be dealt with n following what was at the time thought to be an easy “Clinton victory.” 

Before the election I told different publishers this was in the works and the goal was to discredit and destroy alternate media sources and silence dissent.

The Donald Trump victory slowed this down a little bit for the moment, but redoubled the effort going into it. Let’s look behind the Fake news of propornot that is the internet rage today. I’ve been keeping tabs on some of the players involved for over 1 1/2 years now. 

Propornot is another incarnation of Stopfake or the Daily Dot. Both of these propaganda sites have been doing the same essential thing as propornot since the beginning of the 2014 Coup in Ukraine. In that sense there is nothing notable or remarkable about it. What is remarkable is the amount of press this crude website has generated and why.

The website itself is a compilation of working lists developed by different sources that now work in tandem. It’s been over 3 years in the making and propornot is just the latest side dish. 

OpEdNews, Washingtonsblog, ZeroHedge, Consortium News, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, the Vineyard of the Saker, and Off Guardian are among many others listed publicly and privately to developed website hit lists. Propornot pulls its own lists from sites and contacts like these. The base model is the Ukrainian website “PeaceMaker” which gained fame in March 2015.

The people that wrote the Ukrainian information policy and developed the methods for the “Myrotvorets” or Peacemaker website did so with the sole goal of creating a clearinghouse for killing dissent and dissenters. Site’s like propornot are offspring from the 40,000+ people working on the projects. At the top of the heap the lists feed downward to feed activists workloads.

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2016/11/30/bait-switch-fake-news-propornot-the-...

THE WASHINGTON POST on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg — headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” — cites a report by an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.”

The group’s list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute.

...

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.

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.”

In sum: They’re not McCarthyite; perish the thought. They just want multiple U.S. media outlets investigated by the FBI for espionage on behalf of Russia.

 

WHO EXACTLY IS behind PropOrNot, where it gets its funding, and whether or not it is tied to any governments is a complete mystery. The Intercept also sent inquiries to the Post’s Craig Timberg asking these questions, and asking whether he thinks it is fair to label left-wing news sites like Truthout “Russian propaganda outlets.” Timberg replied: “I’m sorry, I can’t comment about stories I’ve written for the Post.”

As is so often the case, journalists — who constantly demand transparency from everyone else — refuse to provide even the most basic levels for themselves. When subjected to scrutiny, they reflexively adopt the language of the most secrecy-happy national security agencies: We do not comment on what we do.

Timberg’s piece on the supposed ubiquity of Russian propaganda is misleading in several other ways. The other primary “expert” upon which the article relies is Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a pro-Western think tank whose board of advisers includes neoconservative figures like infamous orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis and pro-imperialistRobert D. Kaplan, the latter of whom served on the U.S. government’s Defense Policy Board.

What the Post does not mention in its report is that Watts, one of the specialists it relies on for its claims, previously worked as an FBI special agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force and as the executive officer of the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. As Fortune’s Ingram wrote of the group, it is “a conservative think tank funded and staffed by proponents of the Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.”

PropOrNot is by no means a neutral observer. It actively calls on Congress and the White House to work “with our European allies to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT financial transaction system, effective immediately and lasting for at least one year, as an appropriate response to Russian manipulation of the election.”

In other words, this blacklisting group of anonymous cowards — putative experts in the pages of the Washington Post — is actively pushing for Western governments to take punitive measures against the Russian government and is speaking and smearing from an extreme ideological framework that the Post concealed from its readers.

 

EVEN MORE DISTURBING than the Post’s shoddy journalism in this instance is the broader trend in which any wild conspiracy theory or McCarthyite attack is now permitted in U.S. discourse as long as it involves Russia and Putin — just as was true in the 1950s when stories of how the Russians were poisoning the U.S. water supply or infiltrating American institutions were commonplace. Any anti-Russia story was — and is — instantly vested with credibility, while anyone questioning its veracity or evidentiary basis is subject to attacks on their loyalties or, at best, vilified as “useful idiots.”

Two of the most discredited reports from the election season illustrate the point: a Slate article claiming that a private server had been located linking the Trump Organization and a Russian bank (which, like the current Post story, had been shopped around and rejected by multiple media outlets) and a completely deranged rant by Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald claiming that Putin had ordered emails in the WikiLeaks release to be doctored — both of which were uncritically shared and tweeted by hundreds of journalists to tens of thousands of people, if not more.

The Post itself — now posing as a warrior against “fake news” — published an article in September that treated with great seriousness the claim that Hillary Clinton collapsed on 9/11 Day because she was poisoned by Putin. And that’s to say nothing of the paper’s disgraceful history of convincing Americans that Saddam was building non-existent nuclear weapons and had cultivated a vibrant alliance with al Qaeda. As is so often the case, those who mostly loudly warn of “fake news” from others are themselves the most aggressive disseminators of it.

Indeed, what happened here is the essence of fake news. The Post story served the agendas of many factions: those who want to believe Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton; those who want to believe that the internet and social media are a grave menace that needs to be controlled, in contrast to the objective truth that reliable old media outlets once issued; those who want a resurrection of the Cold War. So those who saw tweets and Facebook posts promoting this Post story instantly clicked and shared and promoted the story without an iota of critical thought or examination of whether the claims were true, because they wanted the claims to be true. That behavior included countless journalists.

So the story spread in a flash, like wildfire. Tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions, consumed it, believing that it was true because of how many journalists and experts told them it was. Virtually none of the people who told them this spent a minute of time or ounce of energy determining if it was true. It pleased them to believe it was, knowing it advanced their interests, and so they endorsed it. That is the essence of how fake news functions, and it is the ultimate irony that this Post story ended up illustrating and spreading far more fake news than it exposed.

read more:

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promot...

The witch hunt for “fake news” and “Russian propaganda” has been kicked up a notch, after the House passed a bill quietly tucked inside the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, designed to crack down on free speech and independent media.

Under "Title V—Matters relating to foreign countries,” the bill seeks to "counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”

It lists media manipulation as:

Establishment or funding of a front group.

Covert broadcasting.

Media manipulation.

Disinformation and forgeries.

Funding agents of influence.

Incitement and offensive counterintelligence.

Assassinations.

Terrorist acts.

“It is easy to see how this law, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, could be used to target, threaten, or eliminate so-called ‘fake news’ websites, a list which has been used to arbitrarily define any website, or blog, that does not share the mainstream media’s proclivity to serve as the Public Relations arm of a given administration,” Global Research reported. The frightening attack on speech and independent media was opposed by only 30 members of the House, including Tulsi Gabbard, Thomas Massie, and Justin Amash — who stated that he fought against it.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201612051048198226-us-lawmakers-fake-news-criminalization/

 

Whether it knows or not, THE MMMM IS AN AGENT OF PROPAGANDA, manipulations, disinformation, government forgeries, etc. All the commentariat that passes as news will be hit between the shoulder blades, but fear not, as long as you spruik the Big Brother porkies, your news outlet is safe... See toon at top.

The only MMMM that knows it is propaganda-ing is Uncle-Rupe's outlets for profit and maintenance of the elite at the top of the food chain. This meant supportting Donald in various discreet ways.

“Here’s the thing,” Carlson began, “I’ve lived here a long time, I remember vividly the ‘massive stockpiles of WMD’s in Iraq,’ which the intelligence community assured us were there, and they weren’t, so pardon my skepticism, I think it’s a patriotic position.”

Schiff appeared to grow increasingly flustered and continued to push McCarthyist anti-Russian sentiment, which Carlson hilariously mocked.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201612091048340762-tucker-carlson-russian-hacking-claims/

 

 

read from top

At YD we're been on the case of "fake news" for a while. Gus started on it in 1951 with his first cartoons on the military and politicians in post war Europe. Here in "The Age of Deceit" he gives a "philosophical traction" for the importance of deceit in the systems of government and selling snake oil...

 

Now more people have come to realise that governments are selling snake oil:

 

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/5455

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“People no longer believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class and its corporate and military misinformation specialists.”

President Obama traveled to Berlin last week to browbeat Europeans on why they should continue to play junior partners in Washington’s quest for full spectrum global domination, but kept returning to his post-election obsession: the existential threat posed by “fake news” on social media. It was as if the realization had just dawned on the lame duck president, that his own powers to create “facts” and manufacture “news” out of thin air would soon be gone. Without the Clintons in the White House to continue the neoliberal project, history might conclude that the First Black President’s only enduring legacy was...that he was the first Black president.

It’s a question of who gets to decide what’s “fake” or not. Obama fears that what he calls “fake” news begets fake history, which begets the fall of western civilization as the rulers would like people to imagine it. Fake news is a grave danger “in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” according to Obama. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” he told the Germans.

It was a magic kind of moment. The legendarily cool and collected Obama had just let out the secret: the ruling class, which he so faithfully serves, has lost control of the social and political narrative, without which it cannot “protect” its wealth, privilege and power.

“When the people come to believe that the president’s narrative is a bunch of ‘propaganda,’ then future Obamas will no longer be able to protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.” 

Was the world’s most powerful individual (until January 20) in despair over Facebook’s failure to erase three or four fictitious, yet ultimately inconsequential, stories from its pages? Of course not. Obama’s problem -- and capitalism’s crisis-- is that people no longer believe the fake “news” and bogus narratives issued by the ruling class and its corporate and military misinformation specialists. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” said Obama.

This is the man that told the nation’s assembled bankers, a year after the Greet Meltdown of 2008, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." When the people come to believe that the president and the corporate media’s narrative -- that the system can be fixed with a little tinkering -- is a bunch of “propaganda,” rather than “serious argument,” then future Obamas will no longer be able to protect the Lords of Capital from the pitchforkers.

Losing control of the narrative is what happened after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, when Black youth stopped listening to Obama’s fictitious sermon that racism is not endemic in America, a fake history that candidate Obama had successfully dispensed in his “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia, in 2008.

Obama’s targeted handful of phony social media articles generally favored Donald Trump. But the biggest “fake news” of the recent campaign, promulgated by virtually the entirety of the ruling class ensconced in Hillary Clinton’s Supersized Tent, was that the Russians were scheming to despoil and disrupt the U.S. elections -- crimes Americans commit all by themselves every cycle through massive voter purges and other racist conspiracies. To Clinton and Obama’s horror, this McCarthyite deluge of fake anti-Russian news failed to sway the very “Middle Americans” that were thought to be the most belligerent, warlike constituency of all.

“The root of the crisis lies in the inability of late stage capitalism to offer anything that will stem the steady decline in the mass of people’s living standards and economic security.”

The Big Tent -- Wall Street, the national security establishment, and their media – have lost all credibility with the public, and Obama was still shaken by the realization when he traveled to Berlin. Donald Trump and his crowd’s credibility – their ability to weave a believable narrative – was nonexistent from the start among half the country, and will shrink even more over time.

The root of the crisis of credibility, which is really a systemic crisis of legitimacy, lies in the inability of late stage capitalism to offer anything that will stem the steady decline in the mass of people’s living standards and economic security. So deep is the decay, every amelioration of public pain would require the dismantling of capitalist structures of power, which is unacceptable to the rulers.

read more:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/5455

“The recent history of Ukraine in general and Crimea in particular over the past several years may be among the most egregious examples of ‘fake news’ in recent memory,” he told RIA Novosti.

“The level of misinformation which has guided related decisions by outside actors and their impact on this country is tragic. I am confident that there will be new possibilities to resolve these misperceptions and the wrong direction it has created for Ukraine.”

“It is my firm belief that the opportunities for private sector cooperation in the Russian economy have never been as great as they will be in the coming years. Although the failures of many hostile western policies as well as the inevitable, logical responses from Moscow have constrained such possibilities throughout recent decades, the possibilities today are unparalleled.”

Page also said he was keen for the Russian market to reopen for American investors who had been stopped from doing business by sanctions.

“US and European companies are very interested in returning to the Russian market,” he said. “Their interest cuts across a vast array of sectors.”

“The hostile efforts to punish Rosneft and their senior management team through western sanctions have primarily hurt western companies, rather than their intended target.”

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/369828-russia-america-relations-trump-advisor/

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-revi...

 

The CIA like any other spy organisation are specialists in manufacturing fake information including this one.  Read from top...

Reprinting without verification a report from the FBI, the very serious American newspaper assured that the piracy of a power plant in Vermont had been organized by Russia. The problem ? The famous powerhouse said ... it had not been hacked.

From the very beginning of the article of the famous Washington Post, the tone is given: "A [computer] code associated with the Russian piracy operation ... was detected in the power plant in Vermont, according to US officials.

Without taking the precaution to verify the information, from by the American intelligence services, the newspaper does not hesitate to relay the incendiary commentary of the Vermont state governor Peter Shumlin, who describes Vladimir Putin as " One of the biggest thugs in the world "and concludes, a bit hastily:" This episode should underscore the urgent need for our [US] federal government to pursue vigorously and put an end to this kind of Russian interference. "

The Vermont senator Patrick Leahy goes on, talking about "piracy financed by the Russian state" in a statement published on the Internet.

While the WP daily continues in the same register, news agencies all over the world resume anti-Russian accusations, like AFP, which titled "Russian hackers have hacked a US electricity supplier." and the Guardian

The problem ? The plant has never really been pirated

Alarmed by the US security services, the power station in question, Burlington Electric, searches all its computers and finally discovers that the code of the malicious software is present on only one computer that it is not connected in anyway to the facilities. In other words, no hacker has entered the system of the Vermont power station.

Crap from the Washington Post, that had already released his article without bothering to contact the company.

A revealing "fake news"

As British journalist Glenn Greenwald writes in the on-line magazine The Intercept, the story, which may seem trivial, is actually important because it "reflects the irrational and endless fever that is cultivated in political discourse and culture On the threat posed by Moscow ".

 

https://francais.rt.com/international/31606-washington-post-publie-fauss...

 

And guess what? The Ruskies are not reporting on the malware from the US trying to infiltrate their own network. They are more discreet but shoot the buggers down as they come up.

 

The signs started popping up on the margins of social media as far back as 2010: Like-minded conspiracy theories spread by far-right sites like InfoWars and Russian government-controlled media like RT. Tweets that accused mainstream media organizations of reporting “fake news.” And later, social media networks that appeared to follow both white nationalist and Wikileaks-related accounts.  

Initially, University of Washington professor and researcher Kate Starbird was studying how rumors spread on social media after disasters; they typically began with high volume after a crisis and then dissipated as news reports confirmed what happened. Then, in 2013, sorting through data after the Boston Marathon bombings, Starbird and her students noticed another kind of rumor—a kind that gained traction and volume over a longer period of time, in spite of facts confirmed in news reports. These longer-lasting rumors often intersected with politicized content. In the sustained chatter about the Boston terrorist attack, they noticed Twitter accounts pushing an alternative narrative, a conspiracy theory that Navy SEALS had bombed the race, not the Tsarnaev brothers.

Starbird mostly dismissed these kinds of alternative narratives as outliers, a conclusion she would later regret. Then came 2016, when hyper-politicized disinformation that spread in the aftermath of mass shootings and the Paris terrorist attacks was impossible to ignore. She and her team were compelled to dig deeper into the data. And as the “fake news” language of far-right and Russian media conspiracy theorists was embraced by Donald Trump and his presidential campaign, Starbird realized the phenomenon was going mainstream.

“When it’s coming out of the mouths of people in power,” she says, “it’s no longer marginal.”

Read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/on-the-front-lines-of-the-tr...

and visit: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in June. His denials of Russian meddling have been coy, though he said that “free-spirited” hackers might have spontaneously contributed to “the fight against those who say bad things about Russia.” 

CreditSputnik, via Reuters

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-e...

 

So? What is the beef? Olala, the social media is having more traction than the mediocre mass media de Crap?... The MMMC sold the world the idea that "Saddam Has Weapons of Mass Destruction" with a virulence only matched by its lack of investigative journalism. And even then in 2001 and 2002 before attacking Iraq, it would have been child's play to prove that the government of Bush the Little was bullshitting with truckfulls of CIA sewer muck.  But no, most the merde-och sewer outlets were dishing out the shit with ferocity.

Fake news and disinformation is not new. Including the :

Russia deliberately blurs its role in influence operations, American intelligence officials say. Even skilled investigators often cannot be sure if a particular Facebook post or Twitter bot came from Russian intelligence employees, paid “trolls” in Eastern Europe or hackers from Russia’s vast criminal underground. A Russian site called buyaccs.com (“Buy Bulk Accounts at Best Prices”) offers for sale a huge array of pre-existing social media accounts, including on Facebook and Twitter; like wine, the older accounts cost more, because their history makes chicanery harder to spot." from the New York Times...

RUMOURS, innuendoes are not news....

 

READ FROM TOP. Until the MMMC start to demand that Blair, Bush and Howard be placed in prison until their case of an illegal war is heard, then there is no point discussing yet any more rumours about Putin and the Russians. Even Hillary blames Bernie, Obama, Trump and the weather instead for her solid defeat...

 

запрещено = forbidden...

 

There are members of Congress who don’t want anyone on TV saying America’s foreign policy is a disaster and it costs a fortune, Daniel McAdams, executive director, Ron Paul Institute, told RT. Investigative journalist Dave Lindorff joins the discussion.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the fiscal year 2018, which passed the US Senate earlier this week, carries some added provisions that have little in common with the military. 

Indeed, American legislators have published a bill that could potentially block Russian broadcasters from being shown in the US. It could allow US content providers to break their contracts, leaving Russian channels without any legal recourse.

The plan is buried inside a tiny amendment of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The part about Russia is summarized in just a few lines, between details on funding of the US military.

Amendment No 1096, which aims to“prohibit multichannel video programming distributors from being required to carry certain video content that is owned or controlled by the Government of the Russian Federation”.

RT:  Why the focus on Russia, in what's supposed to be an annual defense spending bill?

Daniel McAdams: There is an obsession on Capitol Hill and within the mainstream media with RT because RT is effective and RT is watched. But also, and this is very important because RT carries perspectives that are not available in the mainstream media. Commentators on RT that I know would say the same thing that they say on RT if they were invited by any of the mainstream media, but they won’t. The matter of fact is that John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the people who were behind this amendment, the Atlantic Council and the others are trying to silence RT. They are the totalitarians, they are the enemies of free speech; they're the enemies of the First Amendment; they don’t want anyone coming on television saying that America’s foreign policy is a disaster; it is broken; it is making us more vulnerable to attack, and it’s costing a fortune. It cannot stand competition in the area of ideas.

Deep down in the #NDAA is an amendment to prohibit distributors from being required to carry#Russia-owned content https://t.co/M1HwcCP6Xh

— RT America (@RT_America) September 21, 2017

RT:  As we mentioned, various foreign governments fund TV channels in America, but only Russia gets a mention in this bill. Is that a case of double-standards? Should the attention just solely be on Russia?

DM: The attention should be on none of these stations. It should be viewer beware. If you’re watching RT and you know that it is funded, or its funding comes from the Russian government, you take that into consideration just as any intelligent person would do. When I watch France 24, when I watch the BBC, I know that that takes the perspectives of the British government into consideration, because it is funded by that.

This is a free market of ideas; this is what this is all about. But the people on Capitol Hill are again totalitarians – they don’t want a free market in ideas. They want to control the debate. They don’t want Americans to wake up and see that the foreign policy that they are pushing is resulting in a charred Earth and a disaster that is coming home to roost.

RT:  Does it look like this measure has been deliberately buried in a huge defense bill to avoid scrutiny? Or do you expect debate on this?

DM: This is how it’s done, absolutely. I have read a million defense spending bills in my 15 years on the Hill. This is called planting a seed – you plant this kernel, and it starts to grow. If someone objects, later on, you can say – this is already passed in the defense bill; you’ve already voted on this; this is already part of the law; this is just suggesting, clarifying, or going further. This is how they do things: you bury it in a huge bill like this; you plant a seed and you watch it grow.

'It's like early 50s: anyone opposes US foreign policy is accused of being paid by Moscow' (Op-Edge by @NeilClark66) https://t.co/j3whVSBCR4

— RT (@RT_com) September 20, 2017

 

I don’t know the exact language in the bill; I am sure Russia is not only the flavor of the month, it is the flavor of the year. There is the ‘Investigate Russia’ committee, where a bunch of Hollywood liberals got together with a bunch of neocons and are finding reds under our beds. There is a hysteria going on in America. I still would like to believe that the average American thinks it’s absolutely nuts; I hope it stays that way. Hopefully, this will blow over at some point, and not blow up….

Hollywood was once on the receiving end of McCarthyism in the 50s, and now it looks like they want to dish out McCarthyism on everyone else.

‘Hemmed in by Deep State’

Dave Lindorff, investigative journalist

RT:  This is supposed to be a routine defense spending bill. So why would Russian broadcasters be targeted?

Dave Lindorff: That is the view in Congress, Russia is the enemy, so they are sticking it in the defense bill. I am being a bit facetious, but not terribly facetious. The defense bill often has things stuck in it that have nothing to do with defense. That is how Congress gets things done that they wouldn’t be able to just to do as a free-standing bill because it would be too ridiculous or have too much opposition.

#NDAA of 2018 authorizes additional $8.5 billion for Missile Defense Agency, $650 mil above Trump admin's request https://t.co/C1s0iAd2b6pic.twitter.com/hvKntbttzd

— RT America (@RT_America) September 18, 2017

 

RT:  Do you think that by focusing so heavily on Russia (Kaspersky Lab and the Russian Navy are also mentioned), Congress is losing sight of more important priorities?

DL: Since the election, and during the latter part of the campaign last year, Democrats have been trying to blame Russia for their inconceivable loss to Donald Trump. Then Trump, who wanted to have better relations with Russia, has been undermined by the people called the “deep state” – the CIA, the Defense Department. Even within his own cabinet now his key players are ‘cold warriors’ like (James) Mattis and (H.R.) McMaster, and so on. So he has been hemmed in by his own staff. To get credibility he has had to go to the deep state to get his key people, and they see Russia as at least a rival and maybe an enemy – I don’t know. Certainly in Syria, they think of [Russia] as the bad guys, and the US as the good guys, even though we're basically supporting terrorism there. It is not surprising that this would fit in the defense bill and that members of Congress are still living in the Cold War: Russia is bad, the US is good, that kind of thing.

read all

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/404121-rt-ban-us-media/

 

Read from Top...

 

 

While the world was reeling in shock at the election of Donald Trump as US President, the residents of a small Macedonian town were less surprised. For months, the residents of Veles had been making big bucks from pro-Trump stories. They told Sputnik how they put the once-mighty industrial town back on the map, as the world's capital of "fake news."Amid a sensationally bitter US presidential campaign, "fake news" became the country's hottest buzzword in 2016, with many US analysts declaring that the phenomenon played a significant role in Trump's success. 

Outrageous stories about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton were shared millions of times on Facebook. Two of the biggest fabrications were claims that in 2013, Clinton said that Trump should run for president and that the Pope had endorsed Trump.

Clinton and her supporters have sought to blame shadowy "big data" analysts or "Russian hackers" for persuading the electorate to vote for the Republican candidate.

In reality, the "fake news" that dominated social networks during election season arose out of the kind of economic decline that most Trump supporters would recognize. But rather than the rust belt in the US, this story started in a small town called Veles, Macedonia.

read more:
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201709251057663134-veles-fake-news-capital/

I did not know that Uncle Rupe had a holiday pad in Veles...

 

Project Veritas Communications Director Stephen Gordon has told RT about an undercover video showing a New York Times employee allegedly admitting to manipulating how the newspaper’s content is released and viewed.

Gordon said that Project Veritas’ newly released video of New York Times audience strategy editor Nick Dudich shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“It's not exactly that they're revelations, because I think it’s something we all know happens,” he said.“There's collusion between the social media networks and the major media outlets.”

Gordon added: “We caught them admitting it.”

Dudich states in the video that he parked a negative report about Facebook in a spot where he knew would not draw a lot of traffic.

Gordon told RT there is a longstanding connection between the Times and YouTube.

“When New York Times and YouTube are in bed, the bastard child of that relationship is fake news,” he said.“We've got more to come on the New York Times.”

The New York Times has responded to the undercover video with a statement on Tuesday.

“Based on what we’ve seen in the Project Veritas video, it appears that a recent hire in a junior position violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role,” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said, the New York Times reported.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/406423-project-veritas-video-new-york-times/

The real shocker discovered among the assorted paraphernalia, however, was alleged proof of “secret dealings” between Tehran and al-Qaeda from a “never-before-seen 19-page document.” This was allegedly written by a senior member of al-Qaeda and is said to provide information on plans between Iran and the terrorist group to attack US interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

The document is said to provide “new insight into the often-adversarial relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran — the Sunni Muslim terror group and the Shiite republic,” AP reported. It then went on to provide a quote by the Long War Journal, which described the document as "a senior jihadist's assessment of the group's relationship with Iran." The “well-connected” al-Qaeda official believed to have authored the document wrote that in return for carrying out attacks on US and Saudi targets, Shiite Iran offered Sunni militants "money, arms” and “training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon."

Curious timing

Skeptics, however, were quick to point out the uncanny timing of the document’s release, coming just weeks after Trump decertified the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement forged during the Obama administration between Iran and six world powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US — to regulate Iran’s nuclear program. The US leader’s controversial decision to turn up the pressure on Tehran, seemingly without good cause, sparked global outcry and threatened to isolate the Trump administration even further on the global stage.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Washington does not have the right to unilaterally revoke a deal that was the product of tough negotiations between multiple states. “It is not a bilateral agreement. It does not belong to any single country. And it is not up to any single country to terminate it,” Mogherini said. “It is a multilateral agreement, which was unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.”

Meanwhile, a former CIA analyst who resigned from the agency over misgivings with the Trump administration, Edward Price, has expressed public skepticism of the CIA claims. In a lengthy thread posted to Twitter, Price suggested we are witnessing an intelligence agency “ploy” similar to the one that preceded the 2003 attack on Iraq, although this time it is Iran that may be the new candidate for regime change.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/408756-iran-qaeda-laden-regime-change/

 

One cannot trust the CIA nowadays... if ever it could have been trusted... It is an organisation of deception and fabrication of "fake news". Read from top... see also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/1686

The same US intelligence agencies that fed mainstream media the narrative about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction should be trusted when they say RT’s critical reporting is propaganda, according to a BBC-hosted panel on fake news.

The four-person panel discussed the phenomenon of fake news on the sidelines of the Davos Economic Forum on Wednesday. Moderating the event was BBC host Zeinab Badawi.

RT’s deputy editor-in-chief, Anna Belkina, was on the defensive at the event, arguing that RT deserves the same support of fellow news organizations that the New York Times or CNN enjoy when US President Donald Trump labels them fake news. RT was targeted in a similar attack by French President Emmanuel Macron, whose administration has yet to present a single example of RT’s alleged false reportage.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/416900-rt-fake-news-davos-panel/

 

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Former US President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, will receive the Liberty Medal on Sunday in Philadelphia. With the award typically going to leaders "who have strived to secure the blessings of liberty to people around the globe,” more than a few people are baffled at the National Constitution Center’s choice.

The Bushes will receive the award on November 11, Veterans Day, which in Europe is known as Armistice Day. This year's Armistice Day is a very special anniversary, because it will have been exactly 100 years since the armistice that ended the First World War on the Western Front on November 11, 1918.

 

It's especially ironic, then, that Bush should be given a medal that typically goes to people who end conflicts or who fight for peace, such as Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai, or overcome prejudice, such as Sandra Day O'Connor, John Lewis and Thurgood Marshall, on a day commemorating the end of what was once called "The War to End All Wars," when Bush's most notorious legacies are two colossal wars in the Middle East and the enormous expansion of the surveillance state in the US.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201811091069675576-George-Bush-Two-Wars-Liber...

 

Why Laura?... Read from top and see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276