WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived.

Selected excerpts from:

WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived.

The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, January 4, 2017

"IN THE PAST six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.

...

Beyond the journalistic tendency to echo anonymous officials on whatever Scary Foreign Threat they are hyping at the moment, there is an independent incentive scheme sustaining all of this. That Russia is a Grave Menace attacking the U.S. has — for obvious reasons — become a critical narrative for Democrats and other Trump opponents who dominate elite media circles on social media and elsewhere. They reward and herald anyone who bolsters that narrative, while viciously attacking anyone who questions it.

Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and — needless to say  — a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage — with someone just elected to public office as a socialist — I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated — where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as The Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: Those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative — no matter how divorced from reason and evidence they are — receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it."
 
Please read rest of the article at https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04/washpost-is-richly-rewarded-for-false-news-about-russia-threat-while-public-is-deceived/
 
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The Ukrainian-Russian-American Observer:

http://ura-observer.blogspot.com

https://www.facebook.com/URA.Observer/

https://twitter.com/URA_Observer

Greg Krasovsky:

https://www.facebook.com/gkrasovsky

THE PENTAGON’S MISSIONARY SPIES: U.S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage.

Greg Krasovsky's post on Facebook: 

I have been involved in volunteer disaster aid and humanitarian work since the age of 18 when I started volunteering for The American Red Cross' Disaster Aid Services Division in New York City during my freshman year at Columbia University.

What really makes me upset is to see desperately needed international humanitarian work manipulated and corrupted for economic, political, military and/or intelligence gathering purposes.

Recently, I wrote a Facebook post about. See https://www.facebook.com/gkrasovsky/posts/10153356296538742

Well, it just gets worse, if the below three articles (on NGOs working in Syria in furthering capitalism) weren't bad enough.

Why can't Western democratic government abide by not using humanitarian organizations and their employees & volunteers for intelligence & political work?

Why is it that even The U.S. Peace Corps has been used by the CIA -- including in the former Soviet Union -- despite the clear federal prohibitions against this? See below articles.

How will American volunteer humanitarian workers -- as well as religious missionaries -- be able to do their job abroad when local government and citizenry will suspect and treatment them as potential spies or government agents sent to subvert the local government or promote regime change?

This is as bad as using physicians, lawyers or even journalists-- professionals who have oaths and a duty of loyalty and confidentiality to their clients, patients and sources -- as spies.

Guess how many times people that I know have gotten the smirk or outright comment about being U.S. spies when they told people that they did international humanitarian or disaster relief work?

When will this madness end?

Where's the outrage? Congressional investigations? White House statements and criticism?

Aren't we better than this?

Or am I just beating a dead horse?

What's your opinion?

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THE PENTAGON’S MISSIONARY SPIES: U.S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage.

Selected Excerpts:

""Before it was finally dismantled in 2013, Hiramine’s organization received millions in funding from the Pentagon through a complex web of organizations designed to mask the origin of the cash, according to one of the former military officials familiar with the program, as well as documentation reviewed for this article.

The use of HISG for espionage was “beyond the pale” of what the U.S. government should be allowed to do, said Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, an association of nearly 200 American NGOs. The practice of using humanitarian workers as spies “violates international principles” and puts legitimate aid and development workers at risk, he argued.

“It is unacceptable that the Pentagon or any other U.S. agency use nonprofits for intelligence gathering,” Worthington said. “It is a violation of the basic trust between the U.S. government and its civic sector.”
...
“If true, to use unwitting aid workers on behalf of an intelligence operation, people who genuinely do humanitarian work, to turn their efforts into intel collection is unacceptable,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who served on the House Intelligence Committee from 2007 until this year. Schakowsky said she was unaware of the program, and unaware of any briefings given to the committee chair and ranking members.

“Now we have people who have been hired to do some good work and become unwitting accomplices to an intelligence mission? They can face all kinds of retaliation. It is completely unacceptable,” Schakowsky said.""

Please read the rest of the article at: https://theintercept.com/2015/10/26/pentagon-missionary-spies-christian-ngo-front-for-north-korea-espionage/

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Please read these articles as well:

Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception – Part I

http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/10/23/syrias-white-helmets-war-by-way-of-deception-part-1/

Part II – Syria’s White Helmets: War By Way of Deception ~ ‘Moderate Executioners’

http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/10/28/part-ii-syrias-white-helmets-war-by-way-of-deception-moderate-executioners/

The Useful Altruists: How NGOs Serve Capitalism and Imperialism

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/20/the-useful-altruists-how-ngos-serve-capitalism-and-imperialism/

PURITY IN THE PEACE CORPS

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_secretgov_5i.htm

The Spy Who Was A PCV

http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2000/0011/011clolk.html

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