Robert Parry legt op Consortium News uit, in een artikel overgenomen door Anti-Media, waar goed journalistiek werk o.a. aan moet voldoen: een teken dat een artikel het product is van slordige of oneerlijke journalistiek, kan gezien worden als de kern van het verhaal als feit wordt neergezet, terwijl dit niet bewezen is, of onderdeel is van een serieuze discussie. Veelal wordt zo’n artikel het fundament voor andere (niet bewezen) claims, waarmee een verhaal ‘wordt gebouwd’, dat gefundeerd is op los zand….
Dergelijke journalistiek zou niet in de reguliere media terecht mogen komen, echter tegenwoordig is het tegendeel vaak de praktijk, zoals we zien in de reguliere westerse (massa-) media. Neem de berichtgeving over de illegale oorlogen van de VS tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en nu weer tegen Syrië. ‘Voldongen’ leugens werden en worden als feiten en de enige waarheid neergezet…….
Hetzelfde geldt voor alle belachelijke claims, dat Rusland de VS verkiezingen zou hebben gemanipuleerd middels hacken en het publiceren van artikelen door o.a. Sputnik en Russia Today (RT). Daarbij worden naast een ‘tsunami’ aan berichten op Facebook en Twitter, nu ook advertenties genoemd, die werden geplaatst op Facebook……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Voor al deze zogenaamde feiten, is geen nanometer bewijs, maar ze worden desondanks door diezelfde reguliere media en het merendeel van de westerse politici als de enige waarheid gezien, dit terwijl het overtuigende bewijs van het tegendeel terzijde wordt geschoven………
Parry schrijft over een artikel dat afgelopen vrijdag over 3 pagina’s werd geplaatst in the New York Times (NYT). Daarin wordt betoogt dat Rusland ‘een leger van nep-Amerikanen’ heeft gebruikt om de VS verkiezingen te beïnvloeden……. Of wat dacht u van: ‘met een vloed aan Facebook en Twitterberichten hebben bedriegers haat en verdeeldheid gezaaid in de VS…..’ ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Ja, ze durven wel hè, terwijl die zogenaamde Amerikanen elkaar al een paar eeuwen de strot kunnen afbijten!! (neem alleen al de nog steeds bestaande grove discriminatie van gekleurden in de VS….)
Facebook weigert intussen nog steeds om de advertenties vrij te geven, die volgens haar door de Russische overheid werden geplaatst……. Kortom Facebook beschuldigt een land van uiterst grove handelingen en stelt daarna vrolijk dat men maar moet geloven op de blauwe ogen van de redactie……..
Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van Parry en zegt het voort!
Has
the New York Times Gone Completely Insane?
September
16, 2017 at 11:31 am
Written
by Robert
Parry
Crossing
a line from recklessness into madness, The New York Times published a
front-page opus suggesting that Russia was behind social media
criticism of Hillary Clinton, reports Robert Parry.
(CN) For
those of us who have taught journalism or worked as editors, a sign
that an article is the product of sloppy or dishonest journalism is
that a key point will be declared as flat fact when it is unproven or
a point in serious dispute – and it then becomes the foundation for
other claims, building a story like a high-rise constructed on sand.
This
use of speculation as fact is something to guard against particularly
in the work of inexperienced or opinionated reporters. But what
happens when this sort of unprofessional work tops page one of The
New York Times one day as a major “investigative” article and
reemerges the next day in even more strident form as a major Times
editorial? Are we dealing then with an inept journalist who got
carried away with his thesis or are we facing institutional
corruption or even a collective madness driven by ideological fervor?
What
is stunning about the lede
story in
last Friday’s print edition of The New York Times is that it offers
no real evidence to support its provocative claim that – as the
headline states – “To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake
Americans” or its subhead: “Flooding Twitter and Facebook,
Impostors Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.”
In
the old days, this wildly speculative article, which spills over
three pages, would have earned an F in a J-school class or gotten a
rookie reporter a stern rebuke from a senior editor. But now such
unprofessionalism is highlighted by The New York Times, which boasts
that it is the standard-setter of American journalism, the nation’s
“newspaper of record.”
In
this case, it allows reporter Scott Shane to introduce his thesis by
citing some Internet accounts that apparently used fake identities,
but he ties none of them to the Russian government. Acting like he
has minimal familiarity with the Internet – yes, a lot of people do
use fake identities – Shane builds his case on the assumption that
accounts that cited references to purloined Democratic emails must be
somehow from an agent or a bot connected to the Kremlin.
For
instance, Shane cites the fake identity of “Melvin Redick,” who
suggested on June 8, 2016, that people visit DCLeaks which, a few
days earlier, had posted some emails from prominent Americans, which
Shane states as fact – not allegation – were “stolen … by
Russian hackers.”
Shane
then adds, also as flat fact, that “The site’s phony promoters
were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and
Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose
operations are still being unraveled.”
The
Times’ Version
In
other words, Shane tells us, “The Russian information attack on the
election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic
emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that
battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far
less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s
experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that
essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did
not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and
propaganda.”
Besides
the obvious point that very few Americans watch RT and/or Sputnik and
that Shane offers no details about the alleged falsity of those “fire
hose of stories,” let’s examine how his accusations are backed
up:
“An
investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the
cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which
suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread
anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had
leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut
down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a
Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads
pushing divisive issues during and after the American election
campaign. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on
hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted
anti-Clinton messages.”
Note
the weasel words: “suspected”; “believe”; ‘linked”;
“fingerprints.” When you see such equivocation, it means that
these folks – both the Times and FireEye – don’t have hard
evidence; they are speculating.
And
it’s worth noting that the supposed “army of fake Americans”
may amount to hundreds out of Facebook’s two
billion or so monthly users and
the $100,000 in ads compare to the company’s annual ad revenue
of around
$27 billion.
(I’d do the math but my calculator doesn’t compute such tiny
percentages.)
So,
this “army” is really not an “army” and we don’t even know
that it is “Russian.” But some readers might say that surely we
know that the Kremlin did mastermind the hacking of Democratic
emails!
That
claim is supported by the Jan. 6 “intelligence community
assessment” that was the work of what President Obama’s Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked”
analysts from three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency,
National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But, as
any intelligence expert will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts,
you are hand-picking the conclusions.
Agreeing
with Putin
But
some still might protest that the Jan. 6 report surely presented
convincing evidence of this serious charge about Russian President
Vladimir Putin personally intervening in the U.S. election to help
put Donald Trump in the White House. Well, as it turns out, not so
much, and if you don’t believe me, we can call to the witness stand
none other than New York Times reporter Scott Shane.
Shane wrote at
the time: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is
what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back
up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the
election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies
essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
So,
even Scott Shane, the author of last Friday’s opus, recognized the
lack of “hard evidence” to prove that the Russian government was
behind the release of the Democratic emails, a claim that both Putin
and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published a trove of the
emails, have denied. While it is surely possible that Putin and
Assange are lying or don’t know the facts, you might think that
their denials would be relevant to this lengthy investigative
article, which also could have benefited from some mention of Shane’s
own skepticism of last January, but, hey, you don’t want
inconvenient details to mess up a cool narrative.
Yet,
if you struggle all the way to the end of last Friday’s article,
you do find out how flimsy the Times’ case actually is. How, for
instance, do we know that “Melvin Redick” is a Russian impostor
posing as an American? The proof, according to Shane, is that “His
posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a
pro-Russian worldview.”
As
it turns out, the Times now operates with what must be called a
neo-McCarthyistic approach for identifying people as Kremlin stooges,
i.e., anyone who doubts the truthfulness of the State Department’s
narratives on Syria, Ukraine and other international topics.
Unreliable
Source
In
the article’s last section, Shane acknowledges as much in citing
one of his experts, “Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher
who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media.”
Shane quotes Weisburd as admitting how hard it is to differentiate
Americans who just might oppose Hillary Clinton because they didn’t
think she’d make a good president from supposed Russian operatives:
“Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”
According
to Shane, “Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts
‘Kremlin trolls’ based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with
no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such
users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American,
pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from
Moscow.”
One
of Weisburd’s “Kremlin trolls” turned out to be 66-year-old
Marilyn Justice who lives in Nova Scotia and who somehow
reached the conclusion that
“Hillary’s a warmonger.” During the 2014 Winter Olympics in
Sochi, Russia, she reached another conclusion: that U.S. commentators
were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias perhaps because they indeed
were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias.
Shane
tracked down another “Kremlin troll,” 48-year-old Marcel Sardo, a
web producer in Zurich, Switzerland, who dares to dispute the West’s
groupthink that Russia was responsible for shooting down Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, and the State
Department’s claims that the Syrian government used sarin gas in a
Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013.
Presumably,
if you don’t toe the line on those dubious U.S. government
narratives, you are part of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. (In
both cases, there actually are serious reasons to doubt the Western
groupthinks which again lack real evidence.)
But
Shane accuses Sardo and his fellow-travelers of spreading “what
American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election
hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.” In other words, if you examine
the evidence on MH-17 or the Syrian sarin case and conclude that the
U.S. government’s claims are dubious if not downright false, you
are somehow disloyal and making Russian officials “gleeful at their
success,” as Shane puts it.
But
what kind of a traitor are you if you quote Shane’s initial
judgment after reading the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian election
meddling? What are you if you agree with his factual observation that
the report lacked anything approaching “hard evidence”? That’s
a point that also dovetails with what Vladimir Putin has been saying
– that “IP addresses can be simply made up. … This is no
proof”?
So
is Scott Shane a “Kremlin troll,” too? Should the Times
immediately fire him as a disloyal foreign agent? What if Putin says
that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and your child is taught the same thing in
elementary school, what does that say about public school teachers?
Out
of such gibberish come the evils of McCarthyism and the death of the
Enlightenment. Instead of encouraging a questioning citizenry, the
new American paradigm is to silence debate and ridicule anyone who
steps out of line.
You
might have thought people would have learned something from the
disastrous groupthink about Iraqi WMD, a canard that the Times and
most of the U.S. mainstream media eagerly promoted.
But
if you’re feeling generous and thinking that the Times’ editors
must have been chastened by their Iraq-WMD fiasco but perhaps had a
bad day last week and somehow allowed an egregious piece of
journalism to lead their front page, your kind-heartedness would be
shattered on Saturday when the Times’ editorial board penned a
laudatory reprise of
Scott Shane’s big scoop.
Stripping
away even the few caveats that the article had included, the Times’
editors informed us that “a startling investigation by Scott Shane
of The New York Times, and new research by the cybersecurity firm
FireEye, now reveal, the Kremlin’s stealth intrusion into the
election was far broader and more complex, involving a cyberarmy of
bloggers posing as Americans and spreading propaganda and
disinformation to an American electorate on Facebook, Twitter and
other platforms. …
“Now
that the scheming is clear, Facebook and Twitter say they are
reviewing the 2016 race and studying how to defend against such
meddling in the future. … Facing the Russian challenge will involve
complicated issues dealing with secret foreign efforts to undermine
American free speech.”
But
what is the real threat to “American free speech”? Is it the
possibility that Russia – in a very mild imitation of what the U.S.
government does all over the world – used some Web sites
clandestinely to get out its side of various stories, an accusation
against Russia that still lacks any real evidence?
Or
is the bigger threat that the nearly year-long Russia-gate hysteria
will be used to clamp down on Americans who dare question fact-lite
or fact-free Official Narratives handed down by the State Department
and The New York Times?
By Robert
Parry /
Republished with permission / Consortium
News / Report
a typo
=================================
Zie ook: ‘JULIAN ASSANGE OFFERS U.S. GOVERNMENT PROOF RUSSIA WASN’T SOURCE OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEAKS, SAYS WSJ‘ (op Stan van Houcke die het overnam van Global Research)
