The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting
By Matt Taibbi
/ rollingstone.com
Last week, a technology reporter for the Washington Post named
Craig Timberg ran an incredible story. It has no analog that I can
think of in modern times. Headlined "Russian propaganda effort helped
spread 'fake news' during election, experts say," the piece promotes
the work of a shadowy group that smears some 200 alternative news
outlets as either knowing or unwitting agents of a foreign power,
including popular sites like Truthdig and Naked Capitalism.
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."
The piece relied on what it claimed were "two teams of
independent researchers," but the citing of a report by the longtime
anticommunist Foreign Policy Research Institute was really window
dressing.
The meat of the story relied on a report by unnamed analysts from a single mysterious "organization" called PropOrNot –
we don't know if it's one person or, as it claims, over 30 – a "group"
that seems to have been in existence for just a few months.
It was PropOrNot's report that identified what it calls "the list"
of 200 offending sites. Outlets as diverse as AntiWar.com,
LewRockwell.com and the Ron Paul Institute were described as either
knowingly directed by Russian intelligence, or "useful idiots" who
unwittingly did the bidding of foreign masters.
Forget that the Post offered no information about the
"PropOrNot" group beyond that they were "a collection of researchers
with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds."
The 'Washington Post' ran a piece last week headlined "Russian
propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts
say." (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
