If there is one newspaper more disgusting than the NYT it is the Washington Post.
The lead in WaPo’s Friday edition is “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”:
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Is the Clinton Foundation not a pay-to-play operation, in reality?
Does HRC not suffer from health issues, in reality?
Has anyone voting for Trump been motivated by ‘fear of looming hostilities’ with Russia?
You see where this ‘fake news’ meme is going.
I also find it quite interesting that the Usual Suspects of the elite – from Obama and Merkel, to an increasing number of newly threatened MSM outlets – are pushing this narrative.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
That’s a helluva caveat.
How to weigh the preponderance of evidence Peter Schweitzer has documented about the Clinton Machine’s worldwide ‘pay to play’ scheme; the unfortunate (for HRC) transparency the Podesta emails revealed — e.g., various overt MSM efforts to help HRC (e.g., Donna Brazile, Jon Harwood, Glenn Thrush, etc.), various DNC efforts to favor HRC over Bernie Sanders (e.g., Debbie Blabbermouth Shultz), etc… vs. RT and Sputnik.
Such a tough call.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”…
Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted the propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union.
The degree to which the MSM sees Trump voters as idiots, useful or otherwise, is absolutely mind-numbing.
I especially liked this paragraph:
The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.
The Clinton Foundation… George Soros… the Davos crowd… Silicon Valley… Hollywood… the NYT… How could anyone think there might be collective liberal forces (less ‘secret’ than collective, holding almost all the reins of power, and expressing an identical, group-think mindset) ‘dictate’ world events?
A quite ironic paragraph:
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, said he was struck by the overt support that RT and Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #CrookedHillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.
So… let’s assume RT and Sputnik news channels were ‘pro-Trump’, and that itself a big assumption.
To what degree does this then counterbalance the much more formidable, cumulative effect of the anti-Trump sentiment expressed the past 18 months in the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and dozens of other domestic media outlets?
Again… such a tough call.
This ‘fake news’ meme being pushed by the above-mentioned ‘secret powers’ is a deliberate and coordinated attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Brexit/Trump/Alt-Right democratic revolution we are currently witnessing.
