Fake News operator talks about the bizness

There’s competing memes going on about the ‘fake news’ issue.

Looks like the American pro-corporate MSM is pushing the “Hillary lost cause of fake news” meme.
And the PUtin-friendly Media is pushing the “American corporate media has always been propaganda and thus ‘fake’.

Its not easy to sort through all the ‘interests’ involved
and figure out the ‘truth’ etc.

w
v

================================
fake news battles:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45914.htm

By Finian Cunningham

November 24, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – “Sputnik” – 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.

Western so-called news services do on occasion publish outright fake news, such as when Iraq was accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the US-led war in 2003. But far more often, the informational fare is less crudely fabricated and more subtly finessed with distortions and omissions of crucial facts and context. Still, that is tantamount to fake news, no less.

This week, Western newspapers and TV channels were reporting on how Russia was “destabilizing European security” by installing Iskander missiles and the S-400 defense system in its territory of Kaliningrad – the exclave between Lithuania and Poland.

The supposedly august London Times headlined its report thus: “Putin moves his missiles in new threat to Europe”.

The foreboding tone is typical of the constant flow of Western media reports over many months alleging that Russian warships and warplanes are menacing European territories. From Britain’s Daily Mail to America’s New York Times we have been told since at least last year that Russian troops were about to invade the Baltic states.

No matter that Moscow, including President Vladimir Putin and his top diplomat Sergei Lavrov, has repeatedly dismissed the allegations of Russian aggression. Undeterred, the Western “news stories” just keep being churned out as if by a manic conveyor belt.

As always, this week’s Western Russian-scare episode was spun and disseminated without the appropriate, crucial context.

The installation of missiles on Russia’s western-most territory comes after the US-led NATO military alliance announced plans last month to greatly escalate troops on Russia’s border. The Kaliningrad move also follows the deployment of US missile systems in Romania earlier this year.

Evidently, Russia’s latest military measures are in response to US and NATO offensive steps, or as Putin told American film director Oliver Stone in an interview aired this week, the Russian moves are “counter-measures”.

Washington and its NATO allies justify their reckless escalation on Russia’s borders as “defensive response” to alleged Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia in 2008. But such Western claims are easily disputable, indeed rendered baseless if given to objective scrutiny.

The trouble is, however, Western media have by and large not allowed factual reportage to intrude on their pre-ordained narrative of impugning and demonizing Russia.

What we see is a systematic information campaign – bluntly, propaganda – that propagates fake news upon fake news in order to justify Western strategic interests. Those interests include: propping up NATO and the Western military-industrial complex that is so vital to sustain late capitalist economies; as well as subjugating Russia and its enormous natural resources for exploitation by Western corporations.

In this perspective, fake news about the Pope backing Donald Trump or about Hillary Clinton’s health condition is a trifle. The real perpetrators of fake news are professional media conglomerates that pound TV channels and internet screens every second of every day, with the diabolical risk of igniting all-out global war.

This corporate-controlled fake news about alleged Russian aggression in Europe or purported violations in Syria and Ukraine is correlated with the sanitizing of real news about how Western governments are supporting terrorists in Syria, or aiding and abetting state-sponsored slaughter of civilians in Yemen.

So pervasive is this matrix that the systematic purveyors of fake news can turn around and, with a straight face, pontificate to others about the “ethics of journalism”.

What is truly alarming is that the West’s weaponization of information – self-declared as independent, free-thinking – has become so inculcated that real, alternative news could end up being banished from public access.

Dissenting news sites, including many that are based in the West and elsewhere, including Russian’s RT and Sputnik, often convey context and facts that upend Western official narratives.

Just because those alternative news perspectives might appear outlandish to grossly distorted Western narratives, will they then be subject to censorship?

Accusing Western governments of sponsoring terrorism or fabricating “Russian aggression” could, plausibly, seem like fake news if control of the internet were given over to a coterie of Western-based monitors. But such designation of “fake news” is only due to oblivious cultural arrogance and indoctrination.

Maybe the internet will not succumb to the latest Western crusade against “fake news”.

However, considering how so much of Western “news” is already weaponized and when you consider the deeper malign purposes that it truly serves, then the practice of creeping censorship is never too far away.

NPR:http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/23/503129818/study-finds-students-have-dismaying-inability-to-tell-fake-news-from-real

nittany ram wrote:

“Let’s be honest here. Facebook and Twitter have no motivation to clean up their act: that they are paying out ad revenue to neo-Nazi propaganda is a consequence of the fact that that crap is popular. Rejecting bullying or fascism does not make them money, while providing an outlet for them does.
And now I’m torn. I feel like I should shut down my facebook account, but a) I use it for the good stuff it provides as a social medium to keep in touch with my scattered family, and b) if all the liberals leave, it will become an even worse playground for trolls and scum. What are you all going to do?”

Read more: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/11/26/facebook-has-become-a-scourge-on-the-world/#ixzz4R85bHKsX

—————–

Well what would “cleaning up their act” even look like? I mean the whole “fake news” thing is tricky. The MSM has been spewing out corporate-propaganda since day one. So why shouldnt we call the NY Times and the Washington Times the “fake news papers of record”

w
v

Well, i still maintain the MSM is a more sinister problem than the ‘fake news’ problem. Both are problems, but which one will the MSM NEVER talk about and which one will they try to solve ?

——————
“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.”
― A.J. Liebling

The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
― Gore Vidal

——-
“We are intellectual prostitutes.”
John Swinton, New York 1890.

John Swinton, the foremost journalist of his day, was asked to toast an independent press at a New York banquet given in his honour by other journalists. His response was clear and forthright:

“There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Other of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

“The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.

=====================

===============
Journalists Denounce WaPo Fake News Blacklist as Red Scare Redux

“Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum is guilty.”
by
Lauren McCauley, staff writer
link:http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/28/journalists-denounce-wapo-fake-news-blacklist-red-scare-redux

The Washington Post’s promotion of a new, “McCarthyistic” so-called black list has journalists aghast over what appears to be a red scare redux, as independent news outlets critical of U.S. foreign policy are being smeared as “Russian propaganda.”

“Now that we have entered a New Cold War, I suppose it makes sense that we should expect a New McCarthyism,” writes Robert Parry, investigative journalist and editor of Consortium News, which was one of the websites flagged by the anonymous organization PropOrNot as a “Russian propaganda outlet.”

Last week, the Washington Post published a feature story citing PropOrNot and other supposed “experts” who allege that “Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery” was behind the rise of “fake news,” which they say spread false information about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, fueling the rise of Donald Trump.

The fake news was disseminated and amplified by an “online echo chamber,” WaPo’s Craig Timberg reported, which included players who “were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign…while others were ‘useful idiots’— a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.”

PropOrNot claims that stories planted or promoted by this campaign were viewed on Facebook more than 213 million times.

But the outlets being singled out by the group, and thus smeared by the Post, run the gamut politically, with the only seeming connection being that they “do not uncritically echo a pro-NATO perspective,” as journalists Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald point out.

In a searing take-down published at The Intercept on Saturday, Norton and Greenwald accuse PropOrNot of committing “outright defamation” for “slandering obviously legitimate news sites as propaganda tools of the Kremlin.”

While some, namely Sputnik News and Russia Today, are funded by the Russian government, those sites are listed alongside a host of others who do not warrant this categorization. They write:

Included on this blacklist of supposed propaganda outlets are prominent independent left-wing news sites such as Truthout, Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Consortium News, and Truthdig.

Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute, along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the publishing site WikiLeaks. Far-right, virulently anti-Muslim blogs such as Bare Naked Islam are likewise dubbed Kremlin mouthpieces. Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum is guilty.

Norton and Greenwald also lambast the Washington Post for its “shoddy, slothful” reporting. Among the piece’s shortcomings, they note, is that Timberg failed to include a link to PropOrNot’s website.

“If readers had the opportunity to visit the site,” they write, “it would have become instantly apparent that this group of ostensible experts far more resembles amateur peddlers of primitive, shallow propagandistic clichés than serious, substantive analysis and expertise; that it has a blatant, demonstrable bias in promoting NATO’s narrative about the world; and that it is engaging in extremely dubious McCarthyite tactics about a wide range of critics and dissenters.”

What’s more, The Intercept notes, the problematic exposé “was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media” following its publication, which has far-ranging consequences.

Fortune columnist Mathew Ingram similarly lamented the dangers of lumping “anyone who shared a salacious but untrue news story about Hillary Clinton as an agent of an orchestrated Russian intelligence campaign.”

“Has the rise of fake news played into the hands of those who want to spread disinformation? Sure it has,” Ingram wrote. “But connecting hundreds of Twitter accounts into a dark web of Russian-controlled agents, along with any website that sits on some poorly thought-out blacklist, seems like the beginnings of a conspiracy theory, rather than a scientific analysis of the problem.”