Matt Taibbi: The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting

[babylonsister]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/washington-post-blacklist-story-is-shameful-disgusting-w452543

The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting

The capital's paper of record crashes legacy media on an iceberg

By Matt Taibbi
15 hours ago


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.

snip//

This is the ultimate in stupidity and self-annihilating behavior. The power of the press comes from its independence from politicians. Jump into bed with them and you not only won't ever be able to get out, but you'll win nothing but a loss of real influence and the undying loathing of audiences.

Helping Beltway politicos mass-label a huge portion of dissenting media as "useful idiots" for foreign enemies in this sense is an extraordinarily self-destructive act. Maybe the Post doesn't care and thinks it's doing the right thing. In that case, at least do the damn work.

[elehhhhna]

1. Like the list of liberal educators. Nazi level asshole bullshit.

[TubbersUK]

2. K & R n/t

[MADem]

3. I have a bit of a hard time with Matt Taibbi demanding journalistic integrity from anyone...

The Exile also ignored or glossed over a lot of important stories, most notably the horrific Moscow Theater siege, the Beslan massacre, and the killings of journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, and went after people—too often harmless people or friends like Owen Matthews—with an ugly sadism. Taibbi’s press reviews can read like poison-pen letters. He falsely claimed in print that he’d slept with the wife of Russia scholar Michael McFaul, now a special adviser to President Obama on Russia, with whom he’d been carrying on a war of words. There was the cover depicting Condoleezza Rice in minstrel garb, and, during the U.S. presidential primaries, an Ames editorial on Barack Obama saying that his “perfectly bland, business-friendly swagger makes him exactly the sort of African-American who’d earn Trump’s approval,” an admissible argument made less so by the image of Obama’s head on the body of rapper 50 Cent. Ames insisted his real target in both cases was Russian racism.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/02/exile-201002


This was written SIX years ago.

[still_one]

4. We will never find out, but based on his anti-Hillary positions I wouldn't be surprised if he

joined those self-identified progressives who refused to vote for Hillary

[MADem]

9. ...and the horse he (and they) rode in on!

That's pretty much my POV towards him, and them.

Those people brought us Trump and I'll blame them along with the mouth-breathers that voted for the Orange Cheetoh Cheater in the stupid red hat!

[mulsh]

5. perhaps Propornot is part the US intelligence couter-disinformation program. Certainly seems like a

possibility to me given how little info is available about the people behind it.

of course I think Oswald had a couple of lucky shots and we actually did land on the moon a few times so maybe I'm not the right person to have an opinion about all this.

[annabanana]

7. *. .

What a world we are entering with this "administration"

[yurbud]

6. they aren't just in bed with money and politicians, they can't remember being anywhere else

[mn9driver]

8. The weird thing about this election cycle

is that both left and right alternative news websites were picking up obvious Russian propaganda stories.

It was mostly anti-Clinton and anti-Obama stuff. And yes, sites like Infowars and Truthdig sometimes ended up running the SAME stories.