USA Today pair hit by smear campaign after Pentagon propaganda story
Source: Guardian
Two USA Today journalists investigating private security companies engaging in foreign propaganda wars on behalf of the Pentagon appear to have been subjected themselves to a dirty tricks campaign, the newspaper has revealed.
Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and editor Ray Locker became the subject of a sustained internet campaign to discredit their work just days after they began publishing the results of their investigation into a multi-million dollar Pentagon-funded propaganda mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the course of the smear campaign, fake websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts were set up under the journalists' names in which they were accused of being backed by the Taliban.
The source of the smear campaign has not been identified, and the Pentagon itself told USA Today that it was unaware of any such activities, which it stressed it would find unacceptable. But the timing of the shady attempts to drag their names into the journalistic mud is certainly suggestive.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/20/usa-today-smear-campaign
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