An excellent debunking of a notorious rightwing "fake news" item

Amanda Robb has done an excellent article on the "Pizzagate" fake news and accompanying panic that is a great example of fact-based debunking, Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal Rolling Stone 11/16/2017.

The article is "reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. based on a joint project with The Investigative Fund and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting." Reveal has a series of podcasts available, including one on Pizzagate, which provides additional reporting.

The Pizzagate story could never have been taken as seriously as it was or gotten spread to the extent it did if everyone were applying one of the most basic rules of reality-testing: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Claiming the Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile lesbian child prostitution ring out the basement of a pizza parlor qualifies as an extraordinary claim. Alex Jones ranting about it on YouTube or a chain email from your goofy cousin do not count as extraordinary proof.

The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is one that the Skeptical Inquirer journal has long promoted in debunking pseudoscience. They generally don't emphasize political topics except when its unavoidable in critiquing some crackpot pseudoscience notion like "creationism" or climate-change denial. But their investigations and takedowns of various ghost and UFO stories and alternative-medicine frauds is both informative and entertaining. Their articles give the reader a sense of how easy it can be to be taken in by a bogus claim and also some basic techniques people can use to judge claims on the news and in popular gossip when they deal with events or subjects with which the reader has no first-hand knowledge or expertise.

One of the social processes that affect the acceptance of all claims, not just "fake news," is confirmation from people around you. As the linguists and philosophers building on their work tell us, the formation and refinement of knowledge is very much a social process. And in practice, that means that for much of what we believe we know in daily life is based on whether people we know and trust believe the claim and how intensely they believe it.

I'm not making an argument that all our knowledge is subjective. Reality has an unpleasant way of imposing itself on us when we ignore it.

One very notable thing about Robb's article and the related podcast it that they focus on how important Breitbart and FOX News are to rightwing fabricated "alternative facts" that get magnified by partisan online dissemination, not all of it from engaged individuals. Yes, there are Russian bots out there.

And they also call attention to how people who have been thinking in tune with the rightwing media environment will take contrary reporting from the mainstream press as confirmation of the claims being refuted. When you let FOX and Breitbart and the like rewire your head, strange things can happen. That's also the topic of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's tweet:

Just heard Bill McKibben say: “If you'd been marinating in Rush Limbaugh for thirty years, you'd be impervious to reason too."

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) November 20, 2017

An example of Fake News: Berkeley anti-antifa version

Lisa Amin Gulezian in Berkeley protest victim speaks after police say stabbing allegations are false ABC7 News tells the story of a false claim of a stabbing by an antifa protester:

Right-wing activist Kyle Chapman, known as the "Based Stick Man," started the rumor Saturday morning by tweeting, "A Ben Shapiro supporter was stabbed in the neck by Antifa terrorists last night in Berkeley CA."

Chapman, a 41-year-old Daly City man who's charged with felony possession of a leaded cane for allegedly brandishing a leaded stick at a rally in Berkeley in March, described the woman's attacker as a "demon scum leftist" and asked people to "please pray 4her."

The Berkeley Police Department flatly denied that such a stabbing took place:

Online accounts surrounding a stabbing at last night's protest are false.

— Berkeley Police (@berkeleypolice) September 15, 2017

In our current media environment, a claim like this can get posted and magnified by rightwing media and a potentiall fast number of retweets.

Stories are more persuasive than statistics. So statistics showing that the vast number of incidents of political terrorist violence in the US has come from rightwingers in recent decades don't have the same kind of emotional appeal as "leftwing anarchist in Berkeley stabs peaceful protester in the neck."

There's no magic solution to disinformation campaigns based on claims like this. But people who don't want to get suckered by disinformation will need to pay attention to the factual basis, or lack thereof, in such claims. Especially ones that start taking off as mass memes. That's why fact-checking sites like Snopes, TruthorFiction, and Politifact provide such important journalistic service in today's media landscape.

A September 13 item at TruthorFiction features another claim from a guy named Joshua Witt claimed that someone had stabbed him for looking like a neo-Nazi. Tom McGee reports on the case in He claimed he was stabbed for looking like a “neo-Nazi.” Now police say he bought the knife himself. Denver Post 08/28/2017:

Witt’s report followed blanket news coverage of a white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned violent. One woman who was protesting the Unite the Right demonstration was killed when a white supremacist drove into the crowd.

Police became skeptical of Witt’s story when they reviewed surveillance video and saw no one running from the scene. They also found a transient who lives in the area who matched the description Witt gave, but cleared him as a suspect.

Video from a nearby sporting goods store showed Witt purchasing a small knife.

When police confronted Witt with that information on Aug. 24, he admitted accidentally cutting himself with the knife while in his car parked in front of the store.

Maybe claiming they've been stabbed by Mean Libruls is some kind of alt-right fad right now!

Al Gore: "We are seeing every night on the television news now a nature hike through the Book of Revelation"

"We are seeing every night on the television news now a nature hike through the Book of Revelation," says Al Gore in the PBS Newshour interview that aired Monday, Al Gore: We need to restore American democracy's immunity to blatant falsehoods 03/13/2017:

The contexct of that comment was this:

And that’s a perfect example of the problem that I’m describing in “The Assault on Reason.” Again, at some point, a false belief collides with physical reality.

We are seeing every night on the television news now a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. These climate-related extreme weather events have convinced the vast majority of people that the scientists have been right for a long time. We have to address this.

But putting someone in the EPA who denies even the most basic scientific truth about this, you know, it’s — the old cliches are, you can say the Earth is flat, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to fall off the edge.

The conjoined fake-news/Russian-propaganda brouhaha continues

I don't pretend to know what's really behind the "fake news"/Russian propaganda story that the Democrats in particular have been pushing. Obviously, since the whole story is based on claims about highly secret operations, there's not a lot of definitive information in the public record on this. To put it mildly.

Spencer Ackerman reports on Obama taking a new step in the process of developing whatever this is, President Obama is acting Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference Guardian 12/09/2016:

Lisa Monaco, the White House counterterrorism director, announced what she called a “full review” at a breakfast briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor on Friday.

“This is good news. Declassifying and releasing information about the Russian government and the US election, and doing so quickly, must be a priority,” said Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.

In October, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of homeland security publicly accused the “senior-most” levels of the Russian government of directing those digital breaches. Trump, who has treated Russian president Vladimir Putin with a warmth unequalled by most US politicians, has repeatedly dismissed the accusation as politically motivated.

US intelligence laid the blame for the DNC hack at Russia’s feet but has not provided evidence supporting the accusation, although several private cybersecurity firms reaching the same conclusion have. Earlier this month, all the Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee publicly intimated the administration knows significantly more about Russian culpability than the October statement revealed, and implored Obama for a public disclosure he has thus far resisted. [my emphasis]

Presidential election winner Hillary Clinton made a high-profile statement about "fake news" yesterday (Lauren Gambino, Hillary Clinton warns fake news can have 'real world consequences' Guardian 12/09/2016):

Hillary Clinton issued a call to action against the “epidemic” of fake news in a rare public appearance since her unexpected loss to Donald Trump.

The Democratic presidential nominee warned that the proliferation of false news stories online can have “real world consequences”, alluding to an incident over the weekend in which a man opened fire at Comet Ping Pong after reading a false news story that purported the DC pizzeria was harboring children as part of a sex ring led by Clinton. No one was injured.

“This is not about politics or partisanship,” Clinton said, during a tribute to departing Senate minority leader Harry Reid. “Lives are at risk. Lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities.”

“It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly.”

She linked that theme to legislation in Congress to get more aggressive in responding to "foreign propaganda."

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur is highly suspicious of this whole story line (Hillary Wants Government To Decide What "Fake News" Is 12/08/2016):

Truthdig provides an update on their attorney's letter to the Washignton Pot over an aspect of this story, Here’s The Washington Post’s Letter Responding to Truthdig’s Demand for a Retraction 12/08/2016.

Mark Ames writes on the same story about a smear in a Washington Post article on the fake-news/Russian-propaganda theme in The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying AlterNet 12/07/2016

Featured alongside those anonymously accused of treason by PropOrNot, among a long list of marginal conspiracy sites and major news hubs, is Truthdig. This news and opinion site was co-founded by Zuade Kaufman and the veteran journalist Robert Scheer, who is a professor of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and former columnist for the LA Times. It would not be the first time Scheer has come under attack from dark forces. In the mid-late 1960s, Scheer made his fame as editor and reporter for Ramparts, the fearless investigative magazine that changed American journalism. One of the biggest bombshell stories that Scheer’s magazine exposed was the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association, then America’s largest college student organization, which had chapters on 400 campuses and a major presence internationally.

The CIA was not pleased with Scheer’s magazine’s work, and shortly afterwards launched a top-secret and illegal domestic spying campaign against Scheer and Ramparts, believing that they must be a Russian Communist front. A secret team of CIA operatives—kept secret even from the rest of Langley, the operation was so blatantly illegal—spied on Scheer and his Ramparts colleagues, dug through Ramparts’ funders lives and harassed some of them into ditching the magazine, but in all of that they couldn’t find a single piece of evidence linking Scheer’s magazine to Kremlin agents. This secret illegal CIA investigation into Scheer’s magazine expanded its domestic spying project, code-named MH-CHAOS, that grew into a monster targeting hundreds of thousands of Americans, only to be exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974, leading to the creation of the Church Committee hearings and calls by Congress for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It’s one of the dark ugly ironies that 50 years later, Scheer has been anonymously accused of working for Russian spies, only this time the accusers have the full cooperation of the Washington Post’s front page.

He also discusses the Ukrainian connection in their title:

Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.

One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”

Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.

The more I hear about the Russian hacking story, the more I think that whatever the result of this scare turns out to be, it will not be good for progressives or the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.

Here's a different twist from Greg Sargent What happens if Russia did interfere in our election? Washington Post 12/09/2016:

James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan international security think tank, suggests that a finding of Russian interference of some kind might “hem in the next administration,” i.e., the Trump administration. That’s because any evidence that Russia tried to swing the election in some form or other — if such evidence is found — might shine a harsher light on Trump’s foreign policy choices.

Trump has publicly expressed skepticism that Russia was behind the hacks, claiming that “I don’t believe they interfered,” and suggesting that “it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” Trump has also suggested that he wants much smoother relations with Russia.

“But if the administration releases some information on Russian interference, saying, ‘here’s how they did it and here’s what their intent was,’ it would make it harder to argue that it was a hacker in New Jersey,” Lewis tells me. “That could help shape our approach towards Russia next year. The hope is, Trump would have to be more careful.”

So, is the purpose of this to make it harder for the Trump Family Business Administration less willing to improve relations with Russia no matter what?

The "fake news" and the hyped scare over Russian propaganda

It looks like the paired stories on "fake news" and alleged Russian manipulation of the US election will percolate for a while.

It's hard to tell at this point who and what are behind this particular meme. I always suspected that the anti-Russian emphasis of the Hillary Clinton campaign was in part meant to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy against Russia than even the Obama Administration has run. Part of it was what they saw as a convenient way to duck questions about the Wikileaks revelations of the campaign's e-mails.

Specifically branding Wikileaks as Russian sockpuppets was also an obvious part of the intention of both the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration. Obama has literally had a more severe policy against whistleblowers than even the Cheney-Bush Administration and Hillary Clinton supported that stance, as well. Wikileaks has obviously played a role in investigative reporting that the corporate media have to a large extent abandoned.

Lee Fang explains that Trump's allies are producers of "fake news" in Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies The Intercept 11/26/2016. For instance:

Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally currently under consideration to be Trump’s White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette, a news site that frequently posts articles of dubious veracity. One video produced by LifeZette this summer, ominously titled “Clinton Body Count,” promoted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton family had some role in the plane crash death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as well as the deaths of various friends and Democrats.

The video, published on Facebook from LifeZette’s verified news account, garnered over 400,000 shares and 14 million views.

Progressive news and commentary sites listed on a frivolous list of alleged Russian-influenced "fake news" websites, which the Washington Post publicized as though it were a legitimate and credible group, have been pushing back. Natasha Hakimi breaks it down in Truthdiggers of the Week: Journalists Who Ripped Washington Post, PropOrNot for McCarthyite Hogwash Trughtdig 12/03/2013:

The list, which some in the media have branded “McCarthyite,” has been widely criticized, particularly because Timberg and the Post did not disclose sufficient identifying details about the accusing group, which has not released its members’ names. And neither Timberg nor Post editors have provided any insight on their reasoning in publishing PropOrNot’s findings. For its part, PropOrNot continues to offer erratic, at times childish, responses to the backlash.

She cites Ben Norton's and Glenn Greenwald's article, Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group The Intercept 11/26/2016, where they justifiably charge, "Yet the [WaPo] article is rife with obviously reckless and unproven allegations, and fundamentally shaped by shoddy, slothful journalistic tactics."

She also references and provides quotes from these additional pieces:

Adrian Chen in The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda New Yorker 12/01/2016, which gives an excellent summary of how flaky the PropOrNot group's criteria for pushing Russian propaganda are.
Matt Taibbi, The 'Washington Post' 'Blacklist' Story Is Shameful and Disgusting Rolling Stone 11/28/2016
Joshua Frank, CounterPunch as Russian Propagandists: the Washington Post’s Shallow Smear Counterpunch 12/02/2016; also including the following Vimeo report featuring Joshua Frank:

Truthdig also has another article about the smear effort, Preserving Independent Journalism and Fighting the New McCarthyism 11/29/2016. Also including video, Robert Scheer: PropOrNot List 'An Attack on Internet Freedom" You Tube truthdig 12/02/2016:

Truthdig's Editor in Chief Robert Scheer has been here before. He was the editor of Ramparts magazine, a left alternative magazine from the 1960s and 1970s. Int hat role, he was well known for his critical coverage of the Vietnam War. One of his best-known scoops was breaking the story at Ramparts about how the CIA was clandestinely infiltrating student groups in the United States. He also worked at the Los Angeles Times.

The attorney of one of the smeared sites, the financial blog Naked Capitalism, has sent a Request for retraction of: "Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say" (November 24, 2016), for public apology, and for opportunity to respond, accusing WaPo's article of Making "false and defamatory accusations." While I'm not at all a big fan of legal actions against publication for defamation, promoting unsubstantiated allegations effectively suggesting that a group is acting as an illegal foreign agent really is pretty serious.

The letter includes some further web links on the topic.

Max Blumenthal on the "Russian propaganda" scare

Max Blumenthal raises some important cautions about the more-than-dubious scare talk we're hearing about Russian manipulation of American public opinion via propaganda disinformation operations, Washington Post Promotes Shadowy Website That Accuses 200 Publications of Being Russian Propaganda Plants Alternet 11/25/2016. He calls attention to the fact that the Washington Post is giving a lot of credibility to what could well be a fake-news generated organization itself:

Called PropOrNot, the blacklisting organization was described by the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” The Washington Post agreed to preserve the anonymity of the group’s director on the grounds that exposure could result in their being targeted by “Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.” The Post failed to explain what methods PropOrNot relied on to conclude that “stories planted or promoted by the Russian disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times." (Timberg also cited a report co-authored by Aaron Weisburg, founder of the one-man anti-Palestinian “Internet Haganah” operation, who has been accused of interfering in federal investigations, stealing the personal information of anarchists, online harassment, and fabricating information to smear his targets.)

Despite the Washington Post’s charitable description of PropOrNot as a group of independent-minded researchers dedicated to protecting the integrity of American democracy, the shadowy group bears many of the qualities of the red enemies it claims to be battling. In addition to its blacklist of Russian dupes, it lists a collection of outlets funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and assorted tech and weapons companies as “allies.” PropOrNot’s methodology is so shabby it is able to peg widely read outlets like Naked Capitalism, a leading left-wing financial news blog, as Russian propaganda operations.