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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 10 2016, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-just-don't-know-what-to-believe-anymore dept.

From rt.com:

Facing threats of legal action, the Washington Post has been forced to add an editor's note distancing the paper from a dubious website, PropOrNot, which it had initially endorsed as a group of nonpartisan experts on "Russian propaganda."

The Post came under fire on social media for its provocative hit piece which claimed that "Russia's increasingly sophisticated propaganda campaign" actually influenced the US presidential election.

[...] Jim Moody, an attorney representing the website, stressed in a letter to the Washington Post on Sunday that the newspaper "did not provide even a single example of 'fake news' allegedly distributed or promoted by Naked Capitalism or indeed any of the 200 sites on the PropOrNot blacklist."

From fair.org:

That a group of Cold Warrior hacks would publish such a blacklist is not a surprise; that one of the most established names in American news would uncritically parrot it was. Its reporting, writing-up and referencing is a prime example of how fake real news on real fake news spreads without question.

USA Today (11/25/16), Gizmodo (11/25/16), PBS (11/25/16), The Daily Beast (11/25/16), Slate (11/25/16), AP (11/25/16) The Verge (11/25/16) and NPR (11/25/16) all uncritically wrote up the Post's most incendiary claims with little or minimal pushback. Gizmodo was so giddy its original headline had to be changed from "Research Confirms That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News" to "Research Suggests That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News," presumably after some polite commenters pointed out that the research "confirmed" nothing of the sort.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 10 2016, @09:10PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 10 2016, @09:10PM (#439797) Journal
    Read that again:

    Federal guidelines say any one of nine voting members of the committee can object to such a foreign transaction, but the final decision then rests with the president.

    There's your veto power. If Clinton had chosen to object, then the transaction is blocked until the president looks at it. Sure, it's not as extreme as presented by the author selling the book, but it is there.

    Also it's worth noting that most of the donations happened when she was running for president in 2008. If she had become president, she would have had the ability to veto such a transaction, by having one or more of her underlings (the entire committee was such) object as above and then block it herself. Funny, how a group with a huge interest that potentially could go in front of Hillary Clinton thought it was a good idea to donate $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.

    What I find particularly embarrassing about this whole episode is the behavior of the fact-checkers. They were willing to dispute relative minor issues like the characterization of the veto power that Clinton wielded as Secretary of State, and completely ignore the obvious conflicts of interest that arise from someone giving $145 million to your personal non profit.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @09:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @09:44PM (#439810)

    > There's your veto power. If Clinton had chosen to object, then the transaction is blocked until the president looks at it.

    The obvious rebuttal is that none of the other 8 members of the cabinet chose to object. None of whom were her "underlings."

    > Also it's worth noting that most of the donations happened when she was running for president in 2008. If she had become president

    That makes no sense at all. She was 'bribed' because she was going to be president and then when she wasn't president she's still guilty for not objecting when none of the other 8 independent agencies saw any reason to object either?

    The obvious rebuttal is that you are a connoisseur of conspiracy theory logic where she's obviously guilty so anything that backfits into that conclusion is damning evidence and anything that says otherwise is of no import.

    > your personal non profit.

    She;s not trump. His is a "personal non profit" that actively spent money on his interests and utterly failed to qualify as a charity in any way beyond the legal fig leaf of the paperwork. The clinton foundation is top rated by charity watchdogs like Charity Navigator [charitynavigator.org] and Charity Watch. [charitywatch.org]

    And most damning of all: Russia doesn’t have the licenses to export uranium outside the United States So the uraniaum wasn't going anywhere no matter who owned the mining rates.

    You are welcome to return the reality-based community any time you want callow. All you gotta do is stop beating yourself in the head with the stupid stick.