[One Degree]

FOX needs to do something about Shepard Smith. He has continued his liberal bias against President Trump. His recent coverage sounds more like what would come from CNN or MSNBC. I noticed his attitude was hostile toward Trump awhile back. He once reported the news fairly, but not anymore. What has happened to him?

I don’t watch video news so I am not really familiar with him. Fox does use liberal slanted articles in their printed stories also. I think some of this is to outrage their audience, but I am not sure what they are trying to do with their format. I Sometimes think it is an incompetent intent to sound unbiased. They have me confused about it.

[Sivad]

[Hindsite]

I don’t watch video news so I am not really familiar with him. Fox does use liberal slanted articles in their printed stories also. I think some of this is to outrage their audience, but I am not sure what they are trying to do with their format. I Sometimes think it is an incompetent intent to sound unbiased. They have me confused about it.

FOX has several liberal political pundits to give their point of view, so there can be an exchange of ideas on both political sides. However, Shepard Smith is supposed to give the unbiased news without political comment, since his news program is supposed to be just the news without his political opinion. He does not do that anymore. He clearly has been showing his liberal bias and hatred for Trump.

[Sivad]

The Washington Post, as It Shames Others, Continues to Pay and Publish Undisclosed Saudi Lobbyists and Other Regime Propagandists
Glenn Greenwald
October 15 2018

In the wake of the disappearance and likely murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, some of the most fervent and righteous voices demanding that others sever their ties with the Saudi regime have, understandably, come from his colleagues at that paper. “Why do you work for a murderer?,” asked the Post’s long-time Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, addressing unnamed hypothetical Washington luminaries who continue to take money to do work for the despots in Riyadh, particularly Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, or “MbS” as he has been affectionately known in the western press.

Hiatt urged these hypothetical figures to engage in serious self-reflection: “Can I possibly work for such a regime, and still look at myself in the mirror each morning?” That, said Hiatt, “is the question that we, as a nation, must ask ourselves now.”

But to find those for whom this question is directly relevant, Hiatt need not invoke his imagination or resort to hypotheticals. He can instead look to a place far more concrete and proximate: his own staff. Because it is there – on the roster of the Washington Post’s own columnists and Contributing Writers – that one can find, still, those who maintain among the closest links to the Saudi regime and have the longest and most shameful history of propagandizing on their behalf.

Carter Eskew is a former top-level adviser to Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and a Founder and Managing Director of Glover Park Group which, according to the Post’s own reporting, is one of the Saudi regime’s largest lobbyists. Glover Park, says the Post, has “remained silent amid growing public outrage over reports that Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate.” Indeed, as the New York Times reported this week, Eskew’s firm, “which was started by former Clinton administration officials,” is the second-most active lobbying firm for the Saudi regime, “being paid $150,000 a month.”

In addition to his work as a Managing Director in one of the Saudi regime’s most devoted lobbying firms, Eskew is also a Contributing Opinion Writer at the Washington Post. His last column was published just three days ago, on October 12 – ten days after Khashoggi disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Turkey, and the same day that Eskew’s editor, Hiatt, published his righteous column demanding to know how anyone with a conscience could maintain ties to the Saudi regime (raising a separate but equally important ethical quandary, Eskew’s last Post column was an attack on “Medicare for All,” even though Glover Park clients include corporations with direct financial interests in that debate, none of which was disclosed by the Post).

Worse still, according to a noble campaign promoted by Karen Attiah, the Post’s Global Opinion Editor and friend of Khashoggi – a campaign designed to keep track of and shame those who still intend to participate in the Saudi Crown Prince’s “Davos in the Desert” event – Eskew, along with fellow Glover Park Director Mile Feldman, are still scheduled to speak at that event. Given all the moral decrees and shaming campaigns the Post has issued over the past ten days, how can they possibly justify their ongoing relationship with Eskew as his firm lobbies for the Saudi regime and he attends the regime’s P.R.-building event?

That question is even more compelling when it comes to Ed Rogers, the long-time GOP operative who is currently an Opinion Writer for the Washington Post. In addition to his work for Hiatt on the Post’s Op-Ed page, Rogers himself receives substantial financial rewards for his work as an agent of the Saudi regime. Just two months ago, the lobbying firm of which he’s the Chairman, BGR Group (headed by former RNC Chairman and GOP Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour), signed a new contract that includes “assist[ing] the Saudis in communicating priority issues regarding US-Saudi relations to American audiences including the media and policy communities.”

According to the firm’s own press release, “BGR chairman Ed Rogers” – also an Opinion Writer for the Washington Post – “handles the Saudi work.” Like Eskew, Rogers’ last column for the Post was on October 12: just two days ago, the same day Hiatt published his moralizing column demanding to know how anyone with a conscience and a soul could maintain financial ties to the Saudi regime.

Even more awkward for the Post is that – with the possible exception of Tom Friedman – the most influential media figure who devoted himself to depicting MbS as a noble reformer was the Post’s star foreign affairs columnist, David Ignatius. Ignatius has built his career on cultivating an extremely close relationship to the CIA, whose agenda he typically parrots and rarely contradicts. It is not at all surprising that Ignatius would be a devoted propagandist to the Saudi regime, for decades one of that agency’s most cherished allies and partners.

Indeed, Ignatius did not begin his work heaping praise on Saudi tyrants with the ascent of MbS. As the media watchdog FAIR documented last year, “for almost 15 years, Ignatius has been breathlessly updating US readers on the token, meaningless public relations gestures that the Saudi regime—and, by extension, Ignatius—refer to as ‘reforms.'”

But in light of Khashoggi’s disappearance and the Post’s new posture toward the Saudis, it is two recent columns by Ignatius – touting MbS as an admirable reformer – that are now causing substantial embarrassment for the Post’s attempts to moralize on this issue. The first, published in April of 2017, was headlined “A Young Prince is Reimagining Saudi Arabia” and assured Post readers that MbS’s “reform plans appear to be moving ahead slowly but steadily.”

The second one, from March of this year, is even worse, as reflected by its headlined: “Are Saudi Arabia’s reforms for real? A recent visit says yes.” In it, Ignatius recounted his visit to the Kingdom by quoting one pro-MbS commentator after the next, and then himself gushed: “This is the door that seems to be opening in the kingdom — toward a more modern, more entrepreneurial, less-hidebound and more youth- ­oriented society. It’s a top-down, authoritarian process, for now. But it seems to be gaining momentum.”

Then there is the even more uncomfortable fact that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, played host to MbS during his star-making trip to the U.S. this spring, and was photographed laughing it up with the Saudi tyrant. As the New York Times’ media reporter Jim Rutenberg noted in a hard-hitting article today on the role U.S. media and financial elites played in creating the hagiography surrounding MbS:

As the guest of honor at a Page Six-worthy dinner at the producer Brian Grazer’s Santa Monica home, the crown prince discussed Snapchat’s popularity in his kingdom with the Snap chief Evan Spiegel;Vice’s Shane Smith; Amazon’s chief — and Washington Post owner — Jeff Bezos and the agent-turned-mogul Ari Emanuel.

(While taking aim at a broad range of sycophantic elites who helped build MbS’s deceitful image as a reformer in the west, Rutenberg failed to note the key role played by his own paper’s star foreign policy columnist, Tom Friedman, who not only penned a column hailing the “Arab Spring” ushered in by MbS but lashed out in a profanity-laden attack on those who suggested he was being too gullible and sycophantic toward the young Saudi despot).

Tom Friedman's attempt to whitewash his slavish, obsequious propaganda for the Saudi regime and MBS is as revolting as his "suck on this" justification for the Iraq War. Remember what he said when responding to critics of his MBS worship pic.twitter.com/bWOeJrarT2

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 10, 2018

Much has been made of the glaring and truly infuriating hypocrisy that so many western elites were perfectly happy doing all sorts of business with Saudi tyrants while they murdered Yemeni civilians and domestic dissidents en masse (with the direct help of numerous administrations from both parties, led by Trump’s predecessor), and only became outraged once one of the Saudis’ victims was someone with whom they empathized. And all of that is true enough.

But the Washington Post’s particular righteous fury as expressed in words, while understandable in one sense, is very difficult to reconcile with their actual actions, including their ongoing relationship with numerous individuals who either work directly for the Saudi regime, financially benefit from propaganda and lobbying work performed on their behalf, or have a history of taking the lead in doing P.R. work for Saudi tyrants under the guise of journalism. Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who oversees all of this as he tries to shame others for maintaining relationships with the Saudis, failed to respond to any of the Intercept’s inquiries regarding these multiple ethical and behavioral contradictions.
https://theintercept.com/2018/10/15/the ... agandists/

[Sivad]

MSNBC and Daily Beast Feature UAE Lobbyist David Rothkopf With No Disclosure: a Scandalous Media-Wide Practice

On Thursday, the Daily Beast published an article about the Saudi/US relationship by David Rothkopf, a long-time member in good standing of the U.S. Foreign Policy elite. Until last year, he was the editor-in-chief of the establishment journal Foreign Policy, named to that position in 2012 when it was owned by the Washington Post. He’s also a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. He was previously deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policy in the Clinton administration and managing director of Kissinger Associates, the advisory firm founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

But, unbeknownst to Daily Beast readers consuming his commentary about Saudi Arabia, Rothkopf is something else: a paid lobbyist for the Saudi regime’s close ally, the equally despotic regime of the United Arab Emirates. Last month, Rothkopf formally registered as a foreign agent for the Emiratis.

On September 12, Rothkopf personally signed a contract with the UAE regime to be paid $50,000 every month, for a period of three years, to, among other services, “provide day-to-day advice on the development of messages”; to work on “media projects [and] outreach efforts”; and to “prepare memoranda [and] talking points” for the “Embassy of the United Arab Emirates to develop and support specific programs and initiatives within the United States.”

Although the contract is in the name of “The Rothkopf Group,” that entity appears to have little real existence beyond Rothkopf himself. It has a Twitter account that has never tweeted, a website that cannot be accessed without a password, and a Linkedin page that lists a tiny handful of employees, the most senior of whom (its “Vice President and Senior Project Manager”) most recently worked as a Capitol Hill intern, a “professional dancer,” a yoga instructor and an assistant to a Commerce Under Secretary for 7 months. So one can safely assume that the vast majority of the $600,000 annual payment from UAE goes to Rothkopf personally.

But Daily Beast readers interested in knowing why Rothkopf is qualified to opine on matters relating to Saudi Arabia and other matters of foreign affairs would have no idea that he is paid a substantial sum by one of the region’s most repressive regimes to disseminate messaging on its behalf. That’s because there is nothing in any of Rothkopf’s articles for The Daily Beast that indicates this, nor does his bio page for the journal include this rather significant fact.

The Rothkopf article published on Thursday does not mention the UAE. It does, however, call the U.S. relationship with the Saudis, one of the key allies of the UAE regime that pays him, “important,” though it argues that it is not as important as it once was. Like most U.S. elites who have long defended ties with Gulf dictators but who now must denounce the Saudi despots given the P.R. anger over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Rothkopf does denounce the Saudi leaders in the article.

But – unbelievably – Rothkopf has the audacity to criticize Trump for having “repeatedly shown great fondness for foreign leaders—even despots and known murderers, human rights abusers and criminals”, while Rothkopf himself is literally a paid agent working to disseminate propaganda for one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, one that does much of the Saudis’ dirty work for it in Washington. And the fact that the Daily Beast makes no disclosure of any of this is what makes this practice – having paid lobbyists and consultants for foreign regimes and corporations masquerade as objective and neutral analysts of the news – such a massive journalistic scandal and fraud.

As the Intercept has extensively reported by obtaining his emails, the UAE ambassador who agreed to pay Rothkopf, Yousef al-Otaiba, is one of the most sinister influence-peddlers in Washington. If Daily Beast readers had been told who Rothkopf really is and how he makes large amounts of money, they would have known that he’s one of the least credible people on the planet to sanctimoniously denounce those who harbor “great fondness for foreign leaders—even despots and known murderers, human rights abusers and criminals.” But because Rothkopf’s work for UAE tyrants was concealed by the Daily Beast, readers would have no way of knowing that.

(In response to The Intercept’s inquiry, The Daily Beast’s Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman requested additional time to provide an on-the-record comment, which we granted by withholding publication of this article by several hours, but then he failed to provide any).

MSNBC has also featured Rothkopf as a commentator on the Khoshoggi killing and other matters related to his client, the UAE regime, with no disclosure whatsoever. Indeed, just last week, the cable network featured him as an expert guest to talk about Saudi Arabia with no mention of his lobbying activities, referring to him only as a “Visiting Scholar” with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (see picture above). The cable network frequently features Rothkopf as a foreign policy commentator with no disclosure of these ties.

The same week that MSNBC put on this UAE lobbyist to talk about the Khoshoggi killing, PBS News Hour also featured Rothkopf as an objective guest to talk about Saudi Arabia, where only his disclosed affiliation was with Carnegie and his status as a “frequent writer about foreign affairs” was hyped to viewers.

Just today, CNN also published a column by Rothkopf with no disclosure of any kind of these lobbying and consultant activities, identifying him only as “a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace” and “the author of ‘Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power’ and ‘The Great Questions of Tomorrow.'”

By no means is this slimy practice – featuring lobbyists and corporate consultants to analyze the news without disclosing their glaring conflicts of interest – unique to Rothkopf or these named media outlets. Quite the contrary: it is a media-wide practice that is as scummy, pervasive and unethical as it is ignored.

Last week, we reported that the Washington Post, while its editors were demanding that everyone else sever their ties to the Saudi regime in the wake of the Khashoggi murder, itself had two writers, Democratic operative Carter Eskew and Republican operative Ed Rogers, who were key partners in firms with lucrative contracts with the Saudi regime. After we exposed this, the Post, according to its own account on Sunday, gave those writers an ultimatum: either have their firms terminate their Saudi contracts or cease writing for the Post:

Rogers and Eskew are both contributing opinion writers for The Washington Post. Last week, both of their firms announced they were dropping their representation of Saudi Arabia. The Post had told them they could not continue to write for The Post and lobby for Saudi Arabia, according to spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly.

Note, however, that both Rogers and Eskew continue to write for the Post even though they retain a long list of other undisclosed corporate and governmental clients who pay them to carry out their messaging and agenda. As we noted, Eskew’s last column for the Post was an attack on Medicare for All even though – unbeknownst to Post readers – his firm represents industry health care clients with a direct financial interest in that topic. So Rogers and Eskew will continue to write articles for the Post with no disclosure of who their clients are and how that paid consulting and lobbyist work relates to the material the Post is publishing. How can anyone defend that as a journalistically ethical practice?

Those with Saudi contracts are not only given a platform by the Post, MSNBC, CNN, and the Daily Beast. This morning, former Think Progress editor Judd Legum, writing in his new Popular Information newsletter, wrote that “several prominent analysts commenting on Khashoggi’s death have a significant financial interest in maintaining a positive relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia” and that “these financial conflicts have not been disclosed by the pundits themselves or the news outlets where they appear.”

Among others, Legum names: Dennis Ross, also a columnist at the Washington Post and a commentator on MSNBC, who has opined for both outlets on the Saudi regime without either news organization disclosing his financial interests in the Saudi regime. Also included in Legum’s reporting are Fran Townsend of the same firm as Ross, who works as a national security analyst for CBS News, and General Jack Keane, who has repeatedly commented on Saudi Arabia as a national security analyst for Fox News without any disclosure of his financial interest in Saudi Arabia.

Beyond those names, Fox News, along with Fox Business and CNBC, regularly feature Al Mottur as a “Democratic consultant” and contributor, which is how he markets himself. Occasionally, Fox hosts note that Mottur is a “lobbyist” along with a Democratic operative who worked for the Clinton campaign, but do not ever specify the clients for which he works.

Yet Mottur is a partner in the lobbying firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which serves as paid lobbyists for the Saudi regime, among many other undisclosed corporate and governmental clients. In fact, the 2016 contract that firm signed with the Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, pursuant to which the Saudi regime pays the firm $100,000, was signed by Mottur himself, and in 2018, Mottur registered as a foreign lobbyist for the Saudi regime.

This indefensible, deceitful and blatantly unethical practice – presenting paid lobbyists and messaging “consultants” for foreign governments and corporations as news analysts without disclosing those ties – has been going on for years inside the U.S’s largest corporate media outlets. In 2009, I wrote about MSNBC’s regular use of Richard Wolffe as both a paid contributor and even prime-time guest host despite the fact that Wolffe quit his journalism job in order to go work for a corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett.

In other words, Wolffe was being secretly paid by a roster of corporate and governmental clients to disseminate messaging and communications for them, while MSNBC – without telling viewers any of this, let alone disclosing Wolffe’s client list – was presenting him as some sort of objective journalist and analyst. As I wrote at the time: “Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily “political analyst” — is exactly tantamount to MSNBC’s just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist.”

What possible justification exists for media outlets employing – or even giving a platform to – any lobbyists or consultants who are paid by governments and/or corporations for the specific purpose of disseminating “messaging,” meaning propaganda, on their behalf? Indeed, often these consultants and lobbyists are able to secure lucrative contracts precisely because their media platforms signal to corporations and governments that they have the ability to disseminate messaging, masquerading as journalism, that will serve the interests of their concealed clients. They market themselves to potential clients by touting their media platforms.

This is as extreme a perversion of journalism as can be imagined. It is unethical in the extreme for news outlets to present paid lobbyists and consultants as objective analysts of the news under any circumstances, but particularly without disclosing those financial stakes. And yet, as the Saudis and Emiratis well know, this practice is so widespread among corporate U.S. media outlets that even the planet’s worst foreign regimes can clandestinely buy messaging platforms while readers and viewers who trust these outlets remain in the dark about how they are being manipulated.
https://theintercept.com/2018/10/22/msn ... -practice/

[skinster]

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[skinster]

[Sivad]

"There is no such thing, at this date 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 dares to 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 opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so 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 paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalists 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 tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. 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. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton, preeminent New York journalist, at a press banquet,1880

Swinton at the time was chief of the editorial staff of Charles A. Dana's New York Sun, a post which he left a very few months later to found his own ill-fated labor sheet, John Swinton's Paper.

John Swinton (1829–1901) journalist, newspaper publisher, and orator. Although he arguably gained his greatest influence as the chief editorial writer of The New York Times during the decade of the 1860s, Swinton is best remembered as the namesake of John Swinton's Paper, one of the most prominent American labor newspapers of the 1880s. Swinton would also serve as chief editorialist of the New York Sun during two stints totaling more than a dozen years.

[One Degree]

I went to Twitter yesterday and the first thing I noticed was ‘Twitter Moments’. A short comment about the undecided elections with a large picture of a minority, millennial, woman in distress. What better stereotype to show their political bias and try to influence us with it? This is who is monitoring and banning others supposedly too biased for Twitter and influencing our elections. The Fox is guarding the hen house.

[skinster]

One Degree got triggered by a picture of a brown woman on Twitter.

[skinster]

[Sivad]

How ‘The New York Times’ Deceived the Public on North Korea
Stretching the findings of a think-tank report on Pyongyang’s missile bases is a reminder of the paper’s role in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

The New York Times may still have a Judith Miller problem—only now it’s a David Sanger problem.

Miller, of course, is the former Times reporter who helped build the case for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq with a series of reports based on highly questionable sources bent on regime change. The newspaper eventually admitted its errors but didn’t specifically blame Miller, who left the paper soon after the mea culpa and is now a commentator on Fox News.

Now, Sanger, who over the years has been the recipient of dozens of leaks from US intelligence on North Korea’s weapons program and the US attempts to stop it, has come out with his own doozy of a story that raises serious questions about his style of deep-state journalism.

The article may not involve the employment of sleazy sources with an ax to grind, but it does stretch the findings of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank that is deeply integrated with the military-industrial complex and plays an instrumental role in US media coverage on Korea.

“Controversy is raging,” South Korea’s progressive Hankyoreh newspaper declared on Wednesday about the Times report, which it called “riddled with holes and errors.”

Sanger’s story, which appeared on Monday underneath the ominous headline “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception,” focused on a new study from CSIS’s “Beyond Parallel” project about the Sakkanmol Missile Operating Base, one of 13 North Korean missile sites, out of a total of 20, that it has identified and analyzed from overhead imagery provided by Digital Globe, a private satellite contractor.

None of the 20 sites has been officially acknowledged by Pyongyang, but the network is “long known to American intelligence agencies,” wrote Sanger.

Sakkanmol, according to CSIS, “is an undeclared operational missile base for short-range ballistic missiles” a little over 50 miles (85 kilometers) north of the border and therefore “one of the closest to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and Seoul.” Pyongyang’s highly publicized decommissioning last summer of the Sohae satellite launch facility “obscures the military threat to U.S. forces and South Korea from this and other undeclared ballistic missile bases.”

Its authors added a huge caveat at the end: “Some of the information used in the preparation of this study may eventually prove to be incomplete or incorrect.”

But the Times ignored the warning and took the report several steps further. According to Sanger, that analysis of the missile base shows that North Korea is “moving ahead with its ballistic missile program” despite pledges made by Kim Jong-Un to President Trump at their Singapore summit on June 12 to eliminate his nuclear and missile programs if the United States ends its “hostile policy” and agrees to forge a new relationship with North Korea.

The “new commercial satellite images” of the undeclared missile sites, Sanger concluded darkly, suggest that North Korea “has been engaged in a great deception.”

While North Korea has offered to dismantle a major launching site, he asserted, it continues “to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.” That finding “contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination” of the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles, Sanger concluded.

The implication was that North Korea, by continuing to build missiles after the Singapore summit, is lying to the United States and is therefore untrustworthy as a negotiating partner—and that Trump, by proclaiming that he has neutralized Kim’s threats, has been deceived. The Times-CSIS report was immediately picked up by major media outlets and repeated almost verbatim on NBC Nightly News and NPR, with little additional reporting.

[...]

But even a cursory analysis of the imagery should have raised questions. On Monday night, a Korean news outlet pointed out that all the photos analyzed in the CSIS report are dated March 29, 2018—almost two and a half months before Trump and Kim met in Singapore on June 12.

The dates make Sanger’s claim that North Korea is “moving ahead” on missile production after its pledges to Trump laughable; indeed, they make his story look like a serious attempt to deceive the American public about the real progress that has been made in ending the standoff.

In fact, as discussion swirled on Twitter, it became clear that Sanger was exaggerating the report. Arms-control experts immediately questioned his assertions, arguing that he had ignored the fact that North Korea and the United States have yet to sign any agreement under which the North would give up its nuclear weapons and missiles. And in the absence of an agreement, it’s status quo for both North Korea and the United States.

North Korea’s missile program “is NOT deception,” Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, posted soon after the story was published. Narang, who writes occasionally for the Times editorial page on North Korea, pointed out that Kim Jong-un has never offered to stop producing ballistic missiles and in fact had ordered more to be produced in January 2018.

[...]

The CSIS report was denounced by the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in as “nothing new,” and Kim Eui-kyeom, its chief spokesperson, took particular exception to the Times’ use of the term “deception.” To his credit, Sanger acknowledged the criticism and quoted the statement in full.

The most glaring problem with the Times story was Sanger’s characterization of CSIS as a neutral organization (“a major think tank”) and his failure to disclose that it receives enormous funding from the US government as well major military contractors. Nor did he mention that CSIS and its key analysts provide a kind of anchor to the Times’ coverage of Korea; they often appear near the lead of a story to explain its political significance. That is particularly true of Victor Cha, one of the authors of the report.

[...]

Knight, in an e-mail, said he had concluded that Cha has been “enabled” by Sanger and the editors of the Times to “be the agent of the opening salvo of an offensive by the most reactionary elements of the US national security and foreign policy establishment against the Korean diplomacy of both the Trump administration and South Korea.”

[...]

Here’s where the contractor money that pours into CSIS comes in: Providing the justification for a tougher policy of sanctions and military threats would be very much in tune with the defense and intelligence companies that support the think tank.

According to the CSIS page for “corporation and trade association donors,” they include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3, Rockwell, General Atomics, and Booz Allen Hamilton. CSIS is also funded by several Asian defense giants, including Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Korea Aerospace Industries.

All of these companies have a stake in US military options focused on North Korea, including monitoring its military activities, building missile-defense systems and providing weapons, ships, drones, and aircraft for offensive military operations when they become necessary.

[...]

In the end, the Sanger story was widely derided in the circle of people who closely follow North Korea. Once these doubts were voiced, both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post avoided the Times’ claim of deception and played down its dire conclusions that North Korea is cheating on the agreement it reached with Trump last June.

That’s a good development, indicating that Sanger’s questionable scoop probably won’t mushroom out of control and add fuel to a conflict, as Judith Miller’s phony reporting did at the advent of the Iraq War. And Sanger’s role as a leading expert on North Korea and US intelligence may take a hit.

“In an age of baseless allegations of fake news devaluing the work of journalists worldwide, it’s extremely lamentable that the New York Times—which is meant to be a nuanced and quality outlet—spun the CSIS story in the egregious way it did,” Chad O’Carroll, the CEO of Korea Risk Group, a Seoul-based organization that analyzes North Korea, tweeted on Tuesday.

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-t ... rth-korea/

[Sivad]

[skinster]

^ That was a good episode.

[Sivad]

^ That was a good episode.

Blumenthal is a talented muckraker. If he didn't take up for crazy despots I'd give him an A+.

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[Sivad]

We are a network of people and organizations from across Europe dedicated to revealing and combating propaganda and disinformation. Our broader aim is also to educate on how to spot disinformation and verify sources. This kind of work attracts the extremely hostile and aggressive attention of disinformation actors, like the Kremlin and its various proxies, so we hope you understand that our members mostly prefer to remain anonymous. The facts and information we present are all in the public domain, however, and you can investigate for yourselves. The network is coordinated from the UK. We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and agencies who share our aims.

[One Degree]

The name ⬆️ even sounds like what we would associate with a stereotypical dictatorship. Wow. I hope we can stop the US from going any further down this road. Gotta find some way to break the bubble heads out of their bubble.