Washington Post Editor Publicly Yearns For Cold War With Nuclear Power

Horhey · Mar 13, 2017

Well, there it is. One of the top media elites just said it outright. Glenn Greenwald noted it on Twitter:

Glenn Greenwald ‏-Verified account @ggreenwald

What was the most uplifting part of Cold War? The death squads? The coups against elected governments? Vietnam? Hoover? Near-nuclear wars?

Ruth Marcus -Verified account @RuthMarcus

So excited to be watching The Americans, throwback to a simpler time when everyone considered Russia the enemy. Even the president.

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Perhaps this would explain the following news columns by Washington Post presstitutes:

Trump Didn't Teach Foreign Regimes to Cry 'Fake News'–Corporate Did, FAIR, March 9, 2017

It was US corporate media, in their post-election rush to smear leftists and libertarian sites as Kremlin stooges, that first stripped the term “fake news” of any objective taxonomical value.

Three separate blacklists of so-called “fake news” sites were boosted by dozens of mainstream media outlets in the weeks after the election, with little regard for which outlets were on these lists.

It turned out that anonymous “experts” do not provide good guidance on what is and isn’t “fake news.”

The most prominent such blacklist, by a dodgy and anonymous group called “PropOrNot,” was first breathlessly reported on by the Washington Post (11/24/16) and later written up in AP (11/25/16), USA Today (11/25/16), PBS (11/25/16), NPR (11/25/16), Daily Beast (11/25/16), Slate (11/25/16), Gizmodo (11/25/16) and The Verge (11/25/16).

It quickly became clear the PropOrNot blacklist, which included entirely-within-the-mainstream leftist and libertarian publications like Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, TruthOut and Consortium News, had been compiled by unreliable ideologues. That list was quickly discredited, with the Washington Post walking back their tacit endorsement in an editor’s note roughly a week later.

PropOrNot’s net was cast so wide by that even Drudge Report , a 21-year-old site with 130 million monthly visits, was lumped in with Kremlin “fake news” solely because the list’s (again, anonymous) author deemed them Russian “useful idiots.” Drudge’s massive traffic was lumped into a still-unproven claim of 213 million views for “fake news” that was repeated by scores of high-status pundits, including New York Times deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman.

All three publications now lamenting over Trump and other world leaders’ use of “fake news” to disparage media on purely ideological grounds—the Post, Times and Slate—helped do just that months prior by legitimizing PropOrNot and other “fake news” blacklists.

WaPo Spreading Own Falsehoods Shows Real Power of Fake News, FAIR, Jan 4 2017

The putative scourge of “fake news” has been one of the most pervasive post-election media narratives. The general thrust goes like this: A torrent of fake news swept the internet, damaging Hillary Clinton and possibly leading to a Donald Trump victory.

Washington Post story (12/31/16) with revised headline and a never-mind editor’s note. Is this “fake news”?

A primary problem with this convenient-to-some narrative is that “fake news” has yet to be clearly defined by anyone. Vaguely conceptualized as misleading or outright fabricated stories, it can mean anything—as FAIR has noted previously (12/1/16)—from outlets that align with “Russian viewpoints” to foreign spam.

A recent series of events further illustrates this ambiguity. Friday night, the Washington Post (12/30/16) published an explosive report about Russian hackers breaking into a Vermont utility company. The headline splashed all over social media:

Russian Hackers Penetrated US Electricity Grid Through a Utility in Vermont, Officials Say

Quickly, the blockbuster story began to fall apart, after Burlington Electric, the utility in question, issued a statement saying they had “detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to [their] organization’s grid systems.” The Post “updated” the story several times throughout the evening, eventually adding a heavily qualified editor’s note that the only cause for concern was some “Russian code” on a laptop of one of the employees. There was no evidence of a hack or an attempted hack, Russian or otherwise.

Two days later, after the story was walked back several times, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell linked to it in a story about cybersecurity issues facing the incoming Trump administration:

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After FAIR and others pointed out the error, Rampell’s article was changed, but this episode shows how quickly an entirely bogus premise—that Russia had hacked, or even attempted to hack, an American public utility—can spread without an ounce of skepticism. At the time her column was published, the only “evidence” of an “attempted” Russian hack was some malware code that could have been used by anybody. Rampell, likely influenced by the initial erroneous reporting by her colleagues, made an assumption that this was evidence of an “attempted hack,” a false assumption debunked by the Post itself (1/2/16) two hours after she published. In all cases, everything is rounded up to the most sensational, most Cold War–panic inducing conclusion. “Mistakes” rarely, if ever, happen in favor of less hysteria.
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Horhey · Mar 13, 2017

America's lawyer..

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Washington Post Editor Publicly Yearns For Cold War With Nuclear Power

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