WaPo did more than step in it -- in a decent world, other journalists would shun them for this episode.
The Washington Post—whose coverage of Watergate four decades ago angered the powers that be, toppled a president, and defined courageous journalism—has unleashed a hornet’s nest of a different sort, one unlikely to earn a Pulitzer Prize.
Indeed, Washington’s newspaper of record—which was purchased in 2013 by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos from the storied Graham family—is uncomfortably weathering a barrage of criticism from fellow journalists and others for a front-page story published over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The story, by Post technology reporter Craig Timberg and published Nov. 24, purported to reveal how “sophisticated” Russian propagandists had spread fake news through hundreds of web sites to destabilize American democracy, thwart Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump to the White House.
So far the story—which has attracted millions of page views and more than 14,000 comments—has provoked lawsuit threats from at least two of the web sites, notably the widely respected financial blog Naked Capitalism, which fired off a legal letter demanding a retraction and apology even though the Post story does not specifically mention Naked Capitalism or any of the other allegedly Russian-influenced websites.
There has also been a fusillade of disparaging commentary in publications ranging from The Intercept to The New Yorker.
“I thought it was completely ridiculous that the Post would put this sorry piece of trash on the front page,” Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, told The Daily Beast in a typically vehement slam.
“The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting,” was the headline on Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s takedown.
And if you can't believe Rolling Stone on the ethics of journalism, who can you believe?
The critics panned the Post story’s heavy reliance on the judgments of unnamed “researchers” for PropOrNot.com, a shadowy website launched three months ago ostensibly to expose “Russian influence operations targeted at US audiences, distinguish between propaganda and commercial ‘clickbait’, and help identify propaganda and push back.”
Granting PropOrNot’s “executive director” anonymity to save him from “being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers,” the Post credulously cited the group’s assessment of “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season”—a list that included not only Naked Capitalism, but also such independent enterprises as Counterpunch.org (founded by Alexander Cockburn, Andrew’s late brother), the right-leaning DrudgeReport.com, the libertarian website of former Reagan administration assistant treasury secretary and ex-Wall Street Journal editor Paul Craig Roberts, and the left-leaning Truthdig.com and Truth-out.org.
Much more at the link. As an aside, the website also fingers southfront.org as a Russian propaganda news website. I wrote a few stories for southfront.org about the civil war in the Don Basin earlier this year. They are very pro Russia, but nothing in my brief experience with them makes me believe they are in the pay of Russian security services. Their readers are obnoxious Euros, and are America haters and Russia lovers. As a matter of disclosure, none of the stories about the Donbas conflict I posted for southfront.org were crossposted to Rantburg. I stopped writing for them, not for anything southfront.org was doing but because a lot of the stuff I was getting from both sides was just straight up bullsh*t. I love writing about east European militaries, but the Russians and Ukrainians really strained my tolerance.