By PAM MARTENS – RUSS MARTENS
ABOVE Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

Timberg and the Washington Post, which is owned by the billionaire CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, are being stridently called out as McCarthyites for an article published on Thanksgiving Day that cited unnamed “experts” at a shadowy group called PropOrNot to smear 200 alternative media sites as tools of Russia. The blacklist included some of the most informed and courageous voices on the Internet like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Truthdig, where the brilliant Chris Hedges, part of a New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, regularly asks the uncomfortable questions — like this one:

“When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?”

Theories abound as to why Timberg would write such a shoddily sourced article and smear some of the best writing and thinking on the Internet. One line of thought is that corporate media is struggling to survive financially and needs to take out its competition. Others see something far more nefarious. Max Blumenthal sums it up this way at AlterNet:

“Fake news and Russian propaganda have become the great post-election moral panic, a creeping Sharia-style conspiracy theory for shell-shocked liberals. Hoping to punish the dark foreign forces they blame for rigging the election, many of these insiders have latched onto a McCarthyite campaign that calls for government investigations of a wide array of alternative media outlets.”

The Black Agenda Report’s Executive Editor, Glen Ford, builds on Blumenthal’s theory, writing:

“Had Clinton won the election, she would have begun a campaign of repression against the Left along the same national security lines as the Washington Post article, with that paper probably leading the propaganda charge.

“The Obama administration and Post owner Bezos are quite tight, politically. Back in 2013, when Obama was still trying to reach a ‘grand bargain’ with the Republicans in Congress, he proposed lower corporate tax rates as a way to spur economic growth, and showcased the Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a model — despite the deplorable working conditions, low pay (less than $12 an hour, to start) and heavy use of part-time and contract workers at the plant. His White House economist, Gene Sperling, told the press, ‘We should be looking for other avenues of progress, other grand bargains that can be for middle class job growth.’ Bezos closed the deal on the Washington Post the same year. His paper is clearly the go-to media for the Democrats’ brand of fascism, which is crazily cloaked as an anti-fascist crusade.”

The Black Agenda Report was also listed on the 200-website blacklist as a tool of Russia.

The Thanksgiving Day article by Timberg currently has 14,800 reader comments, many heaping ridicule on Timberg and the Post. A comment from “dmarney” illustrates the intellectual savvy of the Post’s readership:

dmarney 11/29/2016 6:42 PM EST

“A fake news story about fake news sourced to fake researchers writing in a now-fake news organization that once brought down a sitting US president with investigative journalism back in the day when cynics still ran the place.

“You can’t make this stuff up.”

Another commenter with the name, Room V, writes:

“Now WaPo reduces itself to being merely a McCarthyite rag. The black list produced by the shadowy group Propornot and shamelessly promoted by this former newspaper includes online publications such as truthout, truthdig, and consortiumnews, each of which practices journalism to a degree no longer seen at this location. People should turn their backs on the preachers of the New McCarthyism.”

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]any of the articles trashing Timberg refer to him as a “technology reporter” for the Post because that’s currently the description under his articles. His background is far more complicated. For starters, his agent, Gillian MacKenzie, states on her web site that she “was a five year term member of The Council of Foreign Relations.” The Co-Chair of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) is Robert Rubin, the Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton who played a major role in the deregulation of Wall Street and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which set in motion the historic financial collapse in 2008. CFR’s Corporate Program includes approximately 200 multi-national corporations.

Timberg’s official bio shows that his earlier tenure at the Washington Post included a stint as Bureau Chief in Johannesburg where he covered political crises in Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. He later became Deputy Editor for National Security and finally moved to his current post as Technology Correspondent. But when we say “technology,” we’re not talking about laptops. In this 2013 C-Span video, Timberg talks about facial recognition technology being used by law enforcement for surveillance. In this 2014 C-Span video, Timberg interviews Google Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, on the revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance program. The interview is conducted at the right-wing Cato Institute – a nonprofit that was secretly under the partial ownership of the Koch Brothers for decades.

Timberg’s father, the late Robert Timberg, had been a political writer at the Baltimore Sun and author of two books on the Vietnam War. The earlier work, The Nightingale’s Song, traced the lives of five of Timberg’s fellow Naval Academy graduates: Senator John McCain; Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North; Navy Secretary and Senator Jim Webb; and National Security Advisers John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane. (North, Poindexter and McFarlane were central figures in the Iran-Contra scandal.)

We have our own theory about these McCarthyite attacks coming on the heels of the discrediting of the Democratic National Committee as a propaganda outlet for continuity government in Washington and a saboteur of Senator Bernie Sanders’ genuinely populist campaign for President. Many of the web sites that made it onto the blacklist were those that carried in-depth reports on the WikiLeaks’ emails that opened a heretofore closed window on the Wall Street corruption inside the Democratic Party.

When Wall Street On Parade broke the bombshell story from the WikiLeaks emails showing that an executive from the collapsing, corrupt and massively bailed out Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup, was making key hiring decisions for President Obama’s first term, we expected to see the story quickly move to the front page of the Washington Post. Instead, it has yet to see the light of day there. The same is true for the New York Times. Both the Post and Times editorial boards endorsed the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, for President. An article documenting with actual emails how Wall Street continued to control the reins of power in Washington, even during an epic economic crash it had created, was apparently censored by both papers.

WikiLeaks, which made these emails available in the public interest, was included on the 200-website blacklist. The Washington Post and New York Times, which withheld this blockbuster story from their readers in an outrageous form of censorship, did not make the cut as a propaganda tool.

This article originally appeared on Wall Street on Parade.

APPENDIX 1 : Matt Taibbi weighs in
The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting

The capital’s paper of record crashes legacy media on an iceberg

The ‘Washington Post’ ran a piece last week headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” Joe Raedle/Getty

The thrust of Timberg’s astonishingly lazy report is that a Russian intelligence operation of some kind was behind the publication of a “hurricane” of false news reports during the election season, in particular stories harmful to Hillary Clinton. The piece referenced those 200 websites as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

The piece relied on what it claimed were “two teams of independent researchers,” but the citing of a report by the longtime anticommunist Foreign Policy Research Institute was really window dressing.

The meat of the story relied on a report by unnamed analysts from a single mysterious “organization” called PropOrNot – we don’t know if it’s one person or, as it claims, over 30 – a “group” that seems to have been in existence for just a few months.

It was PropOrNot’s report that identified what it calls “the list” of 200 offending sites. Outlets as diverse as AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com and the Ron Paul Institute were described as either knowingly directed by Russian intelligence, or “useful idiots” who unwittingly did the bidding of foreign masters.

Forget that the Post offered no information about the “PropOrNot” group beyond that they were “a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”

Forget also that the group offered zero concrete evidence of coordination with Russian intelligence agencies, even offering this remarkable disclaimer about its analytic methods:

“Please note that our criteria are behavioral. … For purposes of this definition it does not matter … whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide ‘useful idiots’ of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny.”

What this apparently means is that if you published material that meets their definition of being “useful” to the Russian state, you could be put on the “list,” and “warrant further scrutiny.”

Forget even that in its Twitter responses to criticism of its report, PropOrNot sounded not like a group of sophisticated military analysts, but like one teenager:

“Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject – they’re so vewwy angwy!!” it wrote on Saturday.

“Fascists. Straight up muthafuckin’ fascists. That’s what we’re up against,” it wrote last Tuesday, two days before Timberg’s report.

Any halfway decent editor would have been scared to death by any of these factors. Moreover the vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.

But if that same source also demanded anonymity on the preposterous grounds that it feared being “targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers”? Any sane reporter would have booted them out the door. You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won’t put your name to your claims? Take a hike.

Yet the Post thought otherwise, and its report was uncritically picked up by other outlets like USA Today and the Daily Beast. The “Russians did it” story was greedily devoured by a growing segment of blue-state America that is beginning to fall victim to the same conspiracist tendencies that became epidemic on the political right in the last few years.

The right-wing fascination with conspiracy has culminated in a situation where someone like Alex Jones of Infowars (who believes juice boxes make frogs gay) is considered a news source. Jones is believed even by our new president-elect, who just repeated one of his outrageous reports, to the effect that three million undocumented immigrants voted in the November 8th election.

That Jones report was based on a tweet by someone named Greg Phillips of an organization called VoteStand.

When asked to comment on his methodology, Phillips replied in the first person plural, sounding like a lone spree killer claiming to be a national terror network. “No. We will release it in open form to the American people,” he said. “We won’t allow the media to spin this first. Sorry.”

This was remarkably similar to the response of PropOrNot when asked by The Intercept to comment about its “list” report. The only difference was, Phillips didn’t use emoticons:

“We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =)” PropOrNot told The Intercept. “We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.”

“They” never called The Intercept back.

Most high school papers wouldn’t touch sources like these. But in November 2016, both the president-elect of the United States and the Washington Post are equally at ease with this sort of sourcing.

Even worse, the Post apparently never contacted any of the outlets on the “list” before they ran their story. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism says she was never contacted. Chris Hedges of Truthdig, who was part of a group that won the Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times once upon a time, said the same. “We were named,” he tells me. “I was not contacted.”

Hedges says the Post piece was an “updated form of Red-Baiting.”

“This attack signals an open war on the independent press,” he says. “Those who do not spew the official line will be increasingly demonized in corporate echo chambers such as the Post or CNN as useful idiots or fifth columnists.”

All of this is an outgrowth of this horrible election season we just lived through.

A lot of reporters over the summer were so scared by the prospect of a Trump presidency that they talked – in some cases publicly – about abandoning traditional ideas about journalistic “distance” from politicians, in favor of open advocacy for the Clinton campaign. “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism,” is how The Times put it.

These journalists seemed totally indifferent to the Pandora’s box they were opening. They didn’t understand that most politicians have no use for critical media. Many of them don’t see alternative points of view as healthy or even legitimate. If you polled a hundred politicians about the profession, 99 would say that all reporters are obstructionist scum whose removal from the planet would be a boon to society.

The only time politicians like the media is when we’re helping them get elected or push through certain policies, like for instance helping spread dubious stories about Iraq’s WMD capability. Otherwise, they despise us. So news outlets that get into bed with politicians are usually making a devil’s bargain they don’t fully understand.

They may think they’re being patriotic (as many did during the Iraq/WMD episode), but in the end what will happen is that they will adopt the point of view of their political sponsors. They will soon enough denounce other reporters and begin to see themselves as part of the power structure, as opposed to a check on it.

This is the ultimate in stupidity and self-annihilating behavior. The power of the press comes from its independence from politicians. Jump into bed with them and you not only won’t ever be able to get out, but you’ll win nothing but a loss of real influence and the undying loathing of audiences.

Helping Beltway politicos mass-label a huge portion of dissenting media as “useful idiots” for foreign enemies in this sense is an extraordinarily self-destructive act. Maybe the Post doesn’t care and thinks it’s doing the right thing. In that case, at least do the damn work.

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