Mainstream and social media matters

[Doc]

This is the PDF file in question

https://t.co/XiFTWPlwkx?amp=1

[Doc]

NYT Admits in court that it is literally Fake News

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking- ... -complaint

BREAKING: NYT pleads ignorance in answer to Project Veritas' defamation complaint

In their response, The New York Times admitted that they did not contact crucial sources for comment.

The New York Times has taken a blow in their legal battle with Project Veritas after they were forced to answer their defamation lawsuit. In their response, The New York Times admitted that they did not contact crucial sources for comment.
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"The [New York Times] didn't reach out for comment. And maybe you didn't do it because if you did do it, you'd have to publish that this was real," said Veritas' founder James O'Keefe.

"You didn't even pick up the damn phone to make a phone call. And you call yourself journalists!"

UPDATE: @nytimes FORCED to Answer Veritas’s Defamation Lawsuit – NYT Admits They Did Not Contact Veritas’s Named Sources for Comment; Admits Astor Article WRONG About MN Law; Claims Articles Are Opinion While Admitting Reporters Not Opinion Writers pic.twitter.com/8eAyp8PSRB— Matthew Tyrmand (@MatthewTyrmand) April 28, 2021

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On top of this, the paper had to admit that the Maggie Astor article at the centre of the lawsuit was wrong about Minnesota law and has been forced to explain that the article was opinion despite the fact that it was presented as news.

The original article claimed that Project Veritas was "part of a coordinated disinformation effort" in its coverage of ballot harvesting in Minnesota.

Throughout the response, America's former newspaper of record claimed that they lacked "knowledge or information" to sufficiently reply to the complaint. O'Keefe has stated that he is adamant that this lawsuit will progress to a jury trial.
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It is also worth noting that USA Today used The New York Times as a source for their fact-checking on PV, which Facebook then used to notify a substantial number of users that PV was spreading false information. As a result of this, USA Today may also face a lawsuit if they don't retract their fact check.

Now James Okeefe can demand USA Today retract its “fact check,” which relied on reporting that the NYT will no longer standby. The Times asserts in legal documents that its article was “opinion.”

If USA Today doesn’t retract, they get sued, too.

[Typhoon]

Substack - Greenwald | Corporate Media's Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them

My responses to The Washington Post's article and Daily Beast's questions about accusations from The Intercept that I have "endangered" their writers.

[Doc]

Substack - Greenwald | Corporate Media's Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them

My responses to The Washington Post's article and Daily Beast's questions about accusations from The Intercept that I have "endangered" their writers.

2 + 2 = 5

Seems like real journalism is dead.

[Apollonius]

NPR's brilliant self-own - Matt Taibbi, TK News, 20 June 2021
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/nprs-brilliant-self-own

National Public Radio complains about a media figure who tells people "what their opinions should be" and uses political "buzzwords"


... The piece goes on to note that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis.” In other words, they’re doing better than us.

Is the complaint that Shapiro peddles misinformation? No: “The articles The Daily Wire publishes don't normally include falsehoods.” Are they worried about the stoking of Trumpism, or belief that the 2020 election was stolen? No, because Shapiro “publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump's orbit,” as well as “the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.” Are they mad that the site is opinion disguised as news? No, because, “publicly the site does not purport to be a traditional news source.”

The main complaint, instead, is that:

By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire's content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation's greatest threats.

NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. ...

[Typhoon]

NPR's brilliant self-own - Matt Taibbi, TK News, 20 June 2021
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/nprs-brilliant-self-own

National Public Radio complains about a media figure who tells people "what their opinions should be" and uses political "buzzwords"


... The piece goes on to note that “other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal” that “publish aggregated and opinion content” have also “generally been more successful… than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis.” In other words, they’re doing better than us.

Is the complaint that Shapiro peddles misinformation? No: “The articles The Daily Wire publishes don't normally include falsehoods.” Are they worried about the stoking of Trumpism, or belief that the 2020 election was stolen? No, because Shapiro “publicly denounced the alt-right and other people in Trump's orbit,” as well as “the conspiracy theory that Trump is the rightful winner of the 2020 election.” Are they mad that the site is opinion disguised as news? No, because, “publicly the site does not purport to be a traditional news source.”

The main complaint, instead, is that:

By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire's content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation's greatest threats.

NPR has not run a piece critical of Democrats since Christ was a boy. ...

More on NPR's hissy fit.

The Spectator - World | Is NPR jealous of the Daily Wire?

Readers know the press is biased, so they at least want an outlet that isn’t biased against them.

'Hey, that’s some nice Facebook traffic you’re getting. Would be a shame if something happened to it.’

That’s the tone, more or less, from a Monday NPR article ‘profiling’ Ben Shapiro’s phenomenally successful Daily Wire news brand.

The average New York Times article on Facebook collects just under 2,000 likes, shares, and comments. The average Daily Wire link receives nearly 40,000. At the peak of the 2020 election, Daily Wire articles averaged almost 100,000 engagements. No other publication comes close.

And all of this really bothers NPR. For 2,000 petulant words, NPR does everything it can to imply that the Daily Wire should be kicked off Facebook. Why? Because…because…it’s just not fair! Why do people read their articles more than ours?

That’s the guts of the entire temper tantrum posing as an article. NPR gets very angry at the public for not liking the ‘right’ news outlets and basically calls for Big Tech to decide what people are supposed to read. And they do it with the same cudgel they’ve become so fond of in the past year: kvetching about ‘misinformation’.

[Doc]

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/bl ... the-state/

Oh My, Something About That New York Times Journalist Who Recently Called Trump Supporters “Enemies of The State”
July 28, 2021 | Sundance | 371 Comments

Katie Benner sounds like an American girl next door right? Alas, a little digging below the surface reveals something rather specific about the New York Times journalist.

Ms. Katie Benner made headlines yesterday by tweeting: “Today’s #January6thSelectCommittee underscores the America’s current, essential natsec dilemma: Work to combat legitimate national security threats now entails calling a politician’s supporters enemies of the state,” the previously little-known Benner wrote.

Perhaps the purposeful avatar knocked people off the trail. Yes, the statement is jaw-dropping from a New York Times journalist who is openly calling Trump supporters “enemies of the state,” a tweet she soon deleted once the sunlight poured in.

Perhaps her NYT editors influenced the decision to delete the comments; or, well, perhaps the real people behind Ms. Benner noted she had gone a little too far – this time.

As it turns out, Ms. Benner is not quite what she appears…. not even close.

Katie Benner (pictured left) used to write freelance for the Beijing Review, China’s only National news magazine in English, published by the Chinese Communist Party-owned China International Publishing Group.

Benner joined the New York Times in 2015 after her initial work at the communist propaganda outlet. {NYT CITATION}

NEW YORK TIMES – […] “Katie Benner of Bloomberg joining The Times as a technology reporter. She’s covered Wall Street and Silicon Valley. She’s been a magazine writer and a columnist. Early in her career she wrote for Beijing Review, and since last fall, she has been based in San Francisco for Bloomberg View. (2015, link)

The CCP-controlled Beijing Review was designated by the U.S. State Department in 2020 as a “foreign mission” of China {Citation}. Emphasis mine:

STATE DEPT ARCHIVE – […] “Pursuant to authorities under the Foreign Missions Act, the State Department is issuing today a new determination that designates the U.S. operations of Yicai Global, Jiefang Daily, Xinmin Evening News, Social Sciences in China Press, Beijing Review, and Economic Daily as foreign missions. These six entities all meet the definition of a foreign mission under the Foreign Missions Act in that they are “substantially owned or effectively controlled” by a foreign government. In this case, they are effectively controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China”. (link)

[Typhoon]

Taki's Mag | Hack and Harlots

[Typhoon]

This one's for "Doc".

Buzzfeed | The Co-Founder Of The Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under A Fake Name

[Doc]

This one's for "Doc".

Buzzfeed | The Co-Founder Of The Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under A Fake Name

And the elephant in the room is that its fact checks all the way down.

[Typhoon]

=https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multi ... Multiplier

propaganda-multiplier-600x689.jpg (149.99 KiB) Viewed 9112 times

Hardly a novel observation, but worth a reminder.

[noddy]

its missing the In-Q-Tel branch, were the CIA was the one that provided the money pit required to form Google, Facebook etc in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-med ... seriously/

[Doc]

its missing the In-Q-Tel branch, were the CIA was the one that provided the money pit required to form Google, Facebook etc in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-med ... seriously/

Do you remember that after the 2009 housing crisis Obama giving money to news outlets?

[Nonc Hilaire]

Trump speech audience tonight.

E92DE41D-17A0-4628-BCA3-53C908DFC7E8.jpeg (104.54 KiB) Viewed 9053 times

[Doc]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... cial-media

Revealed: LAPD officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop

An internal police chief memo shows employees were directed to use ‘field interview cards’ which would then be reviewed
@SamTLevin
Wed 8 Sep 2021 10.06 EDT

Last modified on Wed 8 Sep 2021 16.50 EDT

The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has directed its officers to collect the social media information of every civilian they interview, including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime, according to records shared with the Guardian.
A lawsuit charges that the Rodeo Drive task force has been stopping and arresting Black people without cause.
Beverly Hills: 99% of people arrested by ‘safe streets’ unit were Black, suit says
Read more

Copies of the “field interview cards” that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions”, and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.

The documents, which were obtained by the not-for-profit organization the Brennan Center for Justice, have raised concerns about civil liberties and the potential for mass surveillance of civilians without justification.

“There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center, noting that the information was probably stored in a database that could be used for a wide range of purposes.

The Brennan Center conducted a review of 40 other police agencies in the US and was unable to find another department that required social media collection on interview cards (though many have not publicly disclosed copies of the cards). The organization also obtained records about the LAPD’s social media surveillance technologies, which have raised questions about the monitoring of activist groups including Black Lives Matter.

In 2015, the department added “social media accounts” as a line on the physical field interview cards, according to a newly unearthed memo from the previous LAPD chief, Charlie Beck. “Similar to a nickname or an alias, a person’s online persona or identity used for social media … can be highly beneficial to investigations,” he wrote.

While the social media collection has gone largely unnoticed, the LAPD’s use of field interview cards has prompted controversy. Last October, prosecutors filed criminal charges against three officers in the LAPD’s metro division, accusing them of using the cards to falsely label civilians as gang members after stopping them. That unit also has a history of stopping Black drivers at disproportionately high rates, and according to the LA Times, has more frequently filled out cards for Black and Latino residents they stopped.

Meanwhile, more than half of the civilians stopped by metro officers and documented in the cards were not arrested or cited, the Times reported. The fact that a department under scrutiny for racial profiling was also engaged in broad scale social media account collection is troubling, said Levinson-Waldman.

[Typhoon]

Substack - Greenwald | The Indictment of Hillary Clinton's Lawyer is an Indictment of the Russiagate Wing of U.S. Media

A lawyer for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign was indicted on Wednesday with one felony count of lying to the FBI about a fraudulent Russiagate story he helped propagate. Michael Sussman was charged with the crime by Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Trump Attorney General William Barr to investigate possible crimes committed as part of the Russiagate investigation and whose work is now overseen and approved by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sussman's indictment, approved by Garland, is the second allegation of criminal impropriety regarding Russiagate's origins. In January, Durham secured a guilty plea from an FBI agent, Kevin Clinesmith, for lying to the FISA court and submitting an altered email in order to spy on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.

The law firm where Sussman is a partner, Perkins Coie, is a major player in Democratic Party politics. One of its partners at the time of the alleged crime, Marc Elias, has become a liberal social media star after having served as General Counsel to the Clinton 2016 campaign. Elias abruptly announced that he was leaving the firm three weeks ago, and thus far no charges have been filed against him.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[Mr. Perfect]

I always told you guys the left were about camps in the end. Everything I said was right.

[Doc]

"Let's go Bono"

BTW Todayon Itunes "let's go Brandon" comes in at Number 1, 2, 4 and 8 for the largest number of downloads.

http://www.popvortex.com/music/charts/top-100-songs.php

[Typhoon]

The Spectator | Sign of the Times

When the media’s credibility collapsed, the New York Times led the way

[Doc]

The Spectator | Sign of the Times

When the media’s credibility collapsed, the New York Times led the way

Not just the NYT. IE when you fabricate facts that can easily be debunked, assuming no one will notice, you have no credibility. Even if you manage to hold on to your cult members.

I am just a poor boy
Though my story's seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

And what about MSDNC?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZcqJldagH0

uZcqJldagH0

[Doc]

If this stands:


https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/ ... t-veritas/

The FBI and the New York Times Collude against Project Veritas
By Andrew C. McCarthy

November 12, 2021 7:59 PM

Left to right: FBI building in Washington, D.C.; Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe at CPAC in 2019; the New York Times building in New York City. (Aaron P. Bernstein, Yuri Gripas, Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential information and the Times’ hypocritical coverage.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W ant to understand how outrageous Friday’s New York Times coverage of the FBI’s seizure of Project Veritas’s proprietary documents is? Just imagine what the Times would be saying if what is happening to PV were happening to . . . well . . . the Times itself.

What if federal prosecutors had had the temerity to seek, and managed to obtain, court-authorized search warrants against Times reporters, on the allegation that the paper was in possession of evidence of a crime — perhaps even that some of its reporters were somehow complicit in the crime? The screams of bloody murder from West 40th Street would be audible across America.

Let’s start with the government leaks.

The reason that prosecutors and police are permitted covertly to seek judicial warrants to seize evidence, and that the courts keep the government warrant applications under seal, is that investigations are supposed to be kept confidential. This is to protect people who have not been charged with crimes — their privacy and their presumption of innocence. Government agents are not permitted to publicize such information, much less selectively leak it to the press. The information does not belong to them. They are given a legal privilege to acquire access to it for investigative purposes only.
More in FBI

Main Steele Dossier Source Pleads Not Guilty to Lying to FBI
Durham Is Steadily Exposing the Real ‘Russia Collusion’ Scandal
What to Make of Durham’s Latest Indictment

Moreover, as no one knows better than the Times, there are special considerations when the government targets the press in a search or other information demand. A free-press right is guaranteed in the First Amendment. Amazingly under the circumstances, the Times’ default position — at least when rights of the Times and the rest of the media-Democrat complex are at stake — is that our constitutional system is threatened if the government demands or seizes information from reporters.

In point of fact, this is not true. The First Amendment prohibits the government from telling the press what it can publish — i.e., no prior restraints. Yet members of the media have the same obligations as every person in this country to provide evidence if demanded by a lawful subpoena. The government has the same power to seize evidence from reporters as from ordinary citizens.

Because of the constitutional recognition of free-press rights, the Justice Department (DOJ) has internal guidelines that require high-level approval before prosecutors and the FBI may demand information from the media. The guidelines discourage such demands unless the case is important and there is no alternative source. But that is discretionary government restraint, not mandatory. The media regularly advocate “press shield” laws precisely because the Constitution does not empower journalists to withhold information and guarantee confidentiality to their sources.

So, contrary to a lot of overheated commentary by PV sympathizers in conservative media, it is not a violation of the Constitution for the Justice Department — specifically, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), working with the FBI — to seize documents and other items from PV members. It is stunning, however, to find Times reporters, of all people, cheerleading this investigative gambit and publishing its fruits.

Let’s back up.

Reportedly, the government’s investigation revolves around a diary that was stolen from President Biden’s 40-year-old daughter, Ashley. A website called National File later published what it described as portions and has claimed to have the complete diary.

I confess to being curious about the basis relied on by the Justice Department — evidently, the Trump Justice Department, in October 2020, at then-candidate Biden’s request — to open a criminal investigation. The stealing of personal items from a non-government official is not a federal crime.
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To be clear, I am curious; I am not saying it was necessarily improper for the Justice Department to look into the theft. Joe Biden, at the time, was not just a former vice president, for whose protection the government is responsible; he was running for (and favored to win) the presidency. While we don’t know all the relevant facts, it is thus easy to conjure up legitimate federal interests in the robbery investigation.

Sometimes, for example, there is federal-government jurisdiction for robbery — if, for example, stolen items involve federal-government materials or such interstate-commerce items as narcotics. It could be a federal crime to transfer or sell stolen items in interstate commerce. A theft involving a close family member of a high government official (or candidate for high office) could also be part of a bigger scheme; there could be a federal crime if the robbery of his daughter signaled a threat to Biden’s own safety, perhaps, or an effort to blackmail or extort him.

So we’d be getting out over our skis to pronounce that the FBI and federal prosecutors had no business looking into the robbery. Plus, it’s not like the Justice Department went off on its own hook here. A federal district court judge issued a search warrant. That is only supposed to happen if there is probable cause to believe that a federal crime has occurred (or is occurring) and that the location to be searched probably contains evidence of that crime.

Now, yes, judges sometimes get it wrong on warrants. The vast majority of the time, though, once the pertinent facts are known, it turns out that the judge had a solid legal basis for issuing warrants. And a federal judge knows very well, just as the Justice Department knows very well, that search warrants targeting journalists — even such unconventional journalists as PV staffers — are fraught with constitutional implications. I bet we will learn that the search warrants were sought and granted only after very careful consideration at the FBI, DOJ, and the court. With due respect to PV founder James O’Keefe, we should not assume that his public explanations, which understandably cast PV in a favorable light, are necessarily the whole story here.

All that said, it is not a crime for journalists to come into possession of unlawfully converted documents. And it is to be expected that journalists zealously guard their right to publish such materials — or at least to consider doing so. We see this play out often when Times reporters receive classified leaks from intelligence officials — it being both against the law for government officials to disseminate the information to unauthorized persons, and potentially criminal for the press to publish national-defense secrets (though doubts about constitutionality make such a prosecution highly unlikely).

So why isn’t the press closing ranks around Project Veritas? Because the so-called mainstream media despise PV.

That, too, is to be expected: PV uses against the Left, very much including against left-leaning media, the Left’s own sandbag tactics — e.g., covert investigation, spying informants who pretend to befriend the people they investigate, and selective publication of the fruits of the investigation in order to paint the target in the worst possible light. If Saul Alinsky had been a right-winger, James O’Keefe would be his favorite student. But PV’s unpopularity cannot mean that it does not merit the status of journalist, with all of the free-press protection that status implies.

O’Keefe concedes that PV came into possession of the diary. He says PV elected not to publish it after becoming aware of it through “tipsters.” To the extent that PV had physical custody of the diary, or some part of it, or a copy of it, O’Keefe says, “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner.”

Regardless of whether that turns out to be a true and complete version of events, it is highly irregular for investigative journalists to be subjected to such intrusive government investigative tactics as search warrants. Furthermore, if what has been reported by the Times is indicative of the scope of the searches permitted by the court, then clearly the warrants were not narrowly tailored to authorize seizure only of evidence related to the stolen diary. To the contrary, the FBI grabbed extensive PV work product and attorney-client communications.

Thus does the Times report today:

Project Veritas has long occupied a gray area between investigative journalism and political spying, and internal documents obtained by The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.

The documents, a series of memos written by the group’s lawyer, detail ways for Project Veritas sting operations — which typically diverge from standard journalistic practice by employing people who mask their real identities or create fake ones to infiltrate target organizations — to avoid breaking federal statutes such as the law against lying to government officials.

Two of the Times’ A-team national reporters, Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti, then elaborate in detail on advice that PV has received from its lawyer, in connection with PV investigations going back for years. In the main, the advice is what you’d expect: How to navigate the perils of collecting information through ethically questionable tactics that skate along the razor’s edge between the legitimate and the lawless — something you’d be right to suppose that the Times knows a thing or two about.

Significantly, what has been leaked to the Times, and what the Times has editorially chosen to publish, is not confined to the Ashley Biden–diary investigation. The Times is heedless of Project Veritas’s right to counsel and to the constitutionally based confidentiality of its attorney-client communications. Given how the Times would react were the shoe on the other foot, which is hardly inconceivable, this is shocking. Not surprisingly, SDNY judge Analisa Torres, the Obama appointee who issued the search warrants, has now abruptly ordered the government to stop extracting materials from the PV operatives’ digital files. Plainly, the Justice Department is running roughshod over PV’s right to counsel.

I can only assume the Gray Lady’s judgment is skewed. It is not so much reporting a newsworthy story as exploiting the opportunity for full-bore scrutiny of PV as a journalistic enterprise. And scrutiny with barely disguised disdain: Because of PV’s political motivations, which the Left finds noxious — which, in fact, have resulted in prominent progressive figures and institutions being targeted, sometimes to their humiliation — PV operatives are somehow unworthy of being regarded as reporters, presumed to enjoy constitutionally driven deference from government investigators.

Judge Torres should be infuriated by the leaks to the Times. And she should do more than merely fulminate.

The judge should order the SDNY’s Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, to provide the court, immediately, with affidavits detailing communications with the media from every prosecutor, FBI agent, and support staffer who is either involved in the investigation or has had access to the items seized from the current or former PV officials. Judge Torres should ask that Attorney General Merrick Garland immediately refer the matter to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz for a thorough investigation of how the search-warrant information came to be transmitted to the Times.

Garland and Horowitz should announce that the Justice Department will conduct the investigation requested by the court, and Horowitz should be given the affidavits so his office can hit the ground running. Judge Torres should ask for periodic updates to stress to the Justice Department and FBI that the court is troubled by the government’s apparently pretextual exploitation of coercive judicial processes in order to fuel media coverage. That coverage has imperiled the constitutional rights of PV members to freedom of the press, due process, privacy, and assistance of counsel.

You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices.

[Doc]

I am shocked !! Shocked !!! to find the steel dossier was fake news !!

And to show they really mean it, they published the notice in the life styles section.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... story.html

Style
The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two stories regarding the Steele dossier
The Washington Post building at 1301 K St. NW in Washington, D.C. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
By Paul Farhi
Yesterday at 12:28 p.m. EST

The Washington Post on Friday took the unusual step of correcting and removing large portions of two articles, published in March 2017 and February 2019, that had identified a Belarusian American businessman as a key source of the “Steele dossier,” a collection of largely unverified reports that claimed the Russian government had compromising information about then-candidate Donald Trump.

The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story. It had identified businessman Sergei Millian as “Source D,” the unnamed figure who passed on the most salacious allegation in the dossier to its principal author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

The story’s headline was amended, sections identifying Millian as the source were removed, and an accompanying video summarizing the article was eliminated. An editor’s note explaining the changes was added. Other stories that made the same assertion were corrected as well.

Source D, according to the dossier, alleged that Russian intelligence had learned that Trump had hired Russian prostitutes to defile a Moscow hotel room once occupied by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and possessed a video recording of the incident.

The allegation, which the dossier said was confirmed by a second person described only as “Source E,” has never been substantiated.

Steele’s dossier consisted of raw information and unconfirmed tips from unidentified sources, which he compiled as part of a political opposition-research project for an investigative firm working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. Though Steele shared it with the FBI, its contents remained largely unknown and unpublicized until two months after the 2016 election, when a leaked copy was published by BuzzFeed News.

Trump has repeatedly denounced the dossier as false, framing it as the centerpiece of a malicious effort financed by his political opponents to damage him.

The Post’s reassessment follows the indictment on Nov. 4 of Igor Danchenko, a Russian American analyst and researcher who helped Steele compile the dossier. Danchenko was arrested as part of an investigation conducted by attorney John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump’s attorney general William P. Barr to probe the origins and handling of the FBI’s inquiry into Trump’s alleged Russian connections.***

Danchenko was indicted on charges that he repeatedly lied to the FBI about where and how he got information that he allegedly gave to Steele for the dossier. He pleaded not guilty in federal court this week. His attorney, Mark Schamel, said in a statement: “For the past five years, those with an agenda have sought to expose Mr. Danchenko’s identity and tarnish his reputation while undermining U.S. National Security. This latest injustice will not stand.”

Buzbee said the indictment and new reporting by the newspaper has “created doubts” about Millian’s alleged involvement. The new reporting included an interview with one of the original sources in its 2017 article, who now is uncertain that Millian was Source D, she said. “We feel we are taking the most transparent approach possible” to set the record straight, she said.

The March 2017 Post story carried the headline, “Who is ‘Source D’? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim.” It said Millian had been identified in different portions of the dossier as Source D and Source E. The article included Millian’s repeated denials that he had helped Steele.

The newspaper removed references to Millian as Steele’s source in online and archived versions of the original articles. The stories themselves won’t be retracted. A dozen other Post stories that made the same assertion were also corrected and amended.

The Post’s decision to edit and repost the Millian stories is highly unusual in the news industry.

Mainstream publications often add corrections to published stories when credible new information emerges. Some publishers also enable readers to petition them to remove unflattering stories from their websites, a once-controversial practice that has gained more acceptance in the digital era, when articles can remain accessible online for years.

But it’s rare for a publication to make wholesale changes after publication and to republish the edited story, especially more than four years afterward.

“No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

The February 2019 Post story detailed Millian’s involvement in some of Trump’s business activities. It was headlined, “Sergei Millian, identified as an unwitting source for the Steele dossier, sought proximity to Trump’s world in 2016.”

The indictment secured by Durham on Nov. 4 suggests, but doesn’t explicitly assert, that Danchenko may have gotten his information about the hotel encounter not from Millian but from a Democratic Party operative with long-standing ties to Hillary Clinton. The indictment doesn’t name the executive by name, but he has been identified as Charles Dolan Jr. by Dolan’s attorney, Ralph D. Martin, who otherwise declined to comment because Dolan is a “witness in an ongoing case.”

The indictment notes that the executive stayed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel where the alleged incident with prostitutes took place, and took a tour of the presidential suite in June 2016. The timing is consistent with Steele’s later report about the alleged hotel-room encounter.

The Steele dossier was a basis for the FBI’s legal arguments for surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, during the 2016 campaign. A Justice Department inspector general later criticized the agency for failing to note doubts about the veracity of the information in its application for court approval of the surveillance.

The 2017 and 2019 stories were written by veteran reporters Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger. They declined to comment.

The Wall Street Journal first identified Millian as Steele’s source in early 2017. A spokesman, Steve Severinghaus, said the paper is “aware of the serious questions raised by the allegations and continue[s] to report and to follow the investigation closely.”

Buzbee became The Post’s executive editor earlier this year. The two Millian stories were published under her predecessor, Martin Baron.

*** Special bonus question: Who, outside of the FBI, could have retracted their comments on the Steele dossier to the Washington Post?

[Doc]

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/11/face ... ttenhouse/

Facebook Blocks Search Results For ‘Kyle Rittenhouse’
By Debra Heine
November 11, 2021

Despite massive public interest in the court proceedings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this week, Facebook has blocked search results for the name “Kyle Rittenhouse.” Facebook shows zero posts when the query “Kyle Rittenhouse” is entered into the social media platform’s search bar. A message appears that states that “832,000 people are talking about this,” but no results show up.

An attempt to find Kyle Rittenhouse posts brings up a message informing the user that Facebook did not find any results with a prompt to make sure your spelling is correct.



Rittenhouse, 18, is currently on trial for shooting three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them outright during a riot in August 2020. He is charged with two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, recklessly endangering safety and illegal possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.

When he took the stand on Wednesday, Rittenhouse said, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I defended myself.”

Following the shooting in August of 2020, Facebook openly admitted that they were blocking search results for the name “Kyle Rittenhouse” because, according to the platform, he had committed a “mass murderer.”

“It’s not actually new,” a Facebook representative told The Verge at the time. “We block searches for a ton of stuff – for instance, child exploitation content.”

Facebook also immediately removed the teen’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Day nine of the trial began with the testimony of Dr. John Black, a use of force expert. The defense team called on Black to comment on audio and video evidence from the night of the shootings.

[Mr. Perfect]