SUMMARY: President Trump has long acknowledged top-rated Fox News as his favorite media outlet, and the network relishes its role as a conservative voice. But its increasingly close relationship with the administration is drawing criticism. William Brangham talks to the New Yorker's Jane Mayer about an unprecedented “feedback loop” and whether the President has made policy decisions to help Fox succeed.
SUMMARY: Days after a historic summit, there are signs of progress from both North and South Korea. Pyongyang announced it will re-sync its time zone with South Korea's starting Saturday, while the South said it will remove the loudspeakers that blast propaganda into the North. John Yang reports on the first steps both sides seem to be taking, and what U.S. officials are saying about the American role.
SUMMARY: A viral video compilation of local TV anchors is raising new concerns about the way Sinclair Broadcast Group mixes news with conservative, partisan political opinion. And while it already reaches over a third of homes across the nation, the country's largest owner of local TV stations is hoping to get bigger. William Brangham reports.
Analysts tracking Russian influence operations find a feedback loop between Kremlin propaganda and far-right memes.
Angee Dixson joined Twitter on Aug. 8 and immediately began posting furiously — about 90 times a day. A self-described American Christian conservative, Dixson defended President Donald Trump's response to the unrest in Charlottesville, criticized the removal of Confederate monuments and posted pictures purporting to show violence by left-wing counterprotesters.
“Dems and Media Continue to IGNORE BLM and Antifa Violence in Charlottesville,” she wrote above a picture of masked demonstrators labeled “DEMOCRAT TERROR.”
But Dixson appears to have been a fake, according to an analysis by Ben Nimmo and Donara Barojan of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank. The account has been shut down. Dixson's profile picture was stolen from a young Instagram celebrity (a German model rumored to have dated Leonardo DiCaprio). Dixson used a URL shortener that is a tell for the sort of computer program that automatically churns out high volumes of social media posts whose authorship is frequently disguised. And one of her tweets attacked Sen. John McCain for his alleged support of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, echoing language in tweets from Russian outlets RT and Sputnik.
The same social media networks that spread Russian propaganda during the 2016 election have been busily amplifying right-wing extremism surrounding the recent violence in Charlottesville, according to researchers who monitor the activity. It's impossible to tell how much of the traffic originates from Russia or from mercenary sources. But there were hordes of automated bots generating Twitter posts and much more last week to help make right-wing conspiracy theories and rallying cries about Charlottesville go viral.
A sample of 600 Twitter accounts [Hamilton 68 - Tracking Russian Influence Operations on Twitter] linked to Russian influence operations have been promoting hashtags for Charlottesville such as “Antifa,” a term for activists on the far left; and “alt-left,” a term Trump used, which was interpreted by many as suggesting an equivalence between liberal demonstrators and white nationalists in the so-called alt-right.
The sample includes accounts that are openly pro-Russian like state-controlled outlets RT and Sputnik, which a joint U.S. intelligence assessment concluded are “part of Russia's state-run propaganda machine.” The sample also includes those, like “Angee Dixson's,” that seem to be written by typical Americans. And it follows automated bots that help make messages go viral and even users around the world who spread the Kremlin's messages whether or not they mean to support Russia. The network is tracked by four researchers working with the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund that seeks to expose efforts to undermine Western democracy.
(A spokesperson for Sputnik took issue with the assertions about it in this article, providing 22 links to the news service's articles that she called “highly critical of the president's response to Charlottesville.” She argued that to “ignore that reality … would only mean that you are fixing the facts to push a false narrative.” The spokesperson also disputed that Sputnik is a vehicle for any purported Russian disinformation campaign.)
“The Russian influence networks we track are definitely amplifying the broader alt-right chatter about Charlottesville,” one of the researchers, J.M. Berger, said. “The major themes they have been pushing are the 'both sides are violent' argument and conspiracy theories that George Soros was behind the counter-protests, although the latter has been trending more sporadically.”
The latest Soros accusation, which PolitiFact found to be baseless, shows another aspect of how messages snowball as they pass between the American right-wing and Russian propagandists, according to Nimmo. A U.S. right-winger asserts a “fact,” a Russian news agency fuses it with a Kremlin narrative, and then American right-wing websites parrot the Russian news agency's assertion.
Soros, a Hungarian-American investor and major Democratic donor, long ago became a frequent bugaboo for the Kremlin and for Republicans. He funds the Open Society Foundations, which support democracy and development around the world — and they have given money to ProPublica, including its Documenting Hate project, while accounting for less than 3 percent of ProPublica's revenue so far this year. Many recipients of Soros' contributions are viewed as politically liberal, but some right-wingers and the Kremlin tend to see his hand (or more precisely, his wallet) in any action they perceive as left-wing.
The accusation that Soros was behind the Charlottesville counter-protesters appeared to have been first uttered by Alex Jones, the conservative conspiracy theorist and provocateur, on Aug. 14. The next day, Lee Stranahan, a host for Sputnik, repeated the claim in several YouTube videos, according to Nimmo. Stranahan was previously a prominent advocate for the #FireMcMaster campaign against national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
The pro-Russian networks are also injecting Russian propaganda about other countries into U.S. far-right circles. After Jones' InfoWars interviewed Stranahan on Aug. 15, Stranahan's charge that the U.S. is hypocritical for supporting Nazis in Ukraine (a years-old Kremlin line) while condemning them at home appeared on fringe websites such as Mint Press News, TheLastAmericanVagabond.com, BBSNews and JewWorldOrder, Nimmo found.
“Given the number of channels that propagated the narrative at the same time, it is not possible to say whether a single channel or many different channels inspired the American actors' linkage of Charlottesville and Ukraine,” Nimmo wrote in a blog post. “What does appear probable is that the U.S. activists derived their narrative directly from the Kremlin and its supporters? —? and thus amplified Russian disinformation in America.”
Some in the self-described alt-right have embraced Russian support. At an earlier protest of the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville in May, people chanted “Russia is our friend!”
Tracking disinformation online is challenging because it can be hard to discern users' motivations and affiliations. But Congressional investigators probing Russia's interference in the 2016 election are interested in how social networks spread fake news and propaganda, such as documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
“The Internet and social media provide Russia cheap, efficient and highly effective access to foreign audiences with plausible deniability of their influence,” another of the researchers working with the Alliance to Secure Democracy, Clint Watts, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March. “This pattern of Russian falsehoods and social media manipulation of the American electorate continued through Election Day and persists today.”
SUMMARY: The new Russian identity is a combination of religion, old Russian traditions and rediscovered patriotism. It helps explain how today's Russians think, how President Putin acts and why he remains popular. As part of our week-long series Inside Putin's Russia, special correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin report in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: For years, the Kremlin and the media it controls have waged a multifaceted information (and disinformation) campaign inside Russia and pointed at its perceived adversaries, including the U.S. As part of our week-long series Inside Putin's Russia, special correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin report on the information wars, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: In the republic of Dagestan, a brutal separatist insurgency has long fought against the Russian state. Now, as many as 5,000 Dagestanis have left to fight for the Islamic State. Why have so many answered the call? As part of our week-long series Inside Putin's Russia, special correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin report, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: What can happen to you if you oppose the Kremlin? There is a high mortality rate among prominent critics of the Russian government, which some say is emblematic of how President Vladimir Putin runs the country. As part of our week-long series Inside Putin's Russia, special correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin report in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: There may be no more consequential relationship for the U.S. than with Russia. As part of our week-long series “Inside Putin's Russia,” special correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin report in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on how Russians perceive the U.S. and how the relationship between the two world powers has evolved under Trump.
SUMMARY: During the campaign and after, President-elect Donald Trump voiced his distrust of the media and held the press at arms-length. On Thursday, he announced his communications team, including RNC strategist Sean Spicer as press secretary. Brian Stelter of CNN and Jeff Mason of Reuters join Judy Woodruff to discuss what to expect about press relations once the president-elect takes office.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): President-elect Donald Trump continued to round out his White House team today, tapping two of his key campaign advisers to senior West Wing positions.
She's been one of Donald Trump's most visible advisers since taking over as campaign manager last summer. Today, the president-elect named Kellyanne Conway to be White House counselor.
He followed that with word that Sean Spicer will serve as White House Press Secretary. Spicer had been communications director for the Republican National Committee for five years. Last month, he moved over to become chief spokesman for the Trump transition.
Now, Spicer, along with Jason Miller and Hope Hicks, will handle relations with the news media, and that could be a tall order.
DONALD TRUMP (R), President-Elect: The people back there, the extremely dishonest press.
JUDY WOODRUFF: As candidate and president-elect, Mr. Trump has called out reporters in general, and at times, by name, like NBC's Katy Tur.
DONALD TRUMP: They're not reporting it. Katy, you're not reporting it, Katy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Last month, he retweeted attacks on CNN's Jeff Zeleny, after the correspondent reported on Mr. Trump's unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. And during the campaign, the Trump team at times barred The Washington Post, Univision, Politico, and BuzzFeed from its rallies.
Reince Priebus, the incoming chief of staff, is signaling changes could be ahead for the White House press corps.
REINCE PRIEBUS, Incoming White House Chief of Staff: Even looking at things like the daily — you know, the daily White House briefing from the Press Secretary, I mean, there's a lot of different ways that things can be done, and I can assure you, we're looking at that.
They say Kremlin relies on disinformation to sow discord in U.S., Europe
With a vigorous national debate under way on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue. The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.
They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.
“People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Hultqvist's spokeswoman.
As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports. But numerous analysts and experts in U.S. and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.
In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of “weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.
“Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin's information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”
The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past. The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that NATO and the EU have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.
The Kremlin's clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, U.S. officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The Kremlin uses both conventional media— Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable. Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Urme, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency's annual report. “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said.
The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events— and foster a kind of policy paralysis.
Moscow adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as “Russophobia.”
“There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry briefing.
Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlingenerated disinformation campaigns. “The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.
“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”
Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don't trust anyone.'” The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront.
“The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013. A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the EU create an ever more receptive audience for Russia's conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme right party in France.
“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”
Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all U.S. puppets.
MacFarquhar writes for The New York Times.
Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”
Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.
“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”
And that’s the word from inside Fox News.
Note the story here isn’t that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known that since the channel’s inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods.
