Censorship, fake news, perception management

Questions, Comments, Concerns etc about The Bell
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 23, 2020 11:39 am

Silly Season
Washington Post, November 19, 2017

Justice Department pushing Iran-connected charges in HBO hack, other cases

Last month, national security prosecutors at the Justice Department were told to look at any ongoing investigations involving Iran or Iranian nationals with an eye toward making them public.
The push to announce Iran-related cases has caused internal alarm, these people said, with some law enforcement officials fearing that senior Justice Department officials want to reveal the cases because the Trump administration would like Congress to impose new sanctions on Iran.

Washington Post, October 22, 2020

U.S. government concludes Iran was behind threatening emails sent to Democrats

U.S. officials on Wednesday night accused Iran of targeting American voters with faked but menacing emails and warned that both Iran and Russia had obtained voter data that could be used to endanger the upcoming election.
The disclosure by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe at a hastily called news conference marked the first time this election cycle that a foreign adversary has been accused of targeting specific voters in a bid to undermine democratic confidence — just four years after Russian online operations marred the 2016 presidential vote.

The claim that Iran was behind the email operation, which came into view on Tuesday as Democrats in several states reported receiving emails demanding they vote for President Trump, was leveled without specific evidence.
...
Metadata gathered from dozens of the emails pointed to the use of servers in Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, according to numerous analysts.

Reuters, October 22, 2020

U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran, Russia have tried to interfere in 2020 election

The emails are under investigation, and one intelligence source said it was still unclear who was behind them.
...
... the evidence remains inconclusive.
The claims that Iran is behind this are as stupid as the people who believe them.

I for one trust (not) those 50 former intelligence officials who say that all emails are Russian disinformation. They are intended to 'sow discord' which is something the U.S. has otherwise never ever had throughout its history.

Politico, October 19, 2020

Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails ... “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
...
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

No, this doesn't make any sense. It is not supposed to do that.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/10/s ... l#comments

As usual the ruling class accuses others of it's own practices.'Sowing discord', which might also be phrased as 'divide & conquer' has been the primary and indeed only viable strategy the bosses got in the class war. Which is why it never ends, it is a built in feature of our undemocratic duopoly. When the Democratic Party reluctantly took up the banner of civil rights, necessarily as the country was exploding on their watch, the bigotry long cultivated found itself befert of comfortable lodgings. The Republicans, facing a growing mass of black Democratic voters, an electoral dilema, took those overt racists into the bosom of the Party of Lincoln with open arms. And so like clockwork the division of the working class is continued .
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 24, 2020 1:16 pm

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Media Responds With Apathy, Disappointment as US-Backed Coup Gov’t Concedes Defeat in Bolivia
October 22, 2020
By Alan Macleod – Oct 19, 2020

Across the spectrum, corporate media has endorsed last year’s rightwing takeover of Bolivia, refusing to label it as a coup. Coverage of Sunday’s historical elections hasn’t been much better.

Bolivia’s Movement to Socialism (MAS) party is celebrating what appears to be a crushing, landslide victory in Sunday’s elections. Although official vote counting is far from over, exit polls show an overwhelming triumph for the socialists, and a repudiation of the right-wing military government of Jeanine Añez, who has ruled since the coup last November. At the same time, the corporate press appears less than pleased about the return to democracy for the Andean country.

In order to win outright in the first round, the top candidate needs at least 40 percent of the popular vote and a lead of 10 points over their nearest rival, and multiple polls have indicated that the MAS ticket of Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca has won more than 50 percent, and have achieved a lead of over 20 points on their nearest challenger, Carlos Mesa (president between 2003 and 2005) — quite a feat in a five-way election. The MAS is also expected to have won a large majority in the senate.


Añez, who came to power in a coup overthrowing President Evo Morales last November, and whose government has constantly postponed the election throughout the year, knew the game was up and lauded the MAS on their remarkable achievement. “We do not yet have an official count, but from the data we have, Mr. Arce and Mr. Choquehuanca have won the election. I congratulate the winners and ask them to govern with Bolivia and democracy in mind,” she wrote. Añez decided to drop out of the election herself last month in an attempt to boost Mesa’s chances of stopping Arce. However, today Mesa accepted defeat as well. “The result is overwhelming and clear. The difference is wide,” he lamented.

Media disappointment at return of democracy

Across the spectrum, corporate media endorsed the events of November, refusing to label them a coup. The New York Times editorial board claimed that the “increasingly autocratic” tyrant Morales had actually “resigned,” after “protests” over a “highly fishy vote.” The Washington Post did the same. “There can be little doubt who was responsible for the chaos: newly resigned president Evo Morales,” their editorial board wrote, as they expressed their relief that Bolivia was finally in the hands of “more responsible leaders” like Añez, (who, at the time, was giving security forces orders to shoot her opponents in the streets). Despite this, The Wall Street Journal’s board decided the events of November constituted “a democratic outbreak in Bolivia.”

Today, therefore, the corporate press is in a very tough spot, as they have to explain to their readers why the Bolivian people have just handed an overwhelming, landslide victory to a party they have been presenting as an authoritarian dictatorship who were overthrown by popular protests last year.

media bias Bolivia
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board decided the events of November constituted “a democratic outbreak in Bolivia.”
A number of outlets solved this by simply fastidiously avoiding reporting on the events of November or using the word “coup” to describe them. NPR’s Philip Reeves, for example, claimed Morales “resigned” amid an annulled election after “allegations of fraud,” leading to an “interim government” (Añez’s own public relations-minded phrase for her administration). The word “coup” only appears in the mouth of Morales, someone whose credibility the outlet has spent months undermining. Other organizations like Deutsche Welt and Bloomberg failed to use the word at all in their reporting.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, referenced the coup, but did not use the word, instead describing it as when “police and military leaders suggested he [Morales] leave.” It takes great linguistic skill to refrain from using by far the most appropriate word to describe events in Bolivia for what they are: a coup. Indeed, the linguistic gymnastics necessary to avoid using the word would be genuinely impressive were not an exercise in deceit and manufacturing consent for regime change.

CNN at least included the phrase “claims of a coup,” but presents it beside apparently equally justified “allegations of fraud among contested national elections.” But these two things are nothing like the same. One is a statement of fact while another is a debunked, discredited talking point used to overthrow a legitimate government.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s article on the election had an entire section called “why is the country so divided” which did not mention the massacres, the firesale of the country’s economy, the repression of media or activists, the persecution of the MAS or the U.S. role in overthrowing the elected government. Instead, it presented Morales himself as the prime agent of polarization, a common tactic among media discussing enemy states.

The New York Times also published a long, in-depth article on the election, yet it appeared that the only MAS “supporters” it was willing to quote were ones who constantly badmouthed Morales, the article also suggesting that MAS’ figures might be inflated, despite the fact they have now been accepted by Añez and Mesa as essentially accurate.

As such the corporate press refused to cover the incredible story of nationwide nonviolent resistance to authoritarian rule, forcing a government into accepting its own defeat, reminiscent of Gandhi’s campaign against the British in India.


A year of political turbulence
Last October, Morales won an unprecedented and not uncontentious fourth term. Yet the U.S.-backed opposition refused to accept the results, claiming that they had been rigged. The Organization of American States immediately backed them up, producing a flawed report on election meddling, something that was almost immediately disproven. Nevertheless, the right-wing mobilized and began a widespread campaign of terror, targeting, attacking, and kidnapping MAS politicians. On November 10, police and military commanders joined the coup, demanding Morales resign or else they would take matters into their own hands. Morales decided to flee to Mexico but made clear he was only leaving to prevent a bloodbath.

The military picked Añez, a little known senator from a party who gained only four percent of the public vote, to become president. She immediately granted security forces total pre-immunity for all crimes committed during the “re-establishment of order.” Her new interior minister, Arturo Murillo, oversaw the creation of masked, black-clad paramilitary units specifically aimed at political subversives, foreigners, and human rights groups. Journalists were attacked and, in one case, beaten to death, while foreign and alternative media were shut down completely. Murillo promised to “hunt down” his opponents like dogs. Morales himself was charged with crimes against humanity and faces spending the rest of his life in prison if he returns to his home country. Other MAS leaders on yesterday’s ballot also face long prison terms on dubious charges.


Añez pushed through the privatization of natural resources and state-owned businesses while in office, accepting loans from predatory organizations like the International Monetary Fund. She also reorientated her country’s foreign policy away from an independent path towards one completely in line with U.S. foreign policy aims, pulling out of multiple regional alliances and entering new ones. Under Morales, for example, Bolivia had declared Israel a ‘terrorist state.” Yet less than a month after the coup, Añez and Murillo were inviting IDF troops to the country to train their police forces in dealing with “leftist terrorism.”

The government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has also taken on a decidedly right-wing tone. Cuts to health provisions and the expulsion of hundreds of Cuban doctors (whom the government labeled as “terrorists”) caused the public health system to crash just before the pandemic became worldwide news. As a result, Bolivia has the third-highest COVID-19 death per capita rate in the world, comfortably surpassing the United States in severity. Añez herself contracted the virus in July.

Añez used the intensity of the pandemic as justification to continually suspend the elections she claimed she would hold, calling herself merely an “interim president.” Yet many inside the country felt the coronavirus was being used as an excuse to keep herself in power indefinitely. Throughout the year, Bolivia was engulfed in near continual protests, shutting the country down. As a result, the summer was marked by the rise of the virus and by a weeks-long peaceful general strike calling for elections. Fearing a potential revolution, Añez conceded and agreed to hold them in October.

After months of organized popular struggle in the face of a coup government that had been massacring them, Sunday’s result has been widely interpreted as a repudiation of the coup and a vote for socialism. MintPress’ Ollie Vargas, who has never made a secret of his political persuasions, said in the wake of the results:

“On a personal level, I can’t believe this is finally happening, but it’s what we’ve always known. Despite the massacres, despite the persecution, despite U.S. intervention, the MAS is back and even more powerful. They can’t put a lid on the majority of the people.”

Morales celebrated the ascension of his former minister of finance to Bolivia’s top job. “We’ve received our democracy” he declared. “Sisters and brothers: the will of the people has been imposed. There has been a resounding victory for the MAS. Our political movement will have a majority in both houses. We have returned millions, now we are going to restore dignity and freedom to the people,” he added on Twitter.

Arce himself was in an equally joyous mood, telling Vargas last night that, “It seems that a great part of the Bolivian people have recovered their soul.” “I think the Bolivian people want to retake the path we were on,” he added. MAS supporters took to the streets to celebrate their victory, made all the more unlikely given the repression they have been subject to under Añez’s military regime.

Fears of violence and vote rigging against the MAS were rife, especially as the government had blocked foreign election observers from overseeing events, threatening to jail them. On Saturday, Argentinian congressman Federico Fagioli, an official observer representing his government, was arrested by police at El Alto airport. Video of the incident shows Fagioli shouting “I am being kidnapped” as multiple officers pick him up and forcefully carry him away.

What’s Next?

If Añez’s government does indeed step down, it will represent only the second time in Latin American history that a U.S.-backed coup against a progressive administration has been overturned. However, in Venezuela in 2002, the countercoup took less than 48 hours. In Bolivia, people have organized for nearly a year to achieve the same ends, giving the government far more time to embed and establish itself. The Bolivian people have a long history of organized struggle bringing down governments. In the early 2000s, nationwide protests against gas and water privatizations rocked the country, toppling unrepresentative regimes (including that of Mesa’s in 2005), setting the stage for Morales to become the most influential figure in Bolivian politics of the last 15 years.

The first indigenous president in the majority indigenous country’s history, Morales ran on the idea of 21st-century socialism, using his country’s considerable mineral wealth to fund social programs that cut poverty by half and extreme poverty by three-quarters, halving unemployment and increasing the country’s GDP by 50 percent. Yet his nationalization program and his outspoken criticism of capitalism and American imperialism on the world stage made him a prime target for regime change in Washington, who strongly supported the events of November, immediately recognizing and supporting Añez’s legitimacy.

Despite the fact that the MAS’ electoral victory looks certain, it is far from clear what sort of resistance they will face from other sources of power. “The next few days will be key for consolidating democracy in Bolivia. The MAS will need to embrace the patriotic elements within the police and military, to ensure the U.S./Murillo don’t launch a second coup against the majority of Bolivians,” Vargas warned. And how will the MAS deal with the coup plotters themselves, clearly guilty of serious human rights abuses. Are they really in any position to exert authority over the situation?


Of late, wherever there are governments critical of U.S. power (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, etc.) they are met with crushing sanctions in an attempt to destroy their ability to oppose Washington. Bolivia under Morales had already been labeled by some in the U.S. as a “narco-dictatorship.” If Arce does indeed come to rule his country, will he receive the Nicolas Maduro treatment?

For MAS supporters, however, those are questions for a different day. Today, they are celebrating a stunning and historic victory cheered by progressives the world over but angering Washington and corporate journalists in equal measure.



Featured image: Former Bolivian President Evo Morales attends a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after general elections in his home country, Oct. 19. 2020. Marcos Brindicci | AP

(MInt Press News)

https://orinocotribune.com/media-respon ... n-bolivia/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 28, 2020 11:34 am

Newsweek's claims of Chinese political interference are fabricated
Hannan Hussain

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Screenshot of the alleged article on Newsweek.

Editor's note: Hannan Hussain is a foreign affairs commentator and author. He is a Fulbright recipient at the University of Maryland (U.S.) and a former assistant researcher at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

On October 26, Newsweek released its four-month investigation into China's alleged "campaign of influence and interference" within the United States. The report claims to have identified 600 government-aligned groups that are used to manipulate U.S. public opinion, conduct economic espionage, and steer election developments to Beijing's apparent advantage.

"The Communist Party of China (CPC) and other government-linked entities have been working, through multiple channels in the U.S. at the federal, state and local level, to foster conditions and connections that will further Beijing's political and economic interests and ambitions," alleges the report. The blatant attacks, devoid of both fact and consistency, are nothing but an attempt to veer away from the fundamental truth that the threat to U.S. democracy is inherently internal.

The report erroneously suggests that 600 identified groups in the U.S. are all in "regular touch with and guided by CPC," offering hypothetical examples of international espionage as its concrete evidence. To further expose this discord, the report taps individually conducted interviews with U.S. government officials and controversial analysts, some of which are linked to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (APSI), a think-tank with a demonstrated anti-China bend.

"The political goal of the China is to denigrate the standing of the U.S.," states a quoted analysis in the report. But the basis for Beijing's alleged "cross-platform inauthentic activity," and the wild speculation about China's penetration into American universities, think-tanks, and cultural groups, is comprehensively unsubstantiated in the politically motivated observations.

As early as August, American intelligence and law enforcement agencies cast a skeptical glance on foreign state interference in the U.S. elections. Reuters reported that one U.S. federal security official had clarified that U.S. agencies "have not seen to date any coordinated voter-fraud effort" by a foreign power or anyone else ahead of the election.

This debunks Newsweek's accusation that China's so-called election interference efforts have capitalized on middle ground between institutional processes and voter outcomes. In fact, the report points to the same intelligence community to push a contrarian spin on Beijing.

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U.S. President Donald Trump (L) speaks on a conference call during a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 23, 2020. /Getty Images

In a more bizarre instance, an anonymous U.S. "official" is quoted by the paper to sell the claim that a U.S. governor – with investments in China – could end up influencing policy in Washington on behalf of Beijing. This fictitious claim marks a comical divergence from the report's earlier narrative, which suggested that U.S. governors and lawmakers are resistant to such influence.

A broad range of contradictions also surround Beijing's alleged influence-building campaigns for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The report claims that Chinese leaders "have a favorite in the race," pointing to anonymous members within Biden's ranks that appear potentially less willing to "challenge China quite as deeply as President Trump, if they win."

As evident from both lines of argument, the investigation simply invents Beijing's complicity by pitting party differences in the U.S. against each other, hoping that the underlying conjecture passes as proof.

More importantly, the report establishes a very strong case for its own partisan appeal to Trump's election prospects, arguing that Beijing's "negative rhetoric about the Trump administration" – legitimate sovereign positions on Hong Kong, TikTok and COVID-19 conspiracies – is an implicit indication of its interference intent.

By that logic, China – and other sovereign powers – should immediately relinquish their legitimate opposition to the Trump administration's accusation-heavy rhetoric, and divorce their worldview from factual inquiry. Also, the Newsweek investigation's implicit defense of the Trump presidency turns concrete when it proudly endorses U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as one of the "thorns in the CPC's side" for making U.S. foreign policy advantageous through a "broad pushback against China."

Having manipulated the context of a Global Times story on the U.S. elections and blasting China's United Front as a coercive framework for influence and interference, the investigation also claims to unearth over six dozen United Front-affiliated entities in the States. According to the report, the operations of these groups border on "outright espionage."

It counts Chinese hometown associations for immigrants, several aid centers, Chinese-language media brands, cross-Strait peace initiatives, and hundreds of Chinese Student and Scholar Associations as part of its imaginary state-backed interference network.

In a sign of shifting goalposts, the report also insists on a credible methodology for identifying the alleged influence-building entities. It mentions crossover membership, and the crosschecking of "names, positions and cooperative events described in hundreds of Chinese-language government and party documents."

Testifying to the blatant inaccuracies of the misleading investigation is that very last bit. For an investigation that spends its crux accusing the CPC of trying to subvert the U.S. "from within," it is compromising to see the same report endorse party outputs to legitimize its fabricated assessments.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-10-28/N ... index.html

Is 'The Bell' included in this infamous 600? If not I want to know why not. It would be nice to get a little recognition for a change...
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:41 pm

Freedom Rider: Censorship in the Biden Era
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist 25 Nov 2020

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Freedom Rider: Censorship in the Biden Era
The corporate media have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear.

“The danger of fascism won’t leave Washington with Donald Trump.”

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 the country has been warned about the dangers of fascism. It isn’t difficult to see why that is the case, as he banned people from mostly Muslim nations from entering the country, separated families seeking asylum, weakened an already frayed safety net, and undid the protections provided by a variety of government regulations.

The racist right wing was certainly ascendant during his administration, but the danger of fascism won’t leave Washington with Donald Trump. The obnoxious racist may be the public face of tyranny, but there is another danger coming from sectors of the Democratic Party. Their goal is to censor any points of view that undermine their neoliberal and imperialist narratives.

Bill Russo , deputy communications director for the Joe Biden campaign, publicly demanded that Facebook censor more often than it already does. He and others do so under the guise of preventing Trump from spreading misinformation, using the likes of Steve Bannon as a cover for something more sinister. They may accuse Facebook of “shredding the fabric of democracy,” but they are more interested in making sure that the small group of people who are actually leftists will have no platform with which to oppose Biden policies.

“There is another danger coming from sectors of the Democratic Party.”

The corporate media have already made themselves clear by censoring the president himself. On November 5, 2020 Trump claimed to be a victim of election fraud at a White House news conference. Instead of allowing him to make his statement and then analyzing what he said, the television networks pronounced him a liar and cut away from his remarks.

Trump’s charges are unfounded, but the public should have heard him for themselves and made their own determination about the veracity of his words. But the corporate media are done with him and have joined the incoming administration in deciding what we can and cannot see and hear. They are declaring themselves the arbiters of what information should be made accessible to the rest of the world.

These open attacks against Facebook do require the left to be discerning. Big technology social media platforms are certainly not our friends. They readily silence individuals and pages that question the establishment narrative. Black people risk being kicked off entirely if they utter any words white people may find offensive. But Facebook already buckled under Democratic Party pressure that was ginned up during the Russiagate hoax. They even accepted blame for a non-existent offense. The tale of Russian government memes throwing the election to Trump was false and a useful way to silence dissent and attack another country all at once. It isn’t hard to believe that they will again bend to an establishment that is now back in power.

“Black people risk being kicked off entirely if they utter any words white people may find offensive.”

While keeping Facebook’s history in mind, we must also see through the machinations of a new group of thought police who have made clear that they expect social media to bow to their dictates. That is exactly what Twitter did in censoring a recent news story that was unflattering to Hunter Biden. After protecting the Democratic candidate’s son, Twitter’s CEO showed contrition after the fact and claimed the decision was a mistake.

It isn’t just corporate media who are a danger here. There are individuals on the Biden transition team who have publicly stated their support for official propaganda. Richard Stengel is the team leader for the United States Global Agency, which includes Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks. In 2018 Stengel had this to say about official propaganda, “My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.” It should be noted that Stengel worked for the State Department during the Barack Obama administration and not that of fascist Trump.

It is clear that Biden will be the more effective evil in this regard. There will be no buffoons like Trump or Bannon spewing obvious hatred and nonsense who can be easily dismissed. Instead we will have well spoken operatives like Stengel, who think that propaganda isn’t so bad.

The people need their own platforms, like Black Agenda Report, that will dissect the lies and obfuscations of an administration greeted with a sigh of relief by millions of people weary of Trump and his policies. Already fossil fuel companies and Congress members who benefit from their largesse are on the transition team as are chemical industry representatives slated to go to the EPA. All will end up in the White House along with self-confessed propagandists. We must be ready to engage them all.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/freed ... -biden-era

All true enough, but the misuse of 'fascism' not only sticks in my craw but could serve to obscure the rise of genuine fascism which will surely occur when the working class begins to find it's footing.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 28, 2020 12:49 pm

Bullshitting Russia A new government media report says half of Western reporting about Russia is ‘negative.’ It turns out that a single tabloid journalist writes a lot of it.
1:48 am, October 23, 2019Source: Meduza

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According to a report by the news agency Rossiya Segodnya (“Russia Today,” not to be confused with the network RT), almost half of the articles in the foreign press about Russia are “negative.” This new study leans heavily on the British media (which makes up more than a third of the entire sample), where nearly 40 percent of the selected coverage is “negative.” Meduza has learned that most of the articles Rossiya Segodnya examined in the British press share the same author: a man who’s worked in Russia since 1992 and simply rewrites blurbs he finds in Russian tabloids, selected for him by Russian staff working at his news agency.

Solid negativity
On October 14, 2019, the international news agency Rossiya Segodnya released a study, titled “Octopus-1,” devoted to how the foreign press covers Russia. According to the authors, the research project's name reflects how the country is depicted abroad. “And nothing has changed in 150 years,” they argue. The report was unveiled by communications director Pyotr Lidov (who came to Rossiya Segodnya from the telecommunications company Megafon, which he left amid a scandal after tweeting about “juvenile degenerates” at Moscow’s opposition protests).

Together with Alexey Dubossarsky (the editor-in-chief of Inosmi.ru, which translates foreign-language news stories), Lidov told an audience of journalists how a team of Rossiya Segodnya experts analyzed roughly 80,000 articles published in the first half of 2019 by outlets in G7 countries and coded them as either negative, neutral, or positive. Negative content, Lidov explained, is coverage where “the role, actions, policies, or something else related to the article and to Russia is absolutely and unambiguously assessed negatively.”

Among all the content studied by Rossiya Segodnya, the British press got far and away the most scrutiny. The news agency looked at more than 25,000 articles from the UK — more than a third of the total content analyzed in the report. Lidov attributed this imbalance to the relatively large number of media outlets in Britain, which is home to many tabloids. (Tabloids, and not just the British variety, play an important role in this story — but more on that later.) Almost 40 percent of this British content, according to Lidov’s study, was “negative.”

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“Rossiya Segodnya” presents the findings of its “Octopus-1” research project

RIA Novosti
Rossiya Segodnya says the three worst offenders in the UK include the competing tabloids The Daily Mail and The Daily Express — two outlets that are both among the country’s top-10 most circulated papers (the former is in third place with 1.3 million copies sold a day, and the latter is in ninth place with about 300,000 copies sold every day). These publications and other tabloids like The Daily Mirror and The Sun (which Rossiya Segodnya also codes in the top-10 of its study on “negative” Russia reporting) publish articles on a daily basis that cast Russia in either a “negative” or at best “exotic” light. Here are a few choice examples from just the past few months:

'Jealous' woman 'killed her younger model sister, 17, gouged out her eyes, hacked off her ears and stabbed her 189 times in frenzied attack in Russia' (The Daily Mail, September 25)
UFO alert as Putin drafts in army after Siberian mountain 'collapses' (The Daily Express, January 25)
Mother, 29, stabs her two-year-old son to death after he pleaded with her to stop partying as she boozed with group of men in Moscow (The Daily Mail, August 20)
Blonde bombshell who is top Vladimir Putin guard wins Russian army beauty contest (The Daily Mirror, April 27)
No clue: Bungling dentist screamed at nurse to ‘Google it’ as teen patient lay dying ‘after being given the wrong injection’ (The Sun, October 10)
Citing this report, members of Russia’s Civic Chamber have advocated “a broad public discussion about the rights of foreign news outlets and foreign journalists working [in Russia],” and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also quoted Rossiya Segodnya's research in a daily briefing with reporters, singling out Britain's supposed leaders in “negative” reporting about Russia: The Times and The Daily Express.

Who are you, Mr. Stewart?
These articles and hundreds more like them share a few common features: they’re all retellings of reports from the Russian news media (for example, the piece about the “bungling dentist” who killed her patient first aired on the television network NTV), and they were all written by the same person: William (or Will) Stewart. Who is this man? He’s the absolute record holder for articles written by a foreign correspondent about Russia. On The Daily Mail’s website alone, his byline appears on roughly 220 texts in just the first six months of 2019. In other words, for this single publication, Will Stewart averaged two articles every weekday.

In fact, he writes for dozens of media outlets. According to Stewart's verified profile at MuckRack.com (a networking website for journalists), his byline appears at at least 43 different publications, from Britain to the U.S. and Australia. In the first half of this year, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, and The Daily Express released at least 600 stories from Russia written by Stewart — and this was just in their flagship publications. (The articles were often reprinted in regional editions in Scotland and Ireland, for example.)

These 600 stories comprise more than 10 percent of all the “significant publications about Russia” in the British media that Rossiya Segodnya analyzed in its study. Stewart's productivity also dwarfs the output of the average foreign reporter. For example, Alec Luhn, who's registered with Russia's Foreign Ministry as The Telegraph's chief correspondent in Moscow, authored just 76 articles in the same time period.

According to estimates by Meduza’s sources in the British media, Stewart’s income should amount to tens of thousands of pounds sterling a month, based on the assumption that reporters earn several thousand for front-page material in national newspapers. Stewart’s byline regularly graces page one, and every year he authors hundreds of less prominent news briefs. His reporting is so often and so shocking, even by the standards of British tabloids, that he captivates readers.

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At the same time, the real Will Stewart remains a mystery even among veterans of Moscow’s foreign media bureaus. Not one of the foreign correspondents contacted by Meduza — even journalists who have worked in Russia for decades — say they’ve ever met him or have any idea who he really is. Several sources told Meduza that the name might be a collective pseudonym, or perhaps he's a registered correspondent from a respected publication using an alias to earn money on the side by selling “hellish news from Russia” to tabloids that don’t care about quality reporting.

“I've worked in Russia since 1993, and in all that time I've never met him,” says Ben Aris, the former Moscow bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph who now runs bne IntelliNews. “And in the old days, the Moscow press corps was very small and very close. We used to do stories together all the time: Dubrovka, Chechen Wars, Yastrzhembsky pressers, Putin pressers (which used to be open). If you were covering Russia in those days, it was almost impossible not to meet your colleagues. [...] For a long time, I didn't think he existed. I thought it was some Russian speaker in London who was just translating the yellow press, as it was clear that all his stories were coming from the local press.”

Even Meduza's sources in Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry say they aren't sure who William Stewart is, despite the fact that he’s officially accredited to work in Russia and is listed on the ministry’s website as the Moscow bureau chief for The Daily Express. The ministry's official spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told Meduza that she hasn't communicated with Stewart personally, “but he's known in the Foreign Ministry's press center by the staff who draw up foreign correspondents' entry and work documents. He's accredited to attend briefings. [The ministry's Information and Press Department] has also responded to his inquiries.”

Unlike every other accredited foreign journalist in Russia, Stewart is listed by the Foreign Ministry without a contact telephone number. The only personal information is an apartment address at Korolev Prospekt, where he’s also registered The Daily Express’s Moscow bureau since at least 2004, and an unnamed email address at e2wnews@gmail.com.

Competition for the bullshit crown
Will Stewart is in fact a thoroughly real albeit deeply private person. He’s totally absent from social media, and not a single outlet that publishes his work has his photograph. Nevertheless, the “Companies House” UK corporate registry lists him as the director of a company called “East2West Limited,” registered in January 1996, which corresponds to when Stewart first appeared in the Russian Foreign Ministry's records as a foreign correspondent. (After repeated attempts to contact him, Stewart told Meduza that he's actually worked in Moscow since 1992.)

East2West Limited is listed as the owner of nearly all the illustrations included in Stewart’s articles, though most of these images aren’t original work but screen captures from reports aired on Russian television or photos available publicly on social media from the individuals who feature in the news stories. For example, in Stewart's article for The Sun about a police officer from Mytishchi named Dmitry Prischenko who kidnapped a wealthy businesswoman, several photographs attributed to East2West clearly bear the logo of the Russian Telegram channel Mash.

Image
East2West's file in the “Companies House” UK corporate registry.

East2West Limited is listed as the source for many of Stewart’s articles, which are then reprinted in newspapers around the world. In early 2019, a Reddit thread appeared with the question: “Does anyone know of this Russian news agency, East2west? If so, how reliable are they? [...] All I managed to piece together is that it is supposedly run by a Will Stewart whose mobile phone number is listed as Moscow based; the vast majority of news pieces that I found who sourced East2west were on the gruesome, macabre or bizarre side. [...] It seems very odd to me, as an outsider in this field, that so many media outlets would use the reporting of a news agency that looks like an online ghost.”

In the thread, another Reddit user responded: “[...] I was very disappointed with the number of supposedly serious news sites here in Brazil (where I live) and in the rest of the world — especially in Great Britain — that quoted one or another Russian vehicle followed by such ghost agency. It's really worrying. But, if you allow me, in these times of today, in which there is haste and despair to post a news before the competing sites, the professional [journalist] is under such intense stress that he prefers to believe in citations without checking them.”

East2West Limited’s work model resembles another news agency described by BuzzFeed in 2015 as “the king of bullshit news.” In 1997, a British journalist named Michael Leidig registered an agency called “Central European News” (CEN) and a sister outfit called “EuroPics,” hiring a network of stringers who search local news outlets in various countries, including China and Russia, for strange, tragic, or simply wild stories like the kind that Will Stewart writes, and then translates and resells the content to other outlets, in roughly the same way as Stewart.

For example, in 2014, The Daily Mail published an article titled “Finally, proof that Justin Bieber IS unbearable: Russian fisherman saved from bear attack when ringtone featuring one of the pop brat's songs scares it away.” With multiple texts that CEN sold to competing news outlets, BuzzFeed showed that the agency changed the original stories through “exaggeration, embellishment, and outright fabrication.” For example, the news about the averted bear attack was first reported by Komsomolskaya Pravda, which mentioned nothing about Justin Bieber. (The fisherman in question was saved when his phone randomly scared off the bear by speaking the time aloud in a computerized voice.) Leidig tried to sue BuzzFeed for libel, but lost.

The Kremlin's killer mice
Will Stewart owes his phenomenal productivity to the fact that articles featuring his byline are actually written by a whole team of Russian journalists employed at his agency, East2West Limited, where Meduza tracked down former staff who have actually met him in person. Stewart didn't respond to Meduza's questions about how many Russian staff his news agency employs, but he said he works with “superb freelance journalists in Russia and other ex-Soviet and eastern European countries,” adding that “a number have gone on to great jobs in the Russian media and I am proud of this, as I am that three became Chevening Scholars in the UK studying journalism before furthering their careers.”

One former employee who worked for Stewart until 2011 described the following workflow at the agency: “We had several stringers working for us who started monitoring the news every morning. The focus was on politics, any amusing stories, and key figures of interest to the UK: [soccer player Andrey] Arshavin, [billionaire Roman] Abramovich, then [Prime Minister] Tony Blair, [Kazakh leader Nursultan] Nazarbayev. Well, and trashy headlines like ‘Killer Mice in the Kremlin Towers.’ And Will would go through this and pick the most interesting topics and just dig some more. He puts a lot of thought into the work, and he shows great attention to detail. He’ll spend several days and sometimes several weeks, until the story’s facts line up.”

Former staff at East2West Limited who spoke to Meduza were effusive in their praise of Will Stewart, describing his professionalism, journalistic meticulousness, and deep knowledge of Russia. His first reports from Moscow in the 1990s bear no resemblance to the content he publishes today. For example, in October 1992, he wrote a serious analytical text about President Yeltsin's conflict with Ruslan Khasbulatov, and he wrote an in-depth profile of Alexander Lebed as Yeltsin's potential successor in 1996.

Other journalists familiar with Stewart’s reporting on Russia are more inclined to criticize his devotion to the facts. Oliver Carroll, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, recalls a story Stewart wrote for The Daily Mail on June 26, 2019, titled “‘It kept me to eat later’: Russian man 'looking like a mummy' is rescued after spending a MONTH inside a bear den after the predator broke his spine and saved him for a future meal.” In the text, citing the website EADaily, Stewart chronicles the suffering of a man from Tuva supposedly named Alexander who endures the nightmare described in the headline. Stewart punched up the original Russian tabloid story with some of his own shocking fabrications, like Alexander drinking his own urine to survive.

The article was a smash hit on social media (The Daily Mail’s website says it was shared 72,000 times), and it also gave the story a second life in Russia, where it was now recirculated as a “report by the foreign press.” After Carroll debunked the text in his own article for The Independent (the emaciated figure in video footage was actually a man in Kazakhstan who suffers from severe psoriasis), even The Daily Mail changed its headline for Stewart’s story to read: “Revealed: Doctor says Russian man 'in bear attack' was actually Kazakhstani suffering from severe psoriasis.” In the revised article, Stewart wrote that health officials in Tuva told journalists from EAST2WEST NEWS that they could not confirm that the Kazakh patient was ever treated in the region. (The Daily Mail does not reveal to readers that Stewart owns EAST2WEST NEWS.)

Financial Times Moscow correspondent Max Seddon remembers another bogus report by Will Stewart. In November 2014, when Seddon was in Europe with BuzzFeed, Stewart wrote an article for The Daily Mirror, citing an unsourced report by the news agency Regnum, where he claimed that a Russian sniper in Ukraine had killed a “British female terrorist nicknamed the ‘White Widow.’” The woman in question, Samantha Lewthwaite, was allegedly the former wife of a suicide bomber in the 2005 London attacks who joined the pro-Kyiv “Aidar” volunteer battalion as a sniper herself after entering Ukraine from Somalia.

Doubting the story, Seddon sought verification from Alexey Toporov, who authored the original Regnum report. As proof, Toporov showed him a photograph of a fake South African passport allegedly recovered from Lewthwaite’s corpse by the Russian sniper who supposedly shot her. The image “exactly matches a file photo of the fake South African passport that authorities in Nairobi say Lewthwaite used to enter Kenya in 2011,” explained Seddon, whose discovery didn’t stop Stewart from writing another article, this time for The Daily Express, with new details about “the death of Samantha Lewthwaite,” once again citing Toporov at Regnum. Stewart told Meduza that he “filed clear health warnings that the Regnum report ‘could not be verified,’ and that the claim over her passport was bogus.” He says the unverified report was published in the first place because “[Lewthwaite] was in 2014 of considerable interest in the UK.”

“As reported by the Western media”
Will Stewart’s articles often breathe new life into stories based on Russian sources, reinvigorating the reports with the authority attributed to “the Western media.” For example, Regnum (the same news agency mentioned above) published an article in August 2016 with the headline “Mirror: Putin Will Open Up Siberia With the Help of Airships,” citing a report titled “See the enormous £23million 'half plane, half airship' which Vladimir Putin plans to build to open up Siberia.” In what Rossiya Segodnya might have coded as a “positive” report, The Daily Mirror wrote that Vladimir Putin “has developed a futuristic plan [...] to open up Siberia to economic exploitation.” The story was featured front and center on the British outlet’s homepage.

Regnum’s report reads: “The Russian Security Council, chaired by Vladimir Putin, adopted a project to build a half-plane, half-airship that is supposed to be used in Siberia’s development. One of these futuristic zeppelins will cost £23 million [$29.5 million]. The airship (working name East2West) is capable of replacing five Mi8 helicopters. These aircraft will connect various points of the Far North with the high-speed railways of the Trans-Siberian network and the Northern Sea Route. The airship should be constructed by 2018.”

If you’ve read this far, you likely won’t be shocked to learn that Russia’s “Siberian zeppelins” do not exist, and Regnum clearly misunderstood the credits published below the illustrations in Stewart’s story that read “Image: East2west.” A reverse search on Google reveals that these images were also published by The Siberian Times that same day in a nearly identical article about plans by the Russian Security Council and the Academy of Sciences to develop remote regions of the country using next-generation airships built by “Augur-RosAeroSystems Holding.” (The Siberian Times credits “RosAeroSystems,” not East2West, with the images.)

Siberian times
Based in Novosibirsk, The Siberian Times publishes articles in English, which Will Stewart frequently cites in his reports. Though the website has no masthead, its known editor-in-chief is a woman named Svetlana Skarbo, who graduated from London’s City University and previously worked at The Daily Express. (According to her biography included in an announcement for a lecture series hosted by the Novosibirsk State University's Journalism Department, Skarbo worked as a Moscow correspondent for The Daily Express from 2001 to 2005.)


In 2015, at a recorded event hosted at a bar in Novosibirsk, Skarbo described what it was like working at an English tabloid: “Imagine that you’re 21, you’re sitting there in Moscow, in the office of the still decent newspaper The Daily Express, and your job is writing press reviews, meaning you’re supposed to sort through all the newspapers published that morning, and summarize the most interesting stories. You’ve got to work with all kinds of sources, from Kommersant to what is today called LifeNews.” Speaking to the crowd, Skarbo recalled how fact-checking a strange story about a pregnant boy from Kazakhstan became an investigation into a real medical bombshell — a rare case of “fetus in fetu” (a developmental abnormality where a mass of tissue resembling a fetus forms inside the body). Her work led to a story that was eventually published by The Daily Express.

Svetlana Skarbo, incidentally, is also listed in the “Companies House” UK corporate registry as East2West Limited’s former director (having officially handed over her responsibility to Stewart in June 2018). Skarbo did not respond to Meduza’s inquiries, but former staff at East2West Limited say The Siberian Times is actually Stewart’s brainchild, and he apparently funds the website using earnings from his bylines in major British newspapers (where his articles often cite The Siberian Times as a source). Stewart deflected questions about his potential links to both The Siberian Times and Svetlana Skarbo, who at the time of this writing has not responded to Meduza's messages.

A red-top humanitarian
British journalist and propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev is one of the few people who's met Will Stewart. In 2008, when Pomerantsev was also working in Moscow, Stewart helped a Channel 4 crew film a segment about “the fattest boy in the world”: Kabardino-Balkaria's Dzhambulat Khatokhov, who at age seven “weighed as much as a baby elephant.” Pomerantsev says Stewart's shift from serious socio-political issues to sensationalist stories dovetails with the newspaper's descent into tabloid journalism. “[Will Stewart] was nearly The Daily Express's political editor,” says Pomerantsev. “But back then The Daily Express itself was a pretty serious newspaper for the middle class, not associated with the ‘red tops’ like The Sun and The Daily Mirror.” In the end, however, The Daily Express not only adopted tabloid journalism, but quickly surpassed other outlets with its outlandish headlines.

Stewart told Meduza that he doesn't think Rossiya Segodnya's research relates to him personally. “I don’t feel I was center stage in this particular episode,” he said in an email, explaining that his articles named in the report were identified because of their “‘exotic’ headlines” (like this one), which he says were written by his editors. “Many foreign correspondents all over the world are easily accused of negativity or bias,” Stewart said. “Sometimes this happens, too, to Russian journalists working in the UK, as you know. It is likely to occur more in periods of tension, as we have sadly witnessed recently between Russia and Britain. Latvia-based Meduza is sometimes — doubtless unfairly — accused of negativity towards Russia, too.”

Asked why his reporting contains so many gory details and focuses so often on disfigured children, Stewart said he didn't understand the question, adding, “If it is about a girl born without half her face, I am pleased that I helped in a small way to raise money from readers towards her treatment in both Russia and recently the UK.”

Story by Alexey Kovalev

Translation by Kevin Rothrock

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/10/23 ... ing-russia
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 02, 2020 3:23 pm

CNN's 'Blame China' Document Leak Shows That China Did Nothing Wrong
The Trump administration has tried to blame China for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

U.S. agencies have invested some efforts to obtain documents from China that might provide proof for that.

At least some of those documents were now leaked to CNN which has published them as The Wuhan Files.

But the documents do not show any malfeasance from China's side. They do show a health system and bureaucracy under stress while they have trouble to get an outbreak of a previously unknown infectious disease under control.

This is the most incriminating issue CNN could find in the papers:

In a report marked "internal document, please keep confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases, breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was never fully revealed at that time, as China's accounting system seemed, in the tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the outbreak.
...
The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak. However, though the documents provide no evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was revealed to the public.
Further down in the piece it becomes clear that the differences in reporting case numbers and the 'numerous inconsistencies' were based on the use of multiple categories:

On February 10, when China reported 2,478 new confirmed cases nationwide, the documents show Hubei actually circulated a different total of 5,918 newly reported cases. The internal number is divided into subcategories, providing an insight into the full scope of Hubei's diagnosis methodology at the time.
"Confirmed cases" number 2,345, "clinically diagnosed cases" 1,772, and "suspected cases" 1,796.

So China's central health service reported 2,478 confirmed cases for all of China while Hubei province reported 2,345 confirmed cases. How is that supposed to be a significant difference?

In early February China still had problems to sufficiently test for Covid-19 infections. It took time to confirm new cases. The tests were also not yet reliable. The category 'clinical diagnosed cases' was for those who had tested negative with a still faulty test but showed signs of acute pneumonia - i.e. 'ground-glass opacity' on CT chest scans. After the testing problems were resolved the category was eliminated:

Chinese officials did soon improve the reporting system, placing the "clinically diagnosed" cases into the "confirmed" category by mid-February.
Further down the CNN writers admit that the documents they were given do not show that China did anything wrong:

However, Mertha, the JHU academic, said the mismatch between the higher internal and lower public figures on the February death toll "appeared to be a deception, for unsurprising reasons."
"China had an image to protect internationally, and lower-ranking officials had a clear incentive to under-report -- or to show their superiors that they were under-reporting -- to outside eyes," he said.

Conversely, however, the leaked documents also provide something of a defense of China's overall handling of the virus. The reports show that in the early stages of the pandemic, China faced the same problems of accounting, testing, and diagnosis that still haunt many Western democracies even now -- issues compounded by Hubei encountering an entirely new virus.

Similarly, no mention is made by officials of a so-called laboratory leak, or that the virus was man-made, as some critics, including top US officials, have claimed without evidence.
As the Department of Fear snarks:

U.S. Dept. of Fear @FearDept - 16:55 UTC · Dec 1, 2020
Documents leaked to CNN reveal that China took weeks to get its shit together and eradicate COVID from its soil.

(Nobody has bothered to leak our situation because it's perfectly clear the whole year has been a shit-show and the worst is yet to come.)
Indeed, China did so much 'wrong' that it no longer has a Covid-19 problem.

There is one interesting detail in the files the CNN was given that might become relevant during the ongoing search for the origin of the epidemic:

Tuesday, December 1, marks one year since the first known patient showed symptoms of the disease in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, according to a key study in the Lancet medical journal.
At the same time that the virus is believed to have first emerged, the documents show another health crisis was unfolding: Hubei was dealing with a significant influenza outbreak. It caused cases to rise to 20 times the level recorded the previous year, the documents show, placing enormous levels of additional stress on an already stretched health care system.

The influenza "epidemic," as officials noted in the document, was not only present in Wuhan in December, but was greatest in the neighboring cities of Yichang and Xianning. It remains unclear what impact or connection the influenza spike had on the Covid-19 outbreak.

There is no proof that the very first SARS-CoV-2 infection of a human being has actually taken place in China. SARS-CoV-2 infections have been retroactively found in France and Italy in blood samples that were taken in November 2019 or earlier. The influenza outbreak in Hubei province may have silently reinforced the spreading of SARS-CoV-2 in China. It could explain why Hubei was the first place where a Covid-19 outbreak was noticed while it was spreading silently elsewhere.

The 'blame China' game will continue independent of what the evidence says. But it is becoming harder and harder to argue that the mess most 'western' countries are in was caused by China when it is so obvious that it is caused by the behaviors of our own societies.

Posted by b on December 1, 2020 at 19:26 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/12/c ... .html#more
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 07, 2020 2:35 pm

"Uighurs forced to eat pork" - Horror Stories Told By Chinese Defector Seem To Evolve

Al Jazeerah, the propaganda outlet of Qatar, has published a remarkable anti-China propaganda piece which echos claims made by dubious CIA affiliated outlets:

Uighurs forced to eat pork as China expands Xinjiang pig farms
Former detainees claim that the forcible feeding of pork is most rampant in re-education camps and detention centres.

It has been more than two years since Sayragul Sautbay was released from a re-education camp in China’s westernmost region of Xinjiang. Yet the mother of two still suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from the “humiliation and violence” she endured while she was detained.
Sautbay, a medical doctor and educator who now lives in Sweden, recently published a book in which she detailed her ordeal, including witnessing beatings, alleged sexual abuse and forced sterilisation.

In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, she shed more light on other indignities to which the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were subjected, including the consumption of pork, a meat that is strictly prohibited in Islam.

“Every Friday, we were forced to eat pork meat,” Sautbay said. “They have intentionally chosen a day that is holy for the Muslims. And if you reject it, you would get a harsh punishment.”

When I read the above I remembered that I had previously read about Sayragul Sautbay (or Sauytbay). But the story back than had sounded much different. The woman had moved from China under disputed circumstances but had never been a detainee. She had illegally entered Kazakhstan where she was put in front of a court but only got a mild sentence. Sautbay was then granted asylum in Sweden from where she propagandizes for an CIA affiliated Uighur exile group.

Over the years Sautbay has given several interviews. The details of her story continued to change in anti-Chinese directions.

In early interviews Sautbay claimed to have been an instructor working in a re-education camp. In later interviews she claims to have been a detainee.
In more recent interviews she claims that she had seen torture and violence in the camps. In earlier interviews she had refuted such claims.
In one story she claims to have observed mass rape. In older interviews she insisted that she had observed no violence at all.
While she now claims that detainees in the camp were forced to eat pork she had earlier claimed that no meat was served in the camps.
In July 2018 the U.S. government outlet RFE/RL reported from Sautbay's trial in Kazakhstan:

The trial of an ethnic-Kazakh Chinese citizen accused of illegally entering Kazakhstan has taken on implications far beyond whether she will be reunited with her family near Almaty or deported back to China.
That's because 41-year-old Sayragul Sauytbay has testified about the existence of a network of "reeducation camps" in western China where she says thousands of ethnic Kazakhs are incarcerated for "political indoctrination."

Unlike others who've fled abroad, saying they'd been forced to endure dehumanizing indoctrination at such camps, Sauytbay was not a camp detainee. She was a camp employee.

Before crossing into Kazakhstan on April 5, Sauytbay had been the head administrator of a kindergarten -- a position that, together with her membership of the Communist Party, technically made her a Chinese state official.

She says Chinese authorities had forced her to train "political ideology" instructors for reeducation camps in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

So according to that report Al Jazeerah's 'former detainee' had actually claimed to have been an trainer for "political ideology" instructors for reeducation camps, not a trainer for the detainees.

That, she says, gave her access to secret documents about China's state program to "reeducate" Muslims from indigenous minority communities across western China -- mainly Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and Hui.
She says she also witnessed the inner workings of the program while employed at a camp for ethnic Kazakhs in the region's Mongol-Kuro District.

A few days after the RFE/RL story the Globe and Mail published an interview with Sayragul Sauytbay. While the basic story she tells is basically the same some significant details differ:

It was a place of silence, forced learning and fear. It was called a “transformation centre” hidden in the mountains of far western China, bereft of any obvious sign indicating its purpose. But it looked and felt like a jail.
For months, Sayragul Sauytbay worked inside, teaching Mandarin and propaganda to Muslim detainees swept up in a broad Chinese campaign to eradicate what Beijing calls extremism.

Then, facing internment herself, she fled to neighbouring Kazakhstan – where she was arrested after China sought her deportation. But her lawyers argued that she could face torture if returned, and on Wednesday, a Kazakh court declined to send her back, giving her a six-month suspended sentence.

Sautbay tells how she, a party member, was ordered to teach in a camp:

A primary school teacher who became a kindergarten administrator, Ms. Sauytbay was ordered last November to work in a new place. “They said I must go. I think if I refused them, I would have ended up being locked in that re-education centre as well,” she said.
She had been chosen to teach inside the internment camp​ because she could speak both Kazakh and fluent Mandarin. Often, she was driven to work at night, to a distant place in the mountains of Zhaosu County, on the far western border between China and Kazakhstan. The facility was surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. It looked “very, very scary. Just one glimpse would frighten you,” she said.

Her "access to secret documents" seems to have been more limited than claimed in the RFE/RL piece:

Inside were roughly 2,500 people, all of them Muslim, most of them ethnic Kazakhs. None were Han Chinese, the dominant group in China. “They were all ethnic minorities,” she said, ranging in age from their upper teens to their 70s.
She received no explanation for why they were there, nor the purpose of the instruction she was ordered to deliver.

“They told us nothing,” she said. “Even as a teacher, the knowledge we had about that place was very limited. They had many of their own highly confidential secrets.”

Work in the camp had no fixed schedule, each day a mix of teaching and “special tasks.” The latter might be training students to sing the Chinese national anthem, or Communist standbys such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.”

Mostly, though, she was told to teach Mandarin.

Back then her description of the conditions in the camp differs a lot from the "made to eat pork" claims in the recent Al Jazeerah piece:

She did not personally see violence, although she did see hunger. Detainees had only three kinds of food: rice soup, vegetable soup and nan bread. “There was no meat. There was never enough to eat. People were malnourished,” Ms. Sauytbay said.
Sautbay's husband version of the story, published in 2018 as part of a longer Washington Post piece, likewise makes no mention of violence or pork eating:

Sauytbay, who had a government job in education, had her passport seized by local officials, her husband [Uali Islam] said.
...
In 2016, officials asked for the passports of Sauytbay’s husband and children, and they decided it was time to leave for Kazakhstan. Sauytbay would follow.
“She said, ‘I’m a woman and member of the Communist Party — they won’t do anything to me. Maybe things will settle down and I can join you,’ ” Islam recalled.

In early 2017, she told him, she was informed that she was being transferred to what was described to her as an “education center.” That spring, she arrived to see that it was actually an internment camp housing thousands of Kazakhs.

Sauytbay told her husband the “education” was “all about the party.” Guards locked everyone in a room, blasted propaganda from speakers and made them sing Communist Party songs.

Eventually, Sauytbay fled to Kazakhstan. “She said,” he recalled, “ ‘I came here; I saw my children — now I can die.’ ”

After she had gained asylum in Sweden Sautbay joint up with a U.S. financed Uighur organization. Her story then changed dramatically. The party member and language teacher had became a detainee. There was suddenly extensive violence in the camp and people who earlier never got meat were suddenly made to eat pork. In 2019 she told such horror stories for a Haaretz feature:

Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.
Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.

So a year after explicitly claiming to have been an CCP teacher, not a detainee, Sautbay has now morphed in one. Where she earlier saw no violence she now reports of plenty.

The circumstances of the Haaretz interview make it obvious that she is shopped around as part of a propaganda campaign:

I met with Sauytbay three times, once in a meeting arranged by a Swedish Uyghur association and twice, after she agreed to tell her story to Haaretz, in personal interviews that took place in Stockholm and lasted several hours, all together. Sauytbay spoke only Kazakh, and so we communicated via a translator, but it was apparent that she spoke in a credible way.
The Swedish Uyghur association is part of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, a CIA affiliated organization that has in recent years gained prominence as part of the U.S. driven anti-China campaign.

That such an organization organized the interview and that a translator was minding the correctness of the story is enough to let one doubt the credibility of the tale. But then come details that are so far off from her previous claims that one is sure that these are all outright lies:

“In November 2017, I was ordered to report to an address in the city’s suburbs, to leave a message at a phone number I had been given and to wait for the police.” After Sauytbay arrived at the designated place and left the message, four armed men in uniform arrived, again covered her head and bundled her into a vehicle. After an hour’s journey, she arrived in an unfamiliar place that she soon learned was a “reeducation” camp, which would become her prison in the months that followed. She was told she had been brought there in order to teach Chinese and was immediately made to sign a document that set forth her duties and the camp’s rules.
In the earlier stories CCP member Sautbay was "often driven to work at night", not abducted and forced to stay in the camp for months.

Mindful of her new sponsors Sautbay then contradicts her "no meat" and "no violence" claims from the earlier Globe and Mail interview:

“There were three meals a day. All the meals included watery rice soup or vegetable soup and a small slice of Chinese bread. Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork.
...
The camp’s commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the “black room” because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly. “There were all kinds of tortures there. Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”
On wonders who wrote the script for this laughable "mass rape" scene for her:

Tears stream down Sauytbay’s face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp. “One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”
She was also pressed to offer bridges for sale ...

In March 2020 Secretary of State Mike Pompous and First Lady Melanie Trump 'honored' Sayragul Sautbay with the State Department's International Women of Courage (IWOC) Award:

Sauytbay become one of the first victims in the world to speak publicly about the CCP’s repressive campaign against Muslims, igniting a movement against these abuses. Her testimony was among the first evidence that reached the broader international community of the CCP’s repressive policy, including both the camps and the coercive methods used against Muslim minorities.
At the end of the propaganda onslaught the Haaretz piece closes with an official Chinese comment on Sautbay's stories:

Asked to respond to Sayragul Sauytbay’s description of her experience, the Chinese Embassy in Sweden wrote to Haaretz that her account is “total lies and malicious smear attacks against China.” Sauytbay, it claimed, “never worked in any vocational education and training center in Xinjiang, and has never been detained before leaving China” – which she did illegally, it added. Furthermore, “Sayragul Sauytbay is suspected of credit fraud in China with unpaid debts [of] about 400,000 RMB” (approximately $46,000).
In Xinjiang in recent years, wrote the embassy, “China has been under serious threats of ethnic separatism, religious extremism and violent terrorism. The vocational education and training centers have been established in accordance with the law to eradicate extremism, which is not ‘prison camp.’” As a result of the centers, according to the Chinese, “there has been no terrorist incident in Xinjiang for more than three years. The vocational education and training work in Xinjiang has won the support of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and positive comments from many countries across the world.”

Given the multitude of inconsistencies in Sautbay's ever changing stories and the obvious propaganda purpose they have I am inclined to believe the Chinese government's version.

Posted by b on December 5, 2020 at 17:13 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/12/u ... .html#more

A succinct comment:
It's the Solzhenitsyn story all over again.

Posted by: vk | Dec 5 2020 18:12 utc | 4
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 11, 2020 2:24 pm

NicaNotes: Progressive Media Promoted a False Story of ‘Conflict Beef’ From Nicaragua
December 10, 2020
By John Perry

(This article was published on Dec. 4, 2020, by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:

https://fair.org/home/progressive-media ... nicaragua/)



In reports by Reveal (10/21/20) and PBS NewsHour (10/20/21) there were calls for a boycott of “conflict beef” from Nicaragua. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal claims to be “fair and comprehensive” and PBS to be “trusted,” but their misleading and inaccurate reports could have drastic consequences for Nicaragua, at a time when the country is already struggling to deal with US sanctions, the pandemic and the aftermath of two damaging hurricanes. Their argument is that cattle farmers who produce the beef that is exported have in many cases illegally settled territory in the rainforest that belongs to Indigenous communities, and that the government does little to resolve the violent conflict that results.

There are some 40,000 Indigenous families in Nicaragua, and nearly a third of its territory is legally owned and administered by 300 Indigenous communities. Reveal and PBS focus on Bosawás, the largest tropical rainforest reserve in Central America, which has seven territories belonging to Mayangna and Miskitu Indigenous groups, whose land claims have been recognized by the government. (Since 2006, the governing party in Nicaragua has been the socialist Sandinista Front, a longstanding target of US hostility.)

For decades, non-Indigenous (or mestizo) settlers have entered these areas, some “buying” land from Indigenous communities, even though it cannot legally be sold, and others simply taking it. A history of legal, quasi-legal and illegal land occupation, along with intermixing of mestizo families with Indigenous people, have produced a multifaceted, volatile situation, which occasionally causes violent disputes. A local NGO, CEJUDHCAN, in February 2020 counted 40 deaths of Indigenous people over five years connected to land disputes, with further mestizo deaths uncounted.

The remoteness of the area provides ample scope for reports of violence to be distorted for political purposes. For example, in January, Reuters (1/30/20) reported an attack on the Mayangna community of Alal by 80 men, leading to six deaths, ten people being kidnapped and houses being destroyed. Along with local opposition media, the Guardian (1/30/20) and BBC (1/30/20) repeated the story, apparently based on just two phone calls from people claiming that “the state is doing nothing.” Yet police investigated quickly, finding 12 houses burned down and two people injured, but no one dead or disappeared. Mayangna leaders condemned the false reports. Two days later in Wakuruskasna, seven miles from Alal, police found and identified four murder victims. They described a criminal gang responsible for both incidents, capturing one alleged member.

Reveal News journalist Nate Halverson misrepresents a different incident. In February, a young girl bathing in a river in Santa Clara was reportedly hit by a bullet. Halverson repeats the uncorroborated claim that settlers were “sending a message” to the local Indigenous community: “Leave.” He dismisses the police’s conclusion that the injury was caused by another child shooting off a gun, a version corroborated by Lejan Mora, president of Santa Clara’s Indigenous government, who knows the family. Community leaders told FAIR that the family had been bribed to lie about the “attack.”

Halverson claims the homicide rate in the area “soared so high…that it would rank among the most dangerous places in the world.” Lottie Cunningham Wren, who runs CEJUDHCAN, tells Halverson that the 40+ deaths in five years amount to “ethnocide” in which the Indigenous people will “disappear”—an improbable outcome, given that there are 180,000 Miskitu and 30,000 Mayangna people.

To those unfamiliar with Nicaragua, news items about Indigenous groups conjure images of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Reveal/PBS calls the area “pristine jungle.” Yet these communities have good roads, access to schools, health posts, local municipal services, and government agricultural and technical support.

Romanticized views of forest dwellers create one level of oversimplification. Another, in a region deeply divided between supporters and opponents of Nicaragua’s government, is to report unquestioningly the views of one side, and to suggest ostensibly obvious solutions to land conflicts. Doing so overlooks many obstacles and incorrectly alleges government neglect, ignoring the many advances being made alongside the problems that remain.

All these faults are found in the research behind the Reveal/PBS stories, a report by the Oakland Institute, a California-based progressive think tank that compares the situation of Nicaraguan Indigenous communities with “the peoples and forests in the Brazilian Amazon.” Its author, Anuradha Mittal, has spoken to many Miskitu people aligned with an opposition party, Yatama, but evidently to few if any people from other communities—whether mestizos, Mayangna, Afro-descendants or the many Miskitu who support the government. Glossing over this political bias, she claims to speak for the Indigenous people’s “courageous struggle” against government indifference.

Mittal recognizes that Nicaragua’s widely applauded Law 445 established Indigenous land rights, but she argues that despite subsequent land titling, the government has failed Indigenous people by not taking “the final, crucial step of the land claims process” known as saneamiento—“sanitation”—which in her interpretation “requires clearing the Indigenous territories of non-Indigenous settlers.” But saneamiento is much more complex than this, as explained below. Nor does Mittal acknowledge the role of corrupt Yatama leaders who failed to advance saneamiento despite controlling the regional government for almost a decade until 2014, while themselves selling land illegally.

Geographer Nora Sylvander, who has studied the issue since 2012, argues that saneamiento could easily “create more problems than it solves,” and may “exacerbate the conflict and violence” rather than curb it. For example, what happens to long-established settlers who have “bought” their land: Do they get replacement land, and if so where? What happens if settlers resist removal with violence—would the government risk lives to carry it out? Guillermo Rodriguez of the Center for Justice and International Law, responding to the Oakland Institute report, said, “It’s a really complex situation. In some places, 90% of the current inhabitants are colonos [settlers].”

Many Indigenous leaders argue that saneamiento is actually working, but could do so more quickly with increased resources and closer political coordination by Indigenous territorial administrations with other levels of government. Both Rose Cunningham, mayor of Waspam, and Miskitu leader Mora described the process to us, in which longer-established settlers may be allowed to stay with community agreement while others, often newcomers, are expelled. In fact, Nicaragua is one of many Latin American countries struggling to develop a viable process of saneamiento, in a Caribbean region which is among the country’s poorest, and where the government assigns limited resources to providing better hospitals, schools and roads.

The crux of the Reveal/PBS pieces is to link the land conflicts in Bosawás, and the alleged failure of government to tackle them, with the production of meat for export. Reveal’s piece is headed “Conflict Beef,” and both it and PBS use pictures of US supermarket meat displays. Both quote Mittal as saying: “The supply chain of beef from Nicaragua is anything but clean.”

This is untrue. The government body responsible for the integrity of the supply chain is IPSA (the Spanish acronym for the Institute for Agricultural Protection and Health). On November 9, IPSA’s director explained to us that they believe their cattle registration and traceability system, approved by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, is as rigorous as any in Latin America. Through it, IPSA monitors the location and movement of all registered cattle – and only these cattle can enter the supply chain for the export market. Registration of farms and tagging of animals is done by authorized agents, not by producers, and cattle can only be moved, sold and slaughtered if they have the correct documentation. None of the 125,253 registered farms are in the strictly protected areas (“nuclei”) of national reserves. One of the largest exporting companies produced a promotional video in November to explain the safeguards it has in place.

All this is ignored by both Halverson and Mittal. The Oakland Institute report laments the “absence of a nationally coordinated traceability system for cattle,” while Halverson cites an unnamed US Department of Agriculture official saying “that there is no recognized system to trace beef within Nicaragua, meaning importers cannot ensure that their beef wasn’t raised on stolen Indigenous land.” Yet the USDA audits IPSA every two years, and only IPSA-registered cattle are accepted by the six processing plants certified as meeting USDA requirements. None of these are “near the borders of Indigenous lands,” as Halverson claims. He adds that the European Union doesn’t allow beef imports from Nicaragua, seemingly unaware that the EU already has a pilot project with IPSA to ensure the scheme meets its (higher) requirements.

Of the 705,320 cattle registered by IPSA since 2011, just 11% are in the North Atlantic Region, where the Bosawás reserve is located. The region has 13,348 registered farms, but none are in the reserve’s nucleus, and hardly any are in municipalities where land conflicts occur. Waspam, for example, has only 98, and none of them are in southern Tasba Raya, where violence flared in 2015.

Yet clearly there are cattle in the reserve. Although the Oakland Institute report fails to mention it, Miskitu people typically have small numbers of cattle. Many more may be introduced by settlers, either by agreement or illegally. However, while meat (and milk) from these cattle can be sold locally, there are multiple barriers to their entering the export market. In addition to the IPSA system, cattle trucks leaving the reserve have to comply with municipal administrative requirements, present documents at permanent army checkpoints and face random police checks.

A group of cattle farmers interviewed for this article in Siuna, the city closest to Bosawás, explained in detail how these measures prevent cattle kept in the reserve from entering the export market, adding that the army also removes illegal ranchers. Two leaders of the Mayangna nation interviewed for this article described how this is done in coordination with Indigenous forest wardens. While clearly such evictions are only partially effective, it is extremely difficult to see how the remaining ranchers could evade the army and police and breach the IPSA system to sell cattle for export. Local producers say this is impossible, and neither Mittal nor Halverson offer any evidence to the contrary.

The source of the Reveal/PBS material—the Oakland Institute—is openly hostile to the Nicaraguan government, a fact made obvious by the title of its report, Nicaragua’s Failed Revolution. As well as including a very biased account of the violence the country experienced in 2018, the report makes detailed accusations against Sandinista politicians Myrna Cunningham, Rose Cunningham and Carlos Alemán Cunningham, noting that they are from the same (Miskitu) family. It refers positively to the work of CEJUDHCAN without pointing out that its director, Lottie Cunningham Wren, now aligned with the US-supported opposition, is also part of the same family that the Oakland Institute report alleges is involved in corrupt land dealings.

Based on her work with Mittal, Cunningham Wren is also interviewed by Halverson for Reveal/PBS. The two senior Mayangna leaders we spoke to, Arisio Genaro Celso and Eloy Frank Gomez, regard her as simply looking for ways to attack the government while being out of touch with the Mayangna community’s needs. Likewise, Miskitu leader Mora accuses CEJUDHCAN and Cunningham Wren of blatantly lying about events in the region. Fresly Janes Zamora, Miskitu president of the Twi Yahbra territory, said she is benefiting from violence in the area and not seeking solutions. Another person interviewed by Halverson, Camilo de Castro Belli, is described as a journalist, but in fact is a fellow at the Aspen Institute, a neoliberal think tank, a committed supporter of Nicaragua’s opposition and the son of Gioconda Belli, a prominent opposition figure.

Before this piece was written, both Halverson and Mittal were asked for proof of the claimed link between conflicts in Bosawás and beef exports to the US. Although they replied, they offered no proof. A list of suggested corrections to the Reveal article, invited by its editor, was rejected, as was the offer of an article in response to Halverson’s.

Other media picked up the damaging Reveal/PBS piece: Environmental website One Green Planet (11/17/20) linked the story to the enormously different scale of deforestation taking place in the Amazon. KPFA radio in California devoted two episodes of the show A Rude Awakening (11/6/20, 11/13/20) to interviews with Mittal, in which she made generalized attacks on her critics and on the Ortega government, again without offering any proof of her claims. Neither responded to complaints.

By making a completely false link between the land conflicts in Nicaragua and the growth of its meat exports to the United States, ostensibly progressive media are fueling the US government’s regime-change agenda, just as they have in relation to Venezuela. The US pursues this agenda via economic sanctions (renewed by Trump days after recent hurricanes hit Nicaragua) and blatant financial support for opposition groups in the run-up to Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. If the calls for a boycott of Nicaraguan beef in the Reveal and PBS reports were actually heeded, there would be enormous damage to the Nicaraguan economy and to poor communities in Nicaragua. The livelihoods of no less than 140,000 producers and 600,000 workers would be at risk.

Once again, knowingly or otherwise, US media are complicit in attempts by Nicaraguan opposition groups and the US government to undermine Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Reveal has a deserved reputation in progressive circles for its work in exposing immigration abuses, conditions faced by Amazon workers and other issues: It should pay much more careful attention to the sources of its reports on Nicaragua.

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-progressive- ... -nicaragua

This is how it's done: do some decent left-leaning work then slip in some reactionary propaganda once ya got some audience trust. So-called left leaning publications like The Guardian are full of this sort of thing. Every article must be judged on it's individual merits. Liberal stenographers of the State Dept to the re-education camp.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 29, 2020 3:54 pm

The 'Mighty Wurlitzer' - How U.S. Financed 'Human Rights' Organizations Create Anti-Chinese Headlines

During my daily skimming of the main stream media I at times detect news items that seem of little public interest but are widely published. These pieces are often suspiciously similar to each other and seem to come from the 'Mighty Wurlitzer':

In 1967 the magazine "Ramparts" ran an expose revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world.
...
CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his "mighty Wurlitzer," on which he could play any propaganda tune.
Today's 'Mighty Wurlitzer' song is played simultaneously by all major outlets:

Zhang Zhan: China jails citizen journalist for Wuhan reports - BBC
Chinese Citizen Journalist Sentenced to 4 Years for Covid Reporting - NYT
China sentences citizen journalist to four years in prison for Wuhan lockdown reports - Washington Post
China jails citizen-journalist for four years over Wuhan virus reporting - Reuters
Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan sentenced for reporting early on COVID in Wuhan - CBSNEWS
COVID-19: Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan jailed for four years over Wuhan reporting - SKY
From the BBC's version:

A Chinese citizen journalist who covered Wuhan's coronavirus outbreak has been jailed for four years.
Zhang Zhan was found guilty of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", a frequent charge against activists.

The 37-year-old former lawyer was detained in May, and has been on hunger strike for several months. Her lawyers say she is in poor health.

Ms Zhang is one of several citizen journalists who have run into trouble for reporting on Wuhan.
...
In a video interview with an independent filmmaker before her arrest, Ms Zhang said she decided to travel to Wuhan in February after reading an online post by a resident about life in the city during the outbreak.

Once there, she began documenting what she saw on the streets and hospitals in livestreams and essays, despite threats by authorities, and her reports were widely shared on social media.

The rights group Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders said her reports also covered the detention of other independent journalists and the harassment of families of victims who were seeking accountability.

"Maybe I have a rebellious soul... I'm just documenting the truth. Why can't I show the truth?" she said in a clip of the interview obtained by the BBC.

"I won't stop what I'm doing because this country can't go backwards."

The "Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders" seems to be the source of much of this reporting. Who are these people? The About page of the CHRD's website does not reveal the people behind the organization nor who is financing it.

Two years ago a Grayzone report took a deeper look into the organization:

Reuters and other Western outlets have attempted to fill in the gaps left by McDougall, referring to reports made by so-called “activist group” the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
Conveniently left out of the story is that this organization is headquartered in Washington, DC and funded by the US government’s regime-change arm.

CHRD advocates full-time against the Chinese government, and has spent years campaigning on behalf of extreme right-wing opposition figures.
...
CHRD has used its generous funding to provide grants to opposition activists inside China, bankrolling dozens upon dozens of projects in the country.

On its tax forms, CHRD lists its address as the Washington, DC office of Human Rights Watch. HRW has long been criticized for its revolving door with the US government and its excessively disproportionate focus on designated enemies of Washington like China, Venezuela, Syria, and Russia.

Human Rights Watch did not respond to an email from The Grayzone inquiring about its relationship with CHRD.

Human Rights Watch's overpaid permanent leader is of course part of the 'Mighty Wurlitzer':

Kenneth Roth @KenRoth - 8:22 UTC · Dec 28, 2020
Beijing's selection of the sleepy period between Christmas and New Year's suggests even it is embarrassed to sentence citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for having chronicled the uncensored version of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. https://nytimes.com/2020/12/25/wor...

The U.S. government funded CHRD lists Zhang Zhan on its 'Rights defenders' page. Its portrait of her includes some interesting details:

A former lawyer, Zhang Zhan, born in the 1980s, has long been active in speaking out about politics and the human rights situation in China. She has been repeatedly harassed and threatened by the authorities. In 2019, she spoke out on the Hong Kong protests by posting comments, writing articles and holding up placards to support the protesters. In September 2019, she was summoned by Shanghai police and was later criminally detained and arrested on suspicion of “picking quarrels” for her support for Hong Kong. Police released her on November 26, 2019.
...
Zhang Zhan had travelled to Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early February. She reported numerous stories including the detentions of other independent reporters and harassment of families of victims seeking accountability from the epicenter via her Wechat, Twitter, and YouTube accounts.
Pudong procuratorate indicted Zhang Zhan on September 15 and transfered her case to Pudong New District Court. The indictment accused Zhang Zhan of traveling to Wuhan on February 3, 2020 and that she “sent a large amount of false information” on WeChat, Twitter, and YouTube and “accepted interviews with overseas media Radio Free Asia and Epoch Times and maliciously stirred up the Wuhan epidemic situation.”

(Note: I have found no hint why Zhang Zhan is called a 'former lawyer'. Was she disbarred? Why?)

ChinaAid, an anti-Chinese Evangelical lobby group which is also financed and awarded prices by the U.S. government's National Endowment for Democracy, identifies Zhang Zhan as a 'Christian lawyer'. That is of interest because Chinese authorities are concerned about U.S. financed underground Evangelical groups which defy the requirement to register as social organizations.

ChinaChange, which is another 'human rights' outlet in Washington DC, also took note of Zhang Zhan:

Zhang Zhan (张展), a lawyer who practiced in Shanghai, went to Wuhan in early February, determined to document the coronavirus outbreak in the city that was the epicenter of what would soon become a pandemic around the world. In the three months she stayed in the city, she made 122 posts on YouTube. It was not a coincidence that her first post was “My Claim for the Right of Free Speech.” Zhang Zhan was arrested in May, brought back to Shanghai, indicted in September on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” China’s all-in-one charge for suppressing dissent. She is being tried on Monday, December 28, in Shanghai.

Wuhan, where the first large outbreak of Covid-19 occurred, was put under lockdown on January 23. One wonders why a 'former lawyer' and 'citizen journalist' would go there despite official advice to not enter or leave the city.

A video published in late March by the Epoch Times, a right wing U.S. based paper associated with the anti-Chinese Falun Gong cult, gives a hint:

Dissident Protests ‘Animal-Like’ Treatment of Chinese Citizens

Zhang Zhan, a female dissident living in Shanghai, put herself in harm’s way to go to Wuhan after the city was locked down. Her plan was to investigate and broadcast the local situation as a citizen journalist. She is outraged that the Chinese government casually deprives the basic rights and freedom of Wuhan residents in the name of epidemic control.
In the video Zhang Zhan is standing at a light traffic barrier that blocks access to a quarantined housing block. She is ranting in a weepy voice at white clad guards and passerby. The Epoch Times translated the dialog:

Woman:
Let me ask you,
Do you think the government can treat citizens like animals?
Lock them when the regime is willing to,
Send them out to work when they need these people to work.
Aren’t you treating them like you treat cattle and horses?
When animals need to graze you let them out
And take them back when they are done eating.
Is that for real?
And if they do not obey, whip them.
Is that how it should be?
Is it justified to treat civilians like this?

Man: What are you doing?

Woman: I want to express my protest against the government, persistent protest.
Shortly before the man asked Zhang Zhan what she was doing she had knocked over the traffic barrier.

Holding libertarian rants against pandemic measures and knocking over quarantine barrier while providing videos for anti-Chinese outlets is presumably 'citizen journalism'.

Wuhan had soon defeated the pandemic. But a few new infections in early May again raised alarm. The U.S. government financed Radio Free Asia reported hearsay of it:

Wuhan Locks Down Residential Compounds Amid Citywide Test Rollout

Wuhan, where the virus that causes COVID-19 first emerged, is also in the process of implementing a city-wide order to carry out free nucleic acid tests on the entire eleven million population.
Wuhan-based citizen journalist Zhang Zhan said six new cases of coronavirus had been confirmed in the city's Sanmin residential compound, home to some 5,000 people.

"I went there to find out more about the situation, but it has been placed under quarantine," Zhang told RFA on Thursday, adding that local news reports said six new cases had been confirmed, with 180 contacts now in isolation.

"There are police outside on the street now guarding the place, and no vehicles are being allowed through," Zhang said. "I asked a nearby resident how many people were taken away in ambulances, and he told me that 180 people were taken away for isolation."

Sanmin residents stranded outside the compound when lockdown was imposed are not being allowed to return.

A similar lockdown was being imposed at the Sanyanqiao residential compound, also in Wuhan, Zhang said.

"The barriers have been put back and the place is under lockdown," Zhang said. "There is also an online announcement saying that delivery drivers aren't being allowed to enter certain compounds."

"There are signs of a resurgence of the epidemic in Wuhan."

There was no resurgence of Covid-19 in Wuhan. Just a few, mostly asymptomatic cases were found during the city-wide testing.

Shortly after her 'reporting' for Radio Free Asia the notorious grumbler Zhang Zhan was arrested. As this was not the first time she got herself into trouble she did not receive any clemency.

China did manage the news about the Covid-19 pandemic. It suppressed false reports. That is, according to the World Health Organization, what any government should do. A recent WHO Call to Action explains why:

An infodemic is defined as a tsunami of information—some accurate, some not—that spreads alongside an epidemic. If it is not managed accordingly, an infodemic can have direct negative impacts on the health of populations and the public health response by undermining the trust in science and interventions. We are also seeing that infodemics hinder the cohesiveness of societies by increasing existing social inequities, stigma, gender disparity and generational rift.
...
As outlined in the Resolution on COVID-19 adopted by consensus at the 73rd World Health Assembly and the G20 Health Ministers’ Declaration at the Riyadh Summit, we need to provide populations with reliable and comprehensive information on COVID-19 and take measures to counter misinformation and disinformation.
The response to this infodemic demands the support, development, and application of efficient solutions that equip individuals and their communities with the knowledge and tools to promote accurate health information (upstream) and mitigate the harm that misinformation and disinformation causes (downstream).

Zhang Zhan did her best to feed the infodemic with rumors and false outrage. The Chinese government took appropriate measures against the 'rebellious soul'. It also took the right measures to completely defeat the pandemic.

But the CIA's congregation of Washington based anti-Chinese 'human rights' organizations disagrees with those measures and it is jealous about China's success.

Thus the 'Mighty Wurlitzer' springs into action and the 'western' media dutifully follow its lead by lamenting about the fate of a 'citizen journalist' provocateur in China.

Meanwhile the U.S. government has criminalized investigative journalism by its continued torture of Julian Assange and arrested more than 100 journalists this year.

Posted by b on December 28, 2020 at 18:28 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/12/t ... .html#more

A comment:

Kenneth Roth @KenRoth - 8:22 UTC · Dec 28, 2020
Beijing's selection of the sleepy period between Christmas and New Year's suggests even it is embarrassed to sentence citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for having chronicled the uncensored version of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.


This information is false. China doesn't celebrate Christmas because it isn't a Christian country, and its New Year is celebrated according to the lunar calendar, not the solar calendar. As a result, the "Chinese New Year" is celebrate somewhere between the end of January and the first half of February (depending on the year).

In other words, the period between Christmas and (solar) New Year is not a "sleepy period" in China.

--

About the subject in general:

The first thing we should notice is that this Zhang Zhan is not a journalist. Therefore she's not press. Therefore she's not free press.

The second thing we should noticed is that, even if she was a journalist, we would have to discover if she's a journalist or a "journalist", i.e. a propagandist disguised as a journalist. Propagandists are not journalists in the spirit of the word: they are propagandists. Otherwise, having a Journalism degree would give one license to lie at will. Adding a ridiculous epithet ("citizen") to the term doesn't free you from real world consequences.

The third thing is that she's a lawyer. Her rant is typical of a petit-bourgeois/middle class ideologue: freedom of the individual above the collective good; moral values above social values. The CIA is good in finding those wackos even in nations we don't think they exist.

Posted by: vk | Dec 28 2020 19:01 utc | 2
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 01, 2021 2:45 pm

"Pull My Finger" - (Afghan Edition)

June 26 2020, New York Times

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

August 17 2020, CNN

US intelligence indicates Iran paid bounties to Taliban for targeting American troops in Afghanistan

December 31 2020, Axios

Scoop: Trump administration declassifies unconfirmed intel on Chinese bounties

January 1 2021, Moon of Alabama

Sources: To Keep Troops In Afghanistan U.S. Intel Paid Militants Bounties To Kill Them

Posted by b on January 1, 2021 at 5:42 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/01/p ... l#comments

Ha! Yet such is the nature of this medium and how it is managed that few seem to notice. So too with 'Russian hacking', 'North Korea', 'Maduro the dictator',....and there is no stopping it until these resources are removed from bourgeois control.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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