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Journalist Critical of Israel FIRED From The Hill

 

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Aaron Mate & Max Blumenthal Have The Last Laugh As Washington Post Begins To Implode

 

Though The Washington Post was forced to retract the first sentence and central premise of its nothingburger ‘expose’ targeting The Grayzone, pro-Israel operatives are using the malicious hit piece to demand a federal investigation.

The secret is out. Starting in 2020, for a period of less than a year, and well before ever joining the staff of The Grayzone, journalist Wyatt Reed appeared multiple times on PressTV, an Iranian state-backed international news service. You may have noticed it from Wyatt’s regular postings at the time highlighting these videos, or the “correspondent @PressTV” description that featured in his Twitter bio at the time.

For the Washington Post’s so-called “disinformation threat” researcher, Joseph Menn, this became a vitally important fact to highlight on a full page of a legacy newspaper whose banner motto boldly declares, “Democracy dies in darkness.” 

After sending Wyatt a series of aggressively worded emails implicitly threatening to have him criminally prosecuted, and demanding to speak with his lawyer, the Washington Post employee relied on a series of hacked documents to “expose” what Wyatt never attempted to conceal: while beginning his journalistic career, he appeared on the Iranian news outlet Press TV several dozen times.

Incidentally, during this time, Wyatt received payment from such nefarious foreign outlets as CBS Weekend News and CBS This Morning, which correctly credited him as a journalist when airing the footage he gathered reporting from the frontlines of BLM protests. 

Since joining The Grayzone in June 2023, Wyatt has not accepted a penny from any government-backed outlet. In fact, The Grayzone imposes far stricter rules on its employees than The Washington Post, which appears to have no such prohibitions on its employees moonlighting for government backed think tanks.

However, the case remains: for a brief period of time, four years ago, he openly appeared in reports for an Iranian outlet which employs Americans to this day.

So why, four years after Wyatt’s last appearance on Press TV, is the Washington Post targeting him, and only him, and even suggesting he should be jailed, despite the fact that dozens of Americans have reported for this same network?

The motive behind this malicious attack is abundantly clear: Wyatt now works for The Grayzone, and The Grayzone’s factual reporting has infuriated boosters of the Ukraine proxy war and members of Israel’s international propaganda network. 

That is why the Washington Post’s demonstrably Menn-dacious correspondent falsely stated in the opening line of his smear piece: “Recently unearthed documents reveal that leaders of an online news site aimed at Americans have received money from both Russian and Iranian government media outlets.”

That bogus and defamatory line has since been publicly retracted by the Washington Post, undercutting Menn’s apparent agenda, which was to falsely insinuate Russian and Iranian sponsorship of The Grayzone.

Despite issuing a major correction, the Washington Post article remains loaded with falsehoods and twisted innuendo. For example, the caption of the article’s featured photo, which shows Vladimir Putin delivering a speech through a television screen, reads, “Russia has sought new ways to reach Americans through news sites and social media.” Yet nothing in the article substantiates any connection between this outlet and any such Russian propaganda initiative, because none exists.

Menn’s smear piece has nonetheless inspired a wave of disinformation from a segment of the Western foreign policy establishment determined to muzzle The Grayzone.

As the antiwar commentator Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, “the hit piece is having its intended effect; you see professional empire apologists all over Twitter today promoting the false claim that The Grayzone is funded by Iran and Russia. The empire’s information warriors now have one more weapon they can use to weaken public trust in dissident journalism whenever it presents an inconvenient narrative.”

Ellie Cohanim, who effectively advanced Israeli interests as former US Deputy Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in Mike Pompeo’s State Department, exemplified the trend, falsely and libelously claiming on Twitter, “Max Blumenthal now documented to be on Islamic Republic of Iran’s payroll. A national security threat, he & @TheGrayzoneNews should be investigated.”

The hit piece has since been shared by other prominent political figures in the US, with the former head of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz – who is now a registered foreign agent – declaring that the Washington Post had shown “what we’ve assumed for years is true: according to hacked documents, a Grayzone contributor received thousands from Iran and Russia.”

In the following days, Israeli media picked up on the attack piece, with a Haaretz writer falsely claiming that what she called “A damming [sic] new report from the Washington Post” revealed “the managing editor of a contentious online news site’s simultaneous financial ties with both Russian and Iranian government media outlets.”

That lie was reframed even more explicitly by Mossad-adjacent Benjamin Weinthal in Israel’s i24 News, which aggressively libeled The Grayzone in a June 6 headline as a “pro-Hamas outlet being funded by Iran and Russia.” Weinthal previously boasted of spinning out lies to defame Blumenthal in a 2017 hidden camera investigation.

Weinthal went to cite Abraham Cooper, an operative of the Likud-linked Sheldon and Miriam Adelson Foundation and Simon Wiesenthal Center director, stating that the since-corrected Washington Post piece “raises important questions that need to be addressed by relevant agencies of the government and maybe bi-partisan hearings on the Hill.”

The same article also featured a quote from notorious rabbi-turned-dildo-salesman Shmuley Boteach, who declared that The Grayzone’s Jewish editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, “is a twisted, deranged, and unhinged antisemite… There must be a thorough investigation and if Blumenthal is guilty, he must be arrested and imprisoned for FARA violations.”

Journalist Mark Ames suggested that the hit piece was designed to level just enough innuendo and specious insinuations of foreign support to trigger a federal investigation. “Based on the sourcing/media here,” Ames tweeted, “you get the sense Langley & DC press corps are so frustrated that their ‘disinformation’ hex cast upon [The Grayzone] has had no effect, so they’re trying to summon the Feds to shut [The Grayzone] down.”

If it was not clear from the reaction to the Washington Post’s smear that its author was acting as a conduit for Western intelligence agencies hellbent on silencing The Grayzone – and to even see its staff locked in prison – his sources gave away the game. Indeed, nearly every source cited or quoted by Menn is directly funded by, or apparently involved with, the US government. Some are also sponsored by arms manufacturers which have raked in record profits through the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.

At no point did Menn inform his readers that his sources were state funded pro-war entities. 

WaPo smear guided by NATO-backed outfits, shady alleged FBI informant

One of Menn’s key sources, who claimed credit for helping him shape his article, is a shadyonline troll named Neil Rauhauser. Generously described by The Washington Post as an “activist disinformation researcher,” Rauhauser’s blog now features a post titled, “Major Public Success: Grayzone & PressTV,” in which he bragged: “We have landed a fine hit on the Grayzone goon squad.” Rauhauser went on to claim he had collaborated with Menn on the hit piece since early April, revealing that the story “took two months to shepherd through reporting and editorial.”

Rauhauser has apparently served as a “confidential human source for the FBI” who has urged political allies to “habitually employ deception” and “encourage self-harm at all levels for unwanted contacts.” 

In 2022, journalist and digital rights activist Barrett Brown described Rauhauser as “an FBI co-operator who also worked with the FBI in a private corporate sort of partnership called Infragard.” Though Infragard bills itself as a mere “non-profit organization,” the ACLU has argued the group is “closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations — some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers — into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.”

Other government-backed sources deployed by the Washington Post’s Menn to attack The Grayzone include:

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. The Post cited the Canberra-based think tank in a bizarre non-sequitur about Chinese influence operations on the Solomon Islands – an issue completely unconnected to The Grayzone. 

As this outlet has reported, though ASPI describes itself as a “an independent, non-partisan think tank” — a characterization echoed by outlets like the Washington Post — the think tank is actually a state sponsored propaganda front that has played a central role in hyping a new Cold War with China. Indeed, ASPI was founded by the Australian government in 2001 and is funded by the country’s Department of Defence, NATO and the US Department of State – not exactly independent institutions.

ASPI is also sponsored by weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon Australia, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman which have raked in billions in profits from the wars in Ukraine and the besieged Gaza Strip.

The Atlantic Council

Emerson Brooking, co-director of the Atlantic Council’s so-called “Digital Forensics Research Lab,” told the Washington Post that a few dozen appearances on PressTV were sufficient to prove that Wyatt Reed “has deep ties to Iranian state media.” And now, he declared ominously, Reed was “working for an organization that we also know is a destination for narrative laundering from Russia.”

 

The Atlantic Council is the semi-official DC think tank of NATO, and has taken in substantial funding from the US Department of State and EU states, a who’s who of arms manufacturers, as well as from robust democracies like the Saudi and Emirati monarchies. It even accepted $250,000 from Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter Biden $80,000 per month while the Atlantic Council was simultaneously courting then-Vice President Joe Biden. 

“current and former intelligence officials”

In a particularly revealing passage, the Washington Post’s Menn attempted to minimize constitutional protections provided to journalists, writing, “The First Amendment guarantees free speech rights even for Americans believed to be spreading foreign propaganda. But current and former intelligence officials say Americans’ tolerance for information paid for by foreign actors has made disinformation one of the most critical threats to U.S. democracy.” 

In other words, faceless spooks get veto power over the US Constitution by simply invoking the specter of “disinformation.”

Attorney Ali Herischi

Quoted by the Washington Post on US sanctions against Iran, Ali Herischi is the personal lawyer of Masih Alinejad, a US-based regime change activist who has advocated for Israeli military attacks on her former country of Iran. Alinejad received $305,000 from the US government for her work at Voice of America, the US state broadcaster, between 2015 and 2019. 

Accusing The Grayzone of misinformation, a dying paper spreads misinformation

While turning to US government assets to misinform his audience about The Grayzone, the Washington Post’s Menn simultaneously accused this outlet of spreading misinformation. 

Without linking to any of this outlet’s articles, Menn claimed we “allege widespread Israeli attacks against its own citizens on Oct. 7” and that the “article by Blumenthal distorted the material from sources it cited, Israelis complained, conflating separate incidents to make it seem that troops repeatedly fired indiscriminately at Israelis near Hamas targets.”

In deferring to random Israeli complaints, the Post correspondent failed to inform his readers that Israeli media has corroborated The Grayzone’s assessment that the Israeli military explicitly ordered attacks on Israeli citizens who had been taken captive on October 7, killing many.

In January 2024 – nearly four months after The Grayzone’s initial expose on Israeli friendly fire orders – Israel’s most widely read newspaper, Yedioth Aharanoth, reported that the Israeli military had instructed its personnel to deploy the so-called “Hannibal Directive” on a mass scale on October 7, authorizing the killing of Israeli citizens held captive by Palestinian militants, and destroying 70 vehicles with the knowledge that many contained Israeli passengers. 

And as Haaretz reported, Israeli Gen. Barak Hiram ordered an Israeli tank to shell a home in Kibbutz Beeri filled with at over a dozen Israeli captives on October 7, killing all but two. The Grayzone was among the first English language outlets to report on this scandalous incident.

The Washington Post concluded its shoddily constructed smear piece with yet another obscene misrepresentation of The Grayzone’s reporting. According to Menn, a story co-authored by this journalist and Wyatt Reed “attack[ed] celebrity chef José Andrés for trying to feed Palestinians in Gaza via a jetty made with rubble that the authors said would include ‘genocidal biomatter.’”

In fact, our article criticized Andrés and his World Central Kitchen for constructing the jetty out of the rubble of Gaza City homes destroyed by Israeli bombings, and without the permission of their Palestinian owners. As the headline of the article clearly stated, “US State Dept’s favorite celebrity chef builds Gaza aid dock with stolen rubble.”

The supposedly humanitarian initiative triggered a minor scandal among Gaza residents, who expressed outrage that a Western NGO had appropriated their property for a clearly doomed aid initiative after they had been forcibly displaced by an Israeli military that was coordinating at the time with Andrés’ team.

Menn’s crude distortions of The Grayzone’s reporting highlight the malicious agenda behind his sloppy smear piece, and raise serious questions about the competence of the Washington Post’s editorial staff. 

On almost the same day the Washington Post published its attack on this outlet, the paper abruptly fired its editor-in-chief, Sally Buzbee, and implemented a desperate plan to prevent its complete dissolution. “We are losing large amounts of money,” Washington Post publisher Will Lewis lamented during a June 3 staff meeting. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2024/06/06/washington-post-grayzone-editor-smear-piece/

 

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Land of the Free?Better watch what you say and to whom PHILIP GIRALDI

 

Many individuals who actually care about the United States Constitution and its guarantee of basic liberties for the American people have been seriously concerned over how recent Administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have taken steps to control and limit the rights of citizens to exercise free speech as well as freedom to travel and associate freely. This abuse of power, for that is what it is, has unfortunately escalated sharply due to the uncompromising commitment of the Joe Biden White House to both Israel and Ukraine. It manifests itself in many ways, but most often includes steps to make it difficult for concerned Americans to learn for themselves the truth about what is taking place in the various international hot spots that the US State Department appears to be cultivating in such a fashion as to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Those truth-tellers who persist in exposing the criminality in high places have been targeted and labeled in some government circles as “info-terrorists” and there has been what appears to be a sustained effort underway to undermine the credibility of journalists who are daring to report favorably on either Russia or the Palestinians. Interestingly enough, the Ukrainians have established the gold standard in identifying dissident journalists through their Department of Disinformation called “Myrotvorets.” It includes a list of names of those individuals who might be assassinated to silence them. The US has, not surprisingly, been seeking to establish a similar government agency, though hopefully without the kill list.

In the latest manifestation of denial of fundamental rights in an attempt to shut down a critic, on June 3rd the State Department forced former Marine intelligence officer, Chief UN weapons inspector, journalist and author Scott Ritter off a plane headed to Russia by way of Istanbul and confiscated his passport. According to Scott “As I was boarding my flight out of New York I was pulled aside by three armed Customs and Border Patrol officers, who seized my passport. When asked why, they said orders of the State Department. No further information was provided. My bags were removed from the flight, and I was escorted out of the airport.” Ritter, who has been a persistent critic of both the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, was traveling to participate in the highly respected annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum as a guest speaker. The seizure of the passport to block his travel is a violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

In an interview later that day with Judge Andrew Napolitano, Ritter admitted that he had been taken aback by what had happened to him and should have been more aggressive in defense of his rights. He did not, for example, demand to see a warrant or be given a receipt for the passport and did not get the names of the three officers who had taken it away and escorted him out. He also should have demanded the name of the State Department Official who had signed the order to accost him in the most embarrassing fashion possible as he was boarding the plane and take his document.

Interestingly, Scott Ritter’s name appeared prominently on the Ukrainian “Disinformation” hit list. And not terribly surprisingly, the mainstream media, which is in sync with the government on the wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, did not give the Ritter story much coverage. The silence is particularly remarkable as the press, which has been protecting President Joe Biden and his Homeland Security lackeys as they watched millions of people illegally cross the Mexican border into the US failed to exercise any vigilance when a single American citizen was unsuccessful in trying to go the other way completely legally.

Ritter, to be sure, has been a powerful voice critiquing the Iraq War, where his inspections turned up no WMD and he declared, in August 2002, that a case had not been made for attacking Saddam Hussein. If George W. Bush and his gang of neocons plus Congress had only paid attention to Scott Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of soldiers and the utter waste of trillions of tax dollars. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also died as a result of the US attack on their country. 

Since that time, Ritter has been an activist who calls for dialogue, negotiation and diplomacy to avoid wars, particularly in the current context where the United States is supplying tens of billions of dollars in arms to expand the war with Russia, sustain the attacks on Gazans and establish a pretext for a war with China over Taiwan. Ritter has traveled to Russia and Iran, as well as to other hot spots, without regard for his personal safety, driven by the desire to tell the truth about what is being propagandized in hopes that he will make politicians think twice about what they are doing. Scott has reported what he sees and describes the conversations he has had with local people without fear or favor, always with the objective of avoiding war and death. For his pains, he inevitably is accused of being a source of Russian and anti-Israeli disinformation and even acting as “Putin’s poodle,” but his information has proven to be overwhelmingly reliable.

Interestingly, this week’s incident was not the first time when Ritter was targeted by the US government for truth-telling. In the wake of the passport seizure, he recounted on X how “The similarities between what happened to me on June 3, and what transpired some 21 1/2 years ago, are disconcerting. Then, the FBI carried out a concerted effort to prevent me from making a documentary movie, ‘Shifting Sands,’ about the flawed case for war being promulgated by the US government. They threatened me with arrest, they engaged in acts of physical intimidation, and—when this didn’t work—they played a role in manufacturing a case designed to destroy my personal character in the eyes of the general public. The 2001 incidents were a warning shot across the bow for me to begin toeing the line. When I refused to do so, releasing my documentary film and actively speaking out against the US case for war with Iraq, the FBI then arranged to have the information about the 2001 incidents leaked to the press in an effort to destroy my credibility on the eve of a February 2003 trip I was planning to take to Iraq, together with a high-profile international delegation, that was designed to prevent a war between the US and the government of Saddam Hussein.”

Scott is not alone in being a target for government attempts to discredit him. Almost anyone who has good access to media and audiences and crosses the established line will be confronted to a greater or lesser extent. Sometimes the confrontation does real damage as in the recent cases of employees of universities and government who have lost their jobs for speaking out in defense of the Palestinians. Has anyone in America lost a job for promoting an ongoing and highly visible genocide, i.e. Israel’s apparent inherent right to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians? No, that is considered acceptable speech by those who govern us and make up the rules.

Those of us who are under attack regularly for going against government writ sometimes exchange jokes about how defying the administration or Congress means going it largely alone in a fight against thousands of government lawyers who will be able to write or interpret the “rules” to crucify you staged in a selected court house before a co-opted judge where you will be certainly convicted. The threat is real, think of what Julian Assange is going through driven by a vengeful US government aided and abetted by those of a like mind in Britain, the home of the Official Secrets Act. The government nearly always wins when it comes to ruining one’s life on spurious or transmutable charges like the Espionage Act of 1918. Scott will have to get a lawyer and sue the government in an attempt to get his passport back and along the way a faceless bureaucrat will no doubt accuse him of high crimes and misdemeanors.

This latest outrage reminds me of something that I and others went through a few years ago relating to Iran, another preferred target of Israeli/US government rage. In May 2018 I and others from many nations, including Israelis and even an American rabbi, attended what was a public media annual conference in Masshad, Iran hosted by the Iranian NGO New Horizon foundation to discuss “Jerusalem/al-Quds the Eternal Capital of Palestine.” The discussions were wide ranging and include some sharp criticisms of Iranian policy. At the time, the Trump Administration was preparing to withdraw from the JCPOA agreement which monitored the Iranian nuclear program and was also ready to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, an illegal move. Trump’s Treasury Department was pursuing a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran and groups like the Jewish Anti-Defamation League were calling the conference an “anti-Semitic gathering” that “included US and international anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and anti-war activists.” The conference nevertheless proceeded peacefully, culminating in a press conference in Tehran that I and others spoke at which was open to the international media.

Unfortunately, someone in Washington did not like the idea of a conference that brought together people from many nations and beliefs to discuss a contentious international problem. In February 2019, Sigal Pearl Mandelker, then Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence and an Israeli citizen, ordered the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to sanction the American-educated founder of New Horizon Nader Talebzadeh Ordoubadi as well as his Lebanese wife, Zeina Mehanna, his organization The New Horizon Conference (NHC), and some of its staff for holding the conference. Ostensibly and perhaps inevitably the reason was “anti-Semitism, Holocaust Denial, and allowing Iranian intelligence to recruit attendees.” Mandelker, by the way, was suspected of having links to Israeli intelligence, Mossad. She was inter alia reportedly involved in brokering the infamous Florida deal that allowed the wealthy child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and probable Israeli spy to avoid federal charges.

I may have inadvertently been the source of the claim about Iranian intelligence operating at the conference in Masshad. Shortly after I returned from Iran to the US, I was visited by two FBI officers who wanted to talk about the gathering. They were polite enough, and when they asked if I thought that Iranian intelligence officers were “working” the conference I replied that they most definitely were but while New Horizon certainly knew about it I strongly believe that they had no choice and were not actually complicit in what was going on. In fact, I was personally “pitched” three times – once by an officer posing as a journalist; once by an officer posing as a foreign ministry official; and once by two intelligence officers using alias names who, I later learned, were the head and deputy head of the Ministry of Intelligence. I was not threatened in any way during the pitches, but I was, of course, in their country and completely under their control.

In order to place in context what took place, I would point out that any international conference almost anywhere in the world like the one we attended in Mashhad would be covered by the local intelligence service in an attempt to make recruitments and obtain information. The CIA has an entire division called National Collection which spends much of its time going to conferences in the US where foreign targets will be present. In like fashion operate the British, French, Mossad, Russian and Chinese services. In my opinion, targeting New Horizon for sanctions because an event hosted by it was exploited by its country’s intelligence service is wrong because NH clearly had no choice in the matter. And it is what the United States and other countries do regularly.

The sanctioning of New Horizon became relevant when NH sought to host another conference in Beirut, Lebanon in September 2019. Roughly the same group of Americans, myself included, was invited to speak or otherwise participate. Several of the Americans were approached in advance by FBI agents, evidently acting under orders from Sigal Mandelker. The Agents warned that any participants in the conference might be subject to criminal indictment upon return to the US because New Horizon was under sanctions. One of those who was approached by the Bureau elaborated how “They’re interpreting the regulations to say that even if you only associate with someone who has been sanctioned, you are subject to fines and imprisonment…” The Bureau went on to explain how Iranian sanctions are somewhat unique. That’s because Iran is a “comprehensively sanctioned” country, meaning that anything having to do with “supporting it” is sanctionable, including tourist visits that aid its economy. We were informed confidentially that if we attended the conference we would be arrested upon our return and would face criminal prosecution as well as possible fines up to $300,000. We all decided not to go and the conference gathering proceeded peacefully without any US input.

The point I am trying to make is that this has been going on for quite some time and rather aggressively by the US government, yet even a well-informed American is probably completely unaware of how he or she can be stripped of fundamental constitutional rights without any ability to push back against the system. And it comes from both Democratic and Republican administrations as well as from government agencies that have been corrupted to the point where they exist to serve their political masters rather than the American people. Hopefully, Scott Ritter will get his passport back and be free both to travel again and speak his mind. We need him and also millions more voices challenging the horrors that have been coming out of Washington.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

 

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Oops!!! Jesse Watters RIPS APART Biden on prime Time and this was BROADCAST LIVE EVERYWHERE

 

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The prince of propaganda: How one journalist feeds the Western media’s hunger for lies about Russia

  A mysterious hack manages to churn out thousands of fake news stories about Russia, yet hardly anyone knows who he is

 

By Vadim Zagorenko

 

Will Stewart is one of today’s most productive British journalists. In fact, he might just be one of the most widely published hacks in the history of the trade. Each year, hundreds of his articles are published in major publications. However, most of his work is an attempt to incite fear and hatred.

Russians are no strangers to bad press. Cold War narratives haven’t gone anywhere and even prior to the Ukraine conflict, Western journalists used any opportunity to publish sensationalist news about the country, regardless of whether it had any basis in reality. 

A 2019 study showed that only 2% of all items published about Russia in Western media were positive. Which left 98% as either negative, or deemed neutral. 

The most impressive fact, however, is that a single man was behind many of them – Stewart, who has apparently worked in Russia since 1993.

Stewart’s portfolio on MuckRack boasts almost 15,000 articles in over 40 publications. Most of them are about Russia and are written in the same style: a scandalous headline, a manipulative account of events, and a few quotes from controversial experts. Stewart is most often published in The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Mirror – British tabloids that typically pay equal attention to sensationalist themes.

Stewart’s articles provoke various reactions in Russia. Some of his writing simply makes people laugh, while some of it annoys readers with its outright lies and insults.

The correspondent nobody knows

Many foreign correspondents have worked in Russia throughout the years and continue to do so. Their work is generally routine – they attend press conferences, arrange interviews, and collect information through their contacts and other sources.

Of course, foreign journalists are affected by the current political tensions. Notably in terms of status. For example, at President Vladimir Putin’s last press conference, a New York Times correspondent was humbled when the Russian leader said he would first answer a question from the Chinese Xinhua agency, and only then would talk to the American journalist.

Stewart, however, is apparently above attending press events and interviews. Despite allegedly working in Russia for many years, he doesn’t appear at press conferences or on talk shows, and generally doesn’t like to show his face – you won’t find his photo anywhere on the internet.  

Some Western journalists, including those who’ve worked in Russia for decades, don’t know Stewart either, and admit that they “have never seen him face to face.”

Stewart also has no significant “paper trail,” apart from the company East2West, registered in 1996, in which he’s listed as both the secretary and the director. This entity owns the rights to the illustrations used in the mysterious journalist’s publications. However, most of them are screenshots from Russian news videos.

Stewart, of course, is not a ghost and is a very real person – otherwise he wouldn’t have been accredited by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, he has no need to attend press events, or communicate with speakers and colleagues in Russia. It has long been known that Stewart is the manager of a group of stringers who gather provocative stories and pass them on to him to “package” the plots for Western media.

This working model does not allow for in-depth story development, but it does allow for churning out news by the dozen. And with the use of simple techniques, they can be made shocking and click-worthy.

How fake news is made

Anyone who’s worked in the media, and in fact, any attentive reader, will easily discern Stewart’s tactics. He uses clickbait headlines and omits facts or other context that could shed a different light on his stories. 

Take a recent article, ‘Ex-Russian beauty queen sobs as she’s arrested for throwing party under house arrest’. The title evokes a sad feeling which in fact has nothing to do with reality. 

The article is about Elena Blinovskaya, a blogger who’s been accused of tax evasion. She has been placed under house arrest, although that didn’t prevent her from throwing a party – which in her case is against the law. At her trial, she complained that she isn’t able to take care of her children.

What Stewart forgot to mention is that in Russia, Blinovskaya is famous not for winning the 2016 Miss Russia beauty pageant, but for being a fake professional guru. She earned her impressive fortune by selling the ‘Marathon of Desires’ personal development course. In the article, Stewart calls it “a service to help empower women to make dreams come true.” In fact, the course consisted of “positive affirmations” for which clients paid thousands of dollars. It was a scam. 

Many people accused Blinovskaya of fraud, but last year she was found guilty of tax evasion in the amount of around $10 million. She tried to flee the country, but was detained on the border with Belarus.

Stewart effortlessly spun a narrative turning a tax-evading blogger into a victim of the regime, and later he did the same thing with a little-known rapper who left Russia. In December 2023, Nikolay Vasilyev, known as Vacio, made headlines when he attended a bloggers’ party in the nude, save for a Balenciaga sock covering his genitals, with the words “the ugly fear beauty” scrawled across his back. He was promptly arrested for public indecency. Fast forward to May, and Vasilyev received a military enlistment summons and promptly vanished, only to resurface in the USA. His departure was shrouded in mystery, with no public statements made. Back in Russia, the saga of Vacio quickly faded from memory – after all, he wasn’t particularly well-known before these events.

In Stewart’s retelling, however, the tale takes on a more dramatic hue. According to him, Vasilyev somehow managed to “scandalize Putin” with his bold fashion statement at the party, “outraging”the president in the process. Stuart goes on to suggest that Vasilyev even “defied Putin by fleeing to America.” It seems that Stewart’s choice of protagonists is rather limited, to say the least.

Stewart also has some downright absurd articles. A while ago, he produced another impressive headline: ‘Vladimir Putin finds new love with London-educated historian who wants to censor Russian internet’. The article was ridiculed on Russian social media because Stewart claimed that the Russian president was having an affair with Ekaterina Mizulina, the head of the Safe Internet League.

Mizulina is known for working with children, scolding rappers for their supposedly “wrong” lyrics, and making short-form videos in which she talks about her work or simply dances. 

What made Stewart think that Mizulina was having an affair with Putin? Probably the fact that they have similar views on traditional values and Mizulina resembles other women whom the tabloids have labeled as Putin’s “mistresses.” Now that’s truly impressive investigative journalism.

At least Stewart is consistent. He has a handful of “classic” themes that he frequently writes about – for example, he’s consistently outraged by attractive women in the Russian Armed Forces. Military beauty pageants interested him both before the Ukraine conflict, in 2020, and afterwards, in 2022. The journalist generously used terms like “bizarre” and “sexist” to describe these contests. Of course, Stewart failed to mention that the participants were evaluated not only by their physical appearance, but also based on their professional skills.

The arrogance and absurdity of Stewart’s articles is both surprising and laughable. But sometimes, he really goes too far in the pursuit of scandalous headlines. 

Fake deaths, real deaths, and fake news

Russia has quite a few conspiracy theorists. One of the most famous is Valery Solovey. 

The former professor is famous for spreading bizarre ideas – for example, every year he declares that “Putin will leave in a few months” and foreshadows a major political crisis. So far, none of his predictions have come true.

But his most “significant” conspiracy theory is the popularization of the idea that Putin has body doubles. A while ago, Solovey claimed that the Russian president had died after a long illness, and power in the country had been seized by conspirators along with Putin’s doubles.  

In Russia itself, no one takes Solovey’s theories seriously. But of course, Stewart couldn’t fail to pick up such a fascinating story. 

Putin’s mysterious ‘illness’ and his body doubles quickly became one of Stewart’s favorite themes. His articles on this subject included: 

• Putin reveals old friends ask ‘is it actually you?’ and don’t recognise him amid mounting claims the Russian president uses a body double
• Putin ‘high on speed’ in meetings as Russian tyrant is riddled with cancer and neurological issues, claims expert
• Vladimir Putin ‘sent body double to China’ to meet Xi Jinping as he has ‘days to live’

In all these articles, Solovey is the main source of information. Of course, Stewart doesn’t introduce him as a blogger or a conspiracy theorist, but as a “professor at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of International Relations” in order to give the crazy “insights” some credibility.

Solovey is also responsible for providing Stewart with the most impressive headline: Vladimir Putin ‘in pain from cancer’ as Russian tyrant ‘wants to end history’. The article is based on Solovey’s claims that Putin allegedly has abdominal cancer, early Parkinson’s disease, and a schizoaffective disorder, that these diseases affect his behavior and decisions, and that he harbors apocalyptic plans.

As always, this captivating story lacks any evidence. However, most readers won’t check the credibility of the author’s sources – many people still trust the mainstream media and assume that editors wouldn’t shamelessly deceive them. Many of those who have read this absurd conspiracy theory will believe it simply because it was published in their favorite publication.

Such crazy articles make Western readers believe that Russia is ruled by a sick madman. As a result, Russia’s public image suffers and Russians who live abroad face more difficulties; on the other hand, it becomes easier for Western authorities to use the taxes of these same readers to support the Ukrainian army. All because one author needed a “sensational” headline and resorted to untrustworthy sources. 

Usually, Stewart writes about Putin and other famous Russian politicians. But he has no trouble using the tragedies of ordinary people as “hot news” either. 

At the end of 2023, journalist Anna Tsareva died at the age of 35. She was well known in the Russian media and worked on numerous major projects. Shortly before her death, she became the editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the most popular Russian newspapers. Putin once said that he often reads this paper, although the opinions expressed by its authors aren’t always “loyal” to the authorities. 

Tsareva died suddenly of heart failure. This is a sad but unfortunately frequent result of heart disease – 80% of Russians who suffer from heart disease die from heart failure.

Tsareva’s predecessor, former editor-in-chief Vladimir Sungorkin, had died a year earlier. He was 68 years old, and had embarked on a challenging trip to the Far East to collect information for a book about the famous explorer Vladimir Arsenyev. On the way back, he suffered a stroke and doctors were unable to save him.

Both incidents are tragedies that unfortunately occur in Russia and throughout the world every day. But this didn’t stop Stewart from using them for his purposes. 

In his version of the story, Tsareva was the “editor of Vladimir Putin’s favorite propaganda newspaper,” and the deaths of the two journalists were part of “a list of dozens of untimely or mysterious deaths since the start of Putin’s war.” The master of sensationalist journalism was able to make a scandal and a conspiracy theory out of an illness, without providing any evidence of foul play or treating the memory of the journalists or the grief of their loved ones in a respectful manner. 

Nothing should ruin a good story.

***

Stewart has penned many other absurd stories about Russia – from relating the theories of a politician who suffered an election defeat to exaggerating a Russian cosmonaut’s moderate discontent to make it sound like he had criticized the Russian government. Considering Stewart’s productivity, he will likely churn out hundreds more articles like that in the coming years.

He will continue to profit from fearmongering, tabloids will continue to publish his clickbait articles, and the public will continue to believe the manipulative headlines and embellished stories.

Over time, the narrative will change, Stewart’s content will become less popular, and most of his articles will fall into oblivion. But tabloid readers will still think of Russia as a dangerous and dark place and will share this image, thereby influencing public opinion. This in turn will shape the policy and promises of politicians.

The world is full of such unscrupulous journalists. Not all of them write about Russia and not all are as productive as Stewart. But all of them undermine people’s trust in the media, since a reader who discovers that he was lied to will henceforth treat all publications, even trustworthy ones, with suspicion. 

As long as such “Will Stewarts” exist, the only way to get reliable and truthful information is to do your own research.

 

https://www.rt.com/russia/597515-journalist-fake-news-russia/

 

 

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