Byline Supplement — News Hygiene: Protecting Yourself from Media Slime
My latest in Byline Supplement offers tips on how to protect your infosphere
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We have zero days to waste to ensure democratic victories come November, which means we have no time to waste on despair, disinformation, and digital poison. But how best to navigate the treachery of digital warfare?
Well, I turned to the experts for today’s report in Byline Supplement on how to practice good news hygiene.
As always, I ask those of you can afford to subscribe to Byline to do please do so — your dollars support a small global team of investigative reporters. If you are unable to do so at this time, I am authorized by the editors to send the report upon request — please send the request to bettedangerous/gmail.
Below is an excerpt:
“I've already in my mind decided the media is not going to get it right. When they do: celebrate.”—David Pepper, democratic strategist/author
Let’s start with some good news: exposing fake news is getting easier as media watchdogs and government agencies become savvier and faster at identifying the characteristics of propaganda websites.
When the EU DisinfoLab published its expose on a Russia-based network that cloned authentic media outlets — so-called Doppelganger sites — it helped spur a series of regulatory actions to smoke out malign influence operations.
For the average media consumer, it prompted one simple but very important question to ask: who benefits from this content?
If the answer is Russia, then you can bet you’re staring down a rabbit hole of disinformation.
A clone site will depict Ukraine as a failed and corrupt Nazi state, it will encourage fearmongering, and it will often prop up two shiny ‘heroes’ — Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
This knowledge is useful when navigating the treachery of the internet, but so are concrete consequences.
Russians Sanctioned
The US just sanctioned two Russian nationals who they allege are behind a ‘Doppelganger’ cyber influence campaign.
In March, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) “designated two individuals and two entities for services they provided the Government of the Russian Federation in connection with a foreign malign influence campaign, including attempting to impersonate legitimate media outlets — intended to mislead voters and undermine trust in democratic institutions in the United States and around the world.”
Pink Slime and Dirty News
In an information war, there are many fronts and along with the doppelganger sites, media rater NewsGuard just reported 1,197 ‘pink slime’ sites operating in the US. These pink slime sites are designed to mimic local newspaper sites, but are “highly partisan and tend to bury their ties to dark money, lobbying groups, and special interests,” according to a recent Financial Times expose.
In addition to pink slime there’s what I call ‘Dirty News’. Dirty news is embodied by pro-Kremlin propagandists such as ex-Fox presenter Tucker Carlson — who reported live from Putin’s lap — and Alex Jones — who just platformed Putin’s top propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. Their dirty news treachery spreads media slime to millions.
It’s notable that the French foreign minister just announced that dialogue with Russia is no longer in France’s interest “because the statements and summaries issued are lies.” That proclamation comes just a day before the US Commander in Europe said that Russia is a “chronic threat” to the world, something I’ve reported in these pages many times.
When heads of state and US military leaders are declaring Russia and Russian lies a chronic threat, it’s worth pondering why Russian propagandists in our newsphere continue to freely play such an outsized role.
We need to go back a hundred years to recall that the wealthy in the media have often danced with dictators. William Randolph Hearst paid Benito Mussolini hefty sums to write a syndicated column to spread fascist propaganda.
News Hygiene
So if you, like me, want to do a better job of taking ownership of your own news hygiene — find out how to safely consume accurate, truthful reporting and not fall for the Traps of Despair — there are many useful tips.
One tip you can apply immediately is the David Pepper technique — expect corporate and legacy media to continue to get it wrong, and celebrate when they get it right. (And don’t get caught up in the Trump circus. The courts are not saving us, he said. So keep doing the work undistracted and undeterred.)
And among the effective grassroots media watchdogs is the US-based Media and Democracy Project (MAD) and its agitating wing, Fix Media Now, which can often be found crossing out and correcting maddening New York Times headlines on X/Twitter.
Brian Hansbury, a MAD volunteer, told Byline Supplement that because mainstream corporate media has let the US down, MAD put together guidelines for newsrooms and just launched an open letter petition addressed to executives, publishers, and journalists at major news organizations to force accurate election coverage.
“Anti-democratic forces, pro-Putin forces, those allied against democracy are waging an all fronts information war,” he cautioned. “And, I’m sorry, but we all just need to pick up our pens, engage our minds and get to our keyboards and just care — we all have to become a more informed consumer of news.”
You can learn more from Brian Hansbury here, when he paid a visit to RadPod.
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Thanks. I didn't know about MAD or Fix Media Now. They only have a few thousand followers on Twitter but they are very good at what they do.