Trust in the media has been in long term decline in the UK and the USA, although in America that trend has been disrupted somewhat by a recent surge in trust amongst Democrats only (trust by Republicans has collapsed).

I feel some sympathy for this trend. In recent years there has been a massive increase in anti-Russian stories in western newspapers and media. I noticed that when I do fact checking of these stories they often turn out to be deceptive or fraudulent — and always to the same end. As a result I no longer believe anything I read in the media about Russia. Nor should anyone else. It isn’t only Russia of course … there are other topics that have the same problem. But Russia seems to be the worst affected.

This article is a collection of fact checks for consideration, assembled over time, in no particular order. Some of them were done by me, others I got from Glenn Greenwald who has written extensively about the proliferation of false reporting in western media and especially false reports related to Russia.

Finally, I wrote about one of the “Russian Twitter bot” stories in my previous blog post.

Maria Katasonova

This article in the Telegraph has nothing to do with Russia and Russia isn’t mentioned anywhere in the text itself. Nonetheless, it leads with the following picture and caption:

This woman doesn’t look like a journalist because she is not a journalist. This is Maria Katasonova, a 21-year old nationalist political wannabe. There’s a profile of her in the Intercept which details her various political stunts, but there is no mention of any journalism work at all.

The false caption comes from Getty Images and also appears in the Guardian, and again in the Telegraph, in the San Francisco Chronicle, and in New York Magazine, and the Daily Mail with a different photo but the same caption.

The Daily Express covered Katasonova in a story called “Russia’s fake Ukraine war report exposed in Putin PR disaster”. It claims that Putin created a fake news report, but it’s actually about a short satirical video Katasonova put on YouTube in which she pretends to be a war reporter and then at the end bursts out laughing, showing she not in a war zone, just in a darkened room. There is no connection between Katasonova, journalism, Putin or the Russian government, beyond her embryonic political ambitions.

Presumably the false caption propagates because it feeds the idea that Russian journalism is unreliable.

Russian “fake news”

The Washington Post published an article with the headline, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”.

One of the sources was described this way: “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”

In fact this source was not a collection of researchers. It was an anonymous individual who claimed to represent an equally anonymous group called PropOrNot. This individual or group compiled a blacklist of “propaganda sources” which included many US news outlets that happen to be critical of Hillary Clinton, along with Wikileaks, without presenting any evidence or rationale for where the list came from. Many other claims made by this group fell apart within days of the article being published, such as a list of “allies” on its website who stated they’d never heard of the group.

The Intercept wrote about the Post’s story and the many seriously flawed claims it made:

Julian Assange / Russia

In December 2016 the Guardian ran a story that stated Assange has “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime” and that he said “there was no need for Wikileaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there”.

The things supposedly said by Assange were fabricated. The evidence for the “close relationship with the Putin regime” was that he had done some interviews on RT years earlier. The Guardian eventually had to retract the story (you can see their retraction at the bottom). The article claimed the quotes came from an interview in La Repubblica, an Italian newspaper. However the transcript was posted online and it became clear that the quotes attributed to him were not in it. The journalist who actually did the interview said:

Again, Greenwald wrote about the incident and provides background on why the Guardian would do this.

Russian hacking of electrical grids

The Washington Post seems particularly susceptible to publishing false stories involving Russia. The headline says Russia hacked the Vermont electrical grid. The story was edited days later with a retraction at the top, which says that no such event ever happened. The entire story was a fabrication.

Alexsei Navalny

The Economist published an article that starts by saying “Aleksei Navalny, the country’sleading opposition politician, is hitting the campaign trail”.

The claim that Navalny is the leading opposition politician also shows up in the BBC, NBC News, the Telegraph, Reuters, Deutsche Welle, PBS and many more. It is the standard way to describe him.

According to actual opinion polling the country’s leading opposition politician is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democrat party. He gets around 10% voting intention for the 2018 elections, far ahead of Navalny who (when he shows up at all) gets more like 3–4%. Whilst Navalny is quite well known in Moscow where he obtained 27% of the vote in a 2014 mayoral election, polling shows he is far from the best known opposition politician across the entire country, with only 36% name recognition vs 69% for Zhirinovsky. The second most well known opposition politician is Gennady Zyuganov who runs the Communist party.

I have been unable to find any statistics or facts supporting the claim that Navalny is the “leading opposition politician”.

Lithuanians arming themselves for war

Sky News reports, “Lithuanians stock up for ‘hybrid’ war with Russia”. The article states, “Lithuanians are so unnerved by the current political climate that many are currently mobilising for war — and it is not an exclusively government-directed, top-down affair”.

The cited evidence is two men who joined the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, an organisation with a stable membership of around 10,000 people (0.3% of the population). In contradiction to what the article says this organisation is in fact an integrated part of the government, with specific laws on the books that control its activities and tie it to the Ministry of Defence. It has been this way for a long time; it was founded in 1919 and integrated into the state in the 1920's and 30's.

The article presents no data or other evidence to suggest behavioural changes in the Lithuanian population: the anecdote of two people is generalised to the entire country.

Hacking of American voting machines

USA Today and many others reported, “Russians tried to hack election systems of 21 states in 2016, officials say”.

This story was based on allegations by the Department of Homeland Security.

I started to suspect this story might collapse when I read the following paragraph:

Steve Michels, a spokesman for Walker’s Department of Administration, said both in March and on Friday that the number of attempted hacks on state systems last year was “typical."

The sort of sophisticated hacking missions associated with state-sponsored hacking are rarely detected and certainly do not occur every day. But it’s common for excitable non-technical people to describe the ordinary background noise of the internet as “hacking”, like old virus infected computers scanning for Windows XP machines to infect. Norse Corp has a neat real-time map of such attacks. Whilst true in some very pedantic sense, such attacks have no people behind them (anymore) and thus are easily blocked. They pose no danger to any properly run network. It’s also important to understand that infected computers are so widespread across the globe that just looking up where a computer is doesn’t tell you anything about who used to control them.

Sure enough, some of the named states looked into the allegations and discovered they were false. Wisconsin asked for more information and found the named systems weren’t election related.

As Wisconsin’s IT department noted,

“Those IP addresses we talked about, we had blocked, they were related to non-election systems.”

Network administrators for the State of California put it even more bluntly:

“Following our request for further information, it became clear that DHS’ conclusions were wrong.”

Russian Twitter accounts on Brexit

The Guardian reports, “Russia used hundreds of fake accounts to tweet about Brexit, data shows”.

Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.

Like in the USA, this story is intended to make you think that the results of the Brexit referendum may be illegitimate due to the ‘influence’ of foreign-controlled Twitter accounts.

It is hard to notice the very careful phrasing of these claims at first. But when you keep reading the reason becomes clear:

Prof Laura Cram, director of neuropolitics research at the University of Edinburgh, told the Guardian that at least 419 of those accounts tweeted about Brexit a total of 3,468 times — mostly after the referendum had taken place.

Even Russia can’t influence an event that already happened. The entire story is carefully crafted to create a false impression, in such a way that the journalist can claim innocence later by pointing to a single sentence fragment that reveals the truth.

More Twitter bots

The New York Times reported, “Signs of Russian Meddling in Brexit Referendum”:

LONDON — More than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted tens of thousands of messages in English urging Britain to leave the European Union in the days before last year’s referendum on the issue, a team of researchers disclosed on Wednesday …. The separate findings amount to the strongest evidence yet of a Russian attempt to use social media to manipulate British politics in the same way the Kremlin has done in the United States, France and elsewhere.

As I documented previously, the academic study this claim is based on is nonsense.

CNN on investigations of Russia/Trump ties

CNN reported that “Congress is investigating Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials”. The story was in a section called TrumpWatch and said:

Senate investigators are examining the activities of a little-known $10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration, a congressional source told CNN.

The story was long and detailed and looked like investigative journalism. But it relied entirely on a single anonymous source, whose information turned out to be false. We know this because CNN deleted the story, admitted it was misleading and fired the three journalists who worked on it.

Journalists who are fired but immediately rehired

It’s probably for this sort of reason that Trump and his supporters don’t trust the media:

Trump’s claim about other phony stories is legitimate. This wasn’t the first time CNN had run stories about the Russia/Trump investigations which were later proven false. They did it before, based on stories by some of the same journalists.

The CNN case is useful because it shows why trust in news media is so low. One of the journalists who worked on the retracted CNN story, Eric Lichtblau, had racked up a long series of stories on Russia/Trump whilst at the New York Times, which are now presumably also in question.

But the story was primarily written by Thomas Frank. After being fired from CNN, within weeks he had been recruited by BuzzFeed and was right back at it, writing exactly the same kind of stories about Trump and Russia and still relying on anonymous sources, like in “Trump Advisers’ Meetings In 2016 Bear The Hallmarks Of Russian Intelligence, Experts Say”:

“This just smacks of a classic intelligence operation,” said one retired CIA officer.

Note the tell-tale “experts say”, which can be seen in the retracted Washington Post stories too. Nowhere does BuzzFeed inform its readers that the person writing these stories was previously fired for reporting the views of unreliable anonymous sources on exactly the same topic.

Russian hacking of TV networks

Fortune ran a story under the headline, “C-SPAN Confirms It Was Briefly Hacked by Russian News Site”. The story alleged that RT had hacked its way into C-SPAN’s video feed and taken over the channel.

This headline was a lie. C-SPAN had confirmed no such thing and no hacking took place. It was actually a glitch caused by an internal routing issue, possible because C-SPAN employees monitor RT. Fortune later edited the headline, so the old headline can only be seen in a correction at the bottom.

This one is interesting because the original report is so absurd. Nobody at Fortune stopped to think about whether it made sense?

Russian hacking of Ukraine

The Washington Post reports, “Cybersecurity firm finds evidence that Russian military unit was behind DNC hack”.

A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.

The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.

The story relies heavily on the credibility of CrowdStrike and the credibility of its linkage of malware between different incidents. This security firm crops up frequently in collapsed stories about Russian hacking.

CrowdStrike had previously claimed that Russian government malware that infected an Android app used by soldiers had caused huge military losses for Ukraine. Their proof for these losses was a citation of data from a British think tank that tries to calculate the strengths of various armies around the world.

That original CrowdStrike report fell apart a few months after the Washington Post’s story (which does not have any retraction):

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.

The IISS explains CrowdStrike’s mistake:

One of the IISS researchers who produced the data said that while the think tank had dramatically lowered its estimates of Ukrainian artillery assets and howitzers in 2013, it did so as part of a “reassessment” and reallocation of units to airborne forces.

“No, we have never attributed this reduction to combat losses,” the IISS researcher said.

In other words, prior IISS data was wrong and the data correction was interpreted by CrowdStrike as evidence of real deaths. The maker of the Android app that was supposed to have had malware injected into it called CrowdStrike “delusional” and “amateur”. They later edited their own report to reflect that it was wrong, but this did not lead to any further retractions of stories that were based on the assumed accuracy of the first.

Guccifer 2.0 using a Russian language VPN

The Hill reports, “Evidence mounts linking DNC email hacker to Russia”. This story is about a guy who calls himself “Guccifer 2.0”, who claims the leaked emails from the Democratic party came via him and that he’s not Russian (as CrowdStrike claimed) but Romanian.

First paragraph:

Emails sent by Guccifer 2.0 to The Hill show evidence that the hacker used a Russian-language anonymity protection service — a language he has claimed he could not read or even recognise.

Both claims are false. By implication the headline is also false.

Reading the story further reveals that the VPN service in question is Elite VPN, which has a website available in both Russian and English. It would be quite possible for any English speaker to use it. It also states further down that Guccifer 2.0 actually does recognise Russian, directly contradicting the opening paragraph.

The story says:

The two active payment services for Elite VPN are options that are popular in Russia, including the Moscow-based Web Money.

The Elite VPN website says you can also pay in Bitcoin and Litecoin, along with various other payment services like Perfect Money.

Elite VPN probably is a Russian firm. But it is not a huge surprise that someone who was hacking US political parties would use a VPN company based in Russia. VPNs only provide anonymity if they don’t keep logs or cooperate with law enforcement. Russian VPN firms are much less likely to cooperate with the FBI than those based elsewhere.

Trump/Russia pre-election communication

ABC News reported that, “a confidant of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said Flynn was prepared to testify that then-candidate Donald Trump instructed him to contact Russian officials during the campaign.”

This story was false and ABC suspended the television reporter who claimed it. Only for four weeks, but …. progress?

US TV on Trump/Wikileaks again

Or maybe not. CNN, MSNBC and CBS reported that Trump had received advanced notice from Wikileaks of emails stolen from the Democrats on September 4th, days before Wikileaks announced the leak to the world. This was presented as proof that Wikileaks, Russia and Trump were all colluding in a conspiracy. This story claimed to come from multiple highly placed sources. It was therefore widely reported, repeated, tweeted etc.

The email was actually sent on September 14th, not the 4th and appeared to come from some random member of the public who thought the Trump family should check out the newly public emails, not Wikileaks. CNN retracted the story, but not before it was widely distributed. This time nobody was fired:

It is unclear how “multiple sources” mis-read a date in exactly the same, oh so convenient way.

Conclusion

The media’s reliability problem with Russia isn’t due to innocent mistakes. The errors are always in support of exactly the same narrative and replicate across virtually all media outlets. Stories keep getting retracted and reporters keep getting suspended or fired, but it makes no difference because they’re immediately re-hired by other news firms and carry on as if nothing had happened.

I’m unusually irritated by this sort of thing and am willing to keep this sort of long term “disaster diary” of failed propaganda. Most people aren’t and will accept what they read. It is fair to say that the sort of people who work in news have collectively decided that it’s legitimate to perform social engineering, with the goal of undoing Trump and Brexit, based on systematically misleading their readers and viewers. Any story that supports their desired future is immediately blasted out at full volume regardless of how sketchy, and any evidence they’re wrong is ignored or buried in retractions nobody ever sees. Finally, they are occasionally assisted in this aim by rogue tech firms and academics.

Existing English-speaking institutions of news are probably too far gone to save at this point. Their track record of manipulation is too extensive for trust to be regained amongst anyone who has caught on. What we need is a new kind of news organisation, based on fundamentally different principles and processes. In a future article I plan to ponder what such a news agency might look like.