Correspondent Michael Usher of Australia's '60 Minutes' claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, but the scenes actually don't match up at all.
(Image by (Screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutesâ€)) Details DMCA
Formed in June 2015 and funded by Google News Lab, the First Draft Coalition's founding members included Bellingcat, an online "citizen journalism" site that has gotten many of its highest profile stories wrong and is now associated with NATO's favorite think tank, the Atlantic Council.
Despite Bellingcat's checkered record and its conflicts of interest through the Atlantic Council, major Western news outlets, including the Times and Post, have embraced Bellingcat, apparently because its articles always seem to mesh neatly with U.S. and European propaganda on Syria and Ukraine.
Two of Bellingcat's (or its founder Eliot Higgins's) biggest errors were misplacing the firing location of the suspected Syrian rocket carrying sarin gas on Aug. 21, 2013, and directing an Australian news crew to the wrong site for the so-called getaway Buk video after the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
A screen shot of the roadway where the suspected BUK missile battery supposedly passed after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014.
(Image by (Image from Australian “60 Minutes†program)) Details DMCA
But like many news outlets that support establishment "group thinks," Bellingcat wins widespread praise and official endorsements, such as from the international MH-17 investigation that was largely controlled by Ukraine's unsavory intelligence agency, the SBU and that accepted Bellingcat's dubious MH-17 evidence blaming the Russians.
If such a Ministry of Truth had existed in the mid-1980s, it might well have denounced the investigative reporting on the Contra-cocaine scandal since that was initially deemed untrue. And if "Minitrue" were around in 2002-03, it almost surely would have decried the handful of people who were warning against the "group think" on Iraq's WMD.
Power and Reality
While it's undeniable that some false or dubious stories get pushed during the heat of a political campaign and in wartime -- and journalists have a role in fact-checking as best they can -- there is potentially a greater danger when media insiders arrogate to themselves the power to dismiss contrary evidence as unacceptable, especially given their own history of publishing stories that turned out to be dubious if not entirely false.
It's even more dangerous when these self-appointed arbiters of truth combine forces with powerful Internet search engines and social media companies to essentially silence dissenting opinions and contrary facts by making them very difficult for the public to locate.
Arguably even worse is when politicians -- whether President-elect Donald Trump or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or President Obama -- get into the business of judging what is true and what is false.
On Thursday, an impassioned President Obama voiced his annoyance with "fake news" twice in his joint news conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- "because in an age where there's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. ... If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect."
Let that phrase sink in for a moment: "We won't know what to protect"? Is President Obama suggesting that it is the U.S. government's role to "protect" certain information and, by implication, leave contrary information "unprotected," i.e., open to censorship?
On Friday, a New York Times front-page article took Facebook to task, in particular, writing: "for years, the social network did little to clamp down on the false news."
The Times added, in a complimentary way, "Now Facebook, Google and others have begun to take steps to curb the trend, but some outside the United States say the move is too late."
Info-War
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