Kall continued: "Who decides who or which site is a fake news or propaganda site? According to the Washington Post, some anonymous site which does not define the criteria it uses is who. This is dangerous."
Several other high profile commentators on the media have issued similar warnings, including Robert Parry (who broke the Iran-Contra scandal as a reporter for the Associated Press and Newsweek), Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, Wayne Madsen, Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi.
"I was very proud," wrote another critic, Unz Review Founder and Editor Ron Unz, on Dec. 1, "to see that the Washington Post included The Review in the official list of America's major 'Fake News' Russian propaganda websites, apparently used by the Kremlin to subvert American democracy and thereby foster the spread of Godless Soviet Communism" err, the Russian Orthodox Christianity of Vladimir Putin."
Unz, former publisher of The American Conservative magazine founded by Patrick Buchanan and a former Republican candidate for governor of California, mocked the Post further in his commentary, entitled Record Traffic for Our "Fake News" Russian Propaganda Website!
Los Angeles Times Touts Young Professor's Smear Of 'Fake' and 'Incredible' Sites
The Los Angeles published a similar smear job Nov. 15 in a column headlined Want to keep fake news out of your newsfeed? College professor creates list of sites to avoid.
The column by writer Jessica Roy drew on the work of Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. Zimdars had worked with students to create a Google.doc that she was publicizing as sites to "avoid" because, according to her rating system, many of those sites were "false, misleading, clickbait-y and satirical 'news' sources" or else unknown to her and her helpers.
A review of the list suggests that it was assembled and publicized with a shallow knowledge of the subject matter, particularly for a work emanating from a college and presuming to instruct others about reliable research.
Among the striking deficiencies:
Her list described "unknown" the sites of: the Heritage Foundation (arguably the major conservative think tank in the nation's capital); the National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, one of the founders of the modern conservative movement; OpEdNews, one of the nation's most popular progressive sites in terms of web traffic; Strategic-Culture.org, a Russian government-funded commentary site whose ownership arguably fits the professor's theory of state-funded bias; and NomiPrins.com, named for the former Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns managing director Nomi Prins who became an author and whistleblower well-regarded in progressive circles.
Striking also was the professor's description of the WhoWhatWhy investigative site as "unreliable." Why?
The professor does not define her terms for any of these labels aside from a subjective listing derived from unspecified sources on the basis of unspecified evidence.
WhoWhatWhy founder and editor Russ Baker holds a stellar reputation as a rigorous fact-checker. He is also the best-selling author of Family of Secrets, the iconic book about the Bush dynasty, as well as an impressive career that has included a stint as an staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, and many columns for other prestigious national magazines and newspapers.
I know Russ Baker and his work quite well, and would place him within the top one percent of all journalists I know who care about rigorous sourcing of complex stories. For someone to criticize him as "unreliable" without explanation, therefore, is like someone claiming without explanation that (as some fake news providers recently did) that top Democrats are torturing and murdering children in Washington, DC's abandoned subway tunnels: it's perhaps possible at first glance, but without evidence it reflects worse on those making the allegation than the targets, especially since there are no abandoned subway tunnels in the nation's capital and no reports of missing children.
In sum, it is easy to see why the Los Angeles Times promptly appended an editor's note to its November column:
"UPDATE: Nov. 17, 5:52 p.m.: The professor who created the list has taken down the Google doc. She said it was a safety measure in response to threats and harassment she and her students and colleagues had received. She is continuing to work on it and plans to release it in the future in a format other than a Google doc."
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