Information activities of the News Front International News Agency received the highest rating from the US State Department on the scale of hostility to American global interests.
A special department of the State Department, specializing in identifying dissent and combating it in the global information space, has published a detailed report on the results of its research in this direction.
The said office began by exposing itself:
“As the US government’s dedicated center for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda, the US Department of State’s Global Center of Engagement has a mandate to identify and counter threats from malicious actors using these tactics”.
In other words, this unit exists at the expense of the US state budget, which is owed to it solely for the purpose of combating America’s information enemies. Obviously, it cannot exist physically without such enemies. And, accordingly, these enemies simply have to be, regardless of whether they really exist.
Actually, on this first eloquent phrase, the study of the report, so openly predisposed to the search for enemies and materially interested in this organization, could have ended. Because who is interested in the conclusions of writers that are known in advance, already due to the fact that they simply cannot be different?
However, in order to fully clarify what an “analyst” from the US State Department is in general, it is worth dwelling in a little more detail on this very illustrative example.
Its authors decided to blame Russia exclusively for all “mortal propaganda sins”. But they did it in a very peculiar way, attributing to its information activity exactly the very forms and methods that have been used, to one degree or another, by almost all states for centuries. And the United States is not only not an exception in this sense, but, perhaps, can give odds to most other world players.
“The Russian ecosystem of disinformation and propaganda is a collection of official, mediated and unconfirmed communication channels and platforms that Russia uses to create and reinforce false narratives. The ecosystem is made up of five main components: official government communications, government-funded global communications, cultivating proxy sources, militarizing social media, and cyber disinformation. The Kremlin has a direct responsibility for cultivating these tactics and platforms as part of its approach to using information as a weapon. It invests heavily in its propaganda channels, its intelligence services and their proxies conduct malicious cyber activities to support its disinformation efforts. And it uses media that masquerades as news sites or research institutes to spread these false and misleading stories”.
As you can see, there is nothing special in this list, apart from, of course, the categorical hostility of tone. And the United States blames Russia for exactly what they, with the same success, can blame themselves for. Throw out unfounded accusatory cliches from this verdict, such as “false narratives”, “cyber disinformation”, “false and misleading stories”, and you will be presented with a completely standard set of means and methods of external propaganda of any state.
Not to mention, for a country whose president himself calls major American media outlets such as CNN or the New York Times “factories of false news and gossip”, it is a little immodest to make such sweeping accusations against Russia.
But if you think that in the future the authors of this essay have supported their attacks with some convincing evidence, then you greatly exaggerate the measure of their conscientiousness.
Here is just one eloquent example. The text of the report of the US State Department indicates that “an example of perjury by the Russian media” is the linking of the COVID-19 pandemic with the activities of American biological laboratories around the globe. And this despite the fact that the opposite has not been proven by anyone! And the US Department of Defense itself, to which these laboratories are subordinate, categorically refuses to admit independent observers to their territory. So maybe the State Department’s claims should be addressed to the Pentagon and not the Russian media?
In general, I must say the following. Upon careful study of this opus, as a person who was not alien to the genre of writing such official papers in the past, I was struck by some discrepancy between the declared public status of this document and its content, to put it mildly, not entirely correct for such an open format.
For example, as a “corpus delicti”, its authors did not find anything better than to point out the fact that some Russian media use materials from official state bodies of the Russian Federation in their work. But if this is really a crime and a reason to consider these media “propaganda mouthpieces of the Kremlin”, then on exactly the same basis, Fox News, for example, which regularly publishes interviews with the American president, should be considered exactly the same “mouthpiece”. And the entire staff of correspondents of leading American publications accredited at the White House are Donald Trump’s propagandists. Isn’t that too cool?
The wildness and absurdity of such “conclusions” are so obvious that their presence in the open report looks like sheer nonsense. The US State Department, which publicly advocates freedom of speech and information, cannot and should not voice such game. Just for the sake of preserving the photogenicity of your face.
However, everything immediately falls into place, if we assume that initially it was a certificate for official use, the main task of the compilers of which was precisely the identification, with the aim of subsequent destruction, of such publications. And then the presence of these media in any connection with the official bodies of the Russian Federation, even if purely informational, automatically becomes a “corpus delicti” and a reason for the conclusion that they are undesirable.
But the department that published this essentially police report, which has nothing to do with the principles of freedom of the press, seems to have been too lazy to make smoothing amendments to it and muffle politically incorrect accents. So they thumped into the bells without looking at the calendar…
Well, thanks to the State Department for revealing the kitchen of this espionage and sabotage work on the basis of the fight against dissent in the media.
It is also curious with whom in Russia they consider it necessary to fight in the first place. These Internet resources are in the order in which they are named in this report:
– The Strategic Culture Foundation
– New Eastern Outlook
– Global Research
– News Front
– SouthFront
– Katehon
As you can see, in the fourth place in terms of importance in this list of Russian information platforms hostile to American interests is the News Front International News Agency, with which the author of these lines has the honor to cooperate for many years. How can one fail to recall the well-known Russian proverb “Don’t expect a pie from the enemy”. In fact, this is a kind of “quality mark” from the US government, which, given the fact of the fierce and ineradicable hostility of the Anglo-Saxons to the Russian civilization and the Russian state, one can be rightfully proud of. For this is the surest proof that News Front is on the right track.
Further evidence of the same is the truly draconian crackdown that Western “freedom of speech and information fighters” are using against News Front. A clear confirmation of this is this report itself, where this news agency, undoubtedly, is the leader in the number of its sites destroyed by the Western “guardians of democracy”. Which, by the way, is another indication of the police essence of the office that composed it, the main reason for its existence is precisely to issue precise targeting to the owners of the so-called “free and independent” global network portals, like YouTube, subordinate to the US intelligence services.
Moreover, the authors of this denunciation, not without pride, report on the concrete results of their essentially Gestapo activities. Here, admire – solid marks of victories over “America’s worst enemy”:
There is nothing surprising in the fact that it was News Front that was chosen by the American media inquisition as one of the main targets for a devastating strike.
The official motivation for such repressive measures was never dreamed of even by the Gestapo, in the sense of the almost complete absence of such:
“ –Facebook has removed a network of accounts, including accounts associated with News Front, for “violating Facebook’s anti-foreign interference policy, which is coordinated by inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign organization.
–According to YouTube, the channels were “terminated due to violation of YouTube’s terms of service”.
–Twitter also suspended News Front accounts for violating “Twitter rules”.
As you can see, it is not possible to understand any of these “explanations”, except for the famous Krylov’s “You are to blame only for the fact that I want to eat!”
However, the same report provides facts and figures that fully explain such blatant abuse of freedom of speech and information:
“News Front operates a multilingual website, publishing content in Slovak, Georgian, Hungarian, French, Serbian, Spanish, German, Bulgarian, English and Russian and claiming to have editorial offices in Bulgaria, Serbia, Germany, France, UK, Georgia and Hungary. According to a 2018 article in Coda, News Front had ten employees and at least 100 contributors worldwide. As of April 7, 2020, News Front’s YouTube channels combined had over 484,000 subscribers and 479 million 591 thousand 989 views”.
According to the American “logic” on which this police report is based from beginning to end, such numbers of subscribers and views are clearly “non comme il faut” for a publication acting from positions that contradict the opinion of the US State Department. Therefore, there is no place for it in this “new, wonderful world” of American post-democracy, from the word at all.
Thus, we can sincerely thank the authors of this essay for their extremely frank answer to the question “Who is who?” from their point of view. And for those criteria by which “If the enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed”.
And, therefore, all the points above the “i” are set and the moment of truth, we can assume, has come. And today the main question is whether there will be an adequate answer on our part? In all its long overdue forms and senses.
Yuri Selivanov, specially for News Front