Sorry, U.S. Census Bureau, I.R.S. and St. Louis Federal Reserve – you’re issuing “Russian propaganda” according to The Washington Post’s shoddy “fake news” methodology.<\/strong><\/i><\/p>\n In case you missed it, The Washington Post’s<\/i> criminally careless publishing of “fake news” about purported “Russian propaganda” created a backlash<\/b>–and the Post’s attorney-approved bleating to sidestep responsibility for publishing “fake news” failed to calm the waters.<\/p>\n Here’s The Washington Post’s<\/i> “fake news” article in case you missed it: Russian propaganda effort helped spread \u2018fake news\u2019 during election, experts say<\/a>.<\/p>\n The “experts” claims of expertise were not validated or investigated by the Post, and the Post prominently linked to a list of 200 websites (oftwominds.com among them) that purportedly “wittingly or unwittingly” promoted “Russian propaganda”–but The Washington Post<\/i> did zero journalistic work to investigate the list or the anonymous “experts” that published it.<\/p>\n Since the list is bogus, the entire story qualifies as “fake news”<\/b>–exactly what the Post claims to be investigating. Talk about irony….<\/p>\n This criminally sloppy publishing of “fake news” isn’t journalism–it’s propaganda.<\/b> No amount of slippery legalese can erase the fact that The Washington Post<\/i> published a “fake news” story and featured it prominently on page one.<\/b><\/p>\n Let me explain the “methodology” behind the “Russian propaganda” list: guilt by association.<\/b> Here’s how this works. Say you’re in a totalitarian state with a media controlled by a handful of state-corporate interests. (Sound familiar?)<\/p>\n You have lunch with a colleague who is an acquaintance, discuss kids’ soccer and gripes about the boss, and you go home, thinking nothing of it.<\/p>\n The secret police are waiting to arrest you.<\/b> Your crime is “consorting with an “enemy of the state:” your colleague, unbeknownst to you, is considered an “enemy of the state,” and by having lunch with him, you are guilty by association.<\/b><\/p>\n This is the precise methodology of The Washington Post’s<\/i> shoddy “fake news” list of “Russian propaganda” websites.<\/b> Any association with an “enemy of the state” site like RT (Russia Today) convicts you by association of being an “enemy of the state.”<\/p>\n Neither the “fake news” publishers of the list nor The Washington Post<\/i> combed through the thousands of pages of blog posts on my site and identified those purported to be “Russian propaganda.”<\/b> They didn’t bother, because, well, that would have taken some serious journalistic work.<\/p>\n Instead, they labeled oftwominds.com as guilty by association.<\/b> Here is a chart of my guilt by association:<\/p>\n Just as a reminder, every major power funds international media outlets.<\/b> consider BBC (U.K.); Radio Liberty (USA); France 24 (France); NHK (Japan) and China’s overseas broadcast empire.<\/p>\n It doesn’t take much of a dose of cui bono<\/i> (to whose benefit?) to grasp that state-owned and operated media (even if it is at arm’s length to maintain a claim to “journalism”) aim to paint the issuing state in rosy hues while publicizing the woes of its rivals.<\/p>\n Even the most dimwitted mainstream media “journalist” grasps this obvious fact.<\/b> The rest of us certainly do.<\/p>\n So let’s extend The Washington Post’s<\/i> shoddy “fake news” methodology just a bit, to the sources of oftwominds.com’s “Russian propaganda.”<\/b> Since oftwominds.com’s content relies on statistics from these three websites, clearly they are guilty by association.<\/b><\/p>\n Here’s the revised chart with another layer of “Russian propaganda” sites: the U.S. Census Bureau, the I.R.S. and St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED).<\/b> These sites are integral to oftwominds.com’s output, and so by supplying oftwominds.com with anti-status quo content, they too are guilty of wittingly or unwittingly spreading “Russian propaganda.”<\/i><\/p>\n This is the logic of totalitarianism–guilt by association.<\/b> Just in case you haven’t seen the dozens of charts I use in my “Russian propaganda” from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED), take a gander at this:<\/p>\n My analysis Endangered Species: The Self-Employed Middle Class<\/a> relies on Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and I.R.S. website data.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/photos2016\/WaPo-methodology1.png\")
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