Trump’s new favorite network embraces Russian propaganda
When it comes to putting disinformation in front of American eyeballs, Vladimir Putin has long been able to count alt-right social media stars like Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich as reliable allies. Now the One America News Network, a pro-Trump cable news and commentary channel, is joining them in embracing some of Moscow’s most vile fake news.
On Wednesday OANN aired a segment claiming to reveal that dozens of members of the Syrian Civil Defense, a humanitarian group known as the White Helmets, have confessed to faking chemical weapons attacks in Syria to frame Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator propped up by Putin.
“At least 40 members of the terrorist-linked White Helmets have admitted they staged fake chemical attacks to provoke retaliation against the Syrian Government,” began the report by OANN correspondent Pearson Sharp. “Members of the group, who won an Oscar for their Netflix documentary, came out in recent interviews for a study presented to the United Nations and confessed they had in fact faked the attacks.”
In the real world, the White Helmets are a humanitarian group whose rescue workers are credited with saving at least 100,000 civilians caught in the crossfire of Syria’s bloody civil war. Until recently group was partly funded by the US State Department, and it’s routinely praised as heroic by Western world leaders. A 2016 Netflix documentary on the White Helmets won an Oscar for its British producer.
This cable news smear traces directly to a frenzied disinformation campaign by Russia aimed at linking the White Helmets to a broad range of wrongdoing: things like running a black market in human organs, colluding with terrorists and faking Assad’s chemical weapons attacks. Moscow has been relentless in pushing these claims, tirelessly falsifying videos and photographs, creating phony news outlets and fake think tanks to do so. Some of the same GRU officers involved in the 2016 election interference created fake freelance journalists to pitch stories smearing the White Helmets to legitimate news outlets. [Continue reading…]