Astroturf Independent Media

Unmasking Wikipedia, the Young Turks, the Intercept, and Bellingcat

Another way we know we live in a highly sophisticated propaganda environment is the presence of ostensibly independent media that is tied to intelligence agencies or legacy corporate media. The existence of these independent-looking media sources is further evidence that the legacy corporate media channels—and even the social media giants—no longer fully control the daily news narratives and worry about the increasing draw of truly independent media.

This is the notion of “astroturfing.” Something—a newspaper or website or political campaign—is made to appear to be “grassroots” when it’s actually a top-down fabrication by powerful interests. “Astroturf” sources complicate our task of finding reliable independent media. The ersatz autonomy provides an essential tool in narrative management by enabling information laundering, whereby dubious assertions are planted in “astroturf” articles so that corporate media can cite them as if they originated organically in independent reporting.

The media landscape’s complexity is why I cannot—as much as I would love to—present every reader with the one, best news source that is always truthful, honest, and unbiased. There is, unfortunately, no Santa Claus. There is no Tooth Fairy. We don’t have a magical, reliable, single source of truth about the world. Unbiased reporting does exist, but no one source reliably delivers it. Media sources that are great often change. Successful independent sites are often acquired (YouTube) or infiltrated (The Intercept) or manipulated (Wikipedia) or purchased (The Young Turks) by the corporate media conglomerates or the intelligence community.

This is why a balanced media diet—a broad range of sources—is the best way to go. By absorbing a range of different perspectives, it is unlikely that essential sides of major news stories will escape your awareness despite the censorship, propaganda, and biases in corporate—and “Astroturf”—media.

Back in 2016, when I first began developing a “balanced media diet” (the latest version is available in the book and at www.BalancedMediaDiet.com), some of my best insights and discoveries came from asking a simple question: What sources appear to be independent but aren’t? I examined the dynamics and nature of sites’ financial sponsors as well as the advertisers they promote. This is when I noticed the phenomenon of “astroturfing.”

Here’s a small sample of the “Astroturf independent media” sources I discovered.

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Note: This is an excerpt from my 2023 book Red White & Blind: The Truth About Disinformation and the Path to Media Consciousness.

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1. Bellingcat

Styling itself humbly as an “independent international collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists,” Bellingcat looks like an independent journalism mecca. This is how adulatory corporate media articles describe it. This is by design. Scratching the surface reveals countless conflicts of interest and a marked commitment to bolstering corporate media narratives.

Bellingcat is no small potato in the world of international news. Providing significant “independent” research on controversial topics such as the chemical gas attack in Douma, Syria, this website is a powerful conduit for information laundering. Its analysis of the Syria controversy, for instance, was used in a collaboration by none other than the New York Times. “We scoured a portion of the visual evidence with the investigative group, Bellingcat,” the Times wrote in one of their many “he gassed his own people” articles.¹

Bellingcat counts among its contributors a shockingly large number of past and present American and British intelligence agents, and it has published a far larger number of investigations into the actions of enemy states than into any actions taken by the US military, corporations, or intelligence agencies.² In a thoroughly-researched piece in Monthly Review Online in 2021, independent journalist Alan MacLeod uncovered Bellingcat’s funding by Western governments and the number of former military and state intelligence officers on its staff. MacLeod’s piece, “How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points Into The Press,” concludes with this:

What we are uncovering here is a network of military, state, think-tank and media units all working together, of which Bellingcat is a central fixture. This would be bad enough, but much of its own research is extremely poor. It strongly pushed the now increasingly discredited idea of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, attacking the members of the OPCW who came forward to expose the coverup.³

Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, worked for five years as a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s shadowy, CIA-connected Digital Forensic Research Lab, which we discussed in the Ministry of Truth section of Chapter 9.

As for its funding, Bellingcat is largely supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Reagan-era creation also connected to the CIA that primarily plans and undertakes regime-change operations in foreign lands. Bellingcat may do some good work, but it hardly offers the independent, grassroots, investigative journalism it pretends to. Instead, it provides a veneer of credibility to the laundering of information by intelligence agencies and makes reactionary agendas appear to be grassroots.

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2. Wikipedia

Founded in 2001 as a decentralized global encyclopedia by entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger, Wikipedia grew quickly from humble roots. It started out with a mere few dozen entries but had ten thousand user-created articles by the end of 2001, one million by the end of 2006, and five million by 2015. Today, it has over a million encyclopedic entries in each of two dozen languages and has become the default source of authoritative information for much of the internet. In the US alone, Wikipedia boasts over 100 million unique visitors annually—over a third of the adult, American population.⁴

Wikipedia is used heavily by Google, which does not use “fact-checking” websites the way Facebook does. The Search behemoth relies instead heavily on Wikipedia for content that is provided in “knowledge boxes” alongside search results. A study found that only one-third of Google searches result in clicks, partly because these boxes provide the information sought. Google has said it will be doing more of this—adding “context” to search results to “counteract misinformation.” The idea is to guide you to the answers Google believes you should see rather than let you visit the internet directly. Wikipedia has become a perfect source for Google’s curated information.

Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa also use Wikipedia in this way. Together with Google’s largesse, the money Apple and Amazon pay for this service has allowed Wikipedia’s parent, Wikimedia, to rake in significant loads of cash. Annual revenue exceeded $150 million in 2021, and the company had well over $300 million in cash on hand, funds that it calls its “endowment.” CEO Maryana Iskander commands a team of 500 employees, and she and senior staff take in salaries over $400,000 annually. The site is, of course, maintained using open-source software by millions of volunteers—not paid staff. Former Vice President of Engineering Erik Möller estimated the company could run on $10 million annually if needed. What could all those staff members be doing with the excess millions?

Despite its chests of cash, Wikipedia claims indigence. It holds frequent fundraisers, à la NPR, which burnish its image as a “grassroots” information source. Guilt-inducing ads pop-up regularly, like this plea in 2020:

This Tuesday, Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 9th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.

In 2020, Wikipedia began running ads even in some of the poorest parts of the world, such as India and Latin America, imploring readers for a few dollars.

As for its founders—Wales and Sanger—they arrived at success quite differently. Wales was an entrepreneur and financial trader in Chicago before founding Bomis, one of the internet’s first pornography-focused search engines. He cultivates a “playboy of the internet” image after multiple marriages and leads a lavish lifestyle in London. Wales participates in the annual Davos and Sun Valley gatherings of the global rich. His pet peeve, it turns out, is not being called the sole founder of Wikipedia. He was caught editing his own Wikipedia biography page in 2007, deleting language about the pornography-focus of Bomis and removing references to Larry Sanger as his cofounder.

As for Sanger, he comes across as humbler than Wales. A philosopher and computer scientist by training, he first conceived of the idea of basing the partners’ nascent encyclopedia on a “wiki,” a term for free, collaborative, user-edited content. It’s strange that Wales continues to deny Sanger’s founding role, as Sanger not only conceived the original technology behind Wikipedia but also devised its original philosophy and policies. His name accompanies Wales’s on the original registration of the domain name. Sanger was the only paid Wikipedia employee during its first year of existence.

Sanger left the project fairly early on and has frequently stated his objections to its current editorial approach and algorithms. Over the last few years, his criticism has sharpened. He called Wikipedia “biased propaganda” in 2021,⁵ and in an interview with Fox News, he said he was “embarrassed” by what Wikipedia had become.

So, what has Wikipedia become?

For topics that are not in the news, have no bearing on the distribution of power in the world, and do not conflict with dominant news narratives, Wikipedia is a solid—often fantastic—resource for knowledge and information. If you want to know about ancient Roman smelting techniques or the geological formation of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, for instance, Wikipedia will provide instantaneous and useful information.

For everything else, it’s a tool of narrative management. Similar to the “fact checkers” we discussed above, Wikipedia forms a powerful second moat around news narratives because of its image as poor, user-generated, and objective. On any Wikipedia page that is concerned with current events or historical topics in the news, you will be hard pressed to find information contradicting dominant narratives. Pages touching on current events are often quickly locked to prevent updates by everyday people. For anything with a whiff of controversy, Wikipedia entries support the dominant narrative. Jeffery Epstein’s page barely mentioned his pedophilia conviction during the decade after his initial conviction before the big media circus of 2019. The page on the origin of the coronavirus buried the theory of the lab origin and dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.” Pages on other pandemic narratives were just as bad. The Great Barrington Declaration, an epidemiological approach to covid without lock-downs supported by over 100,000 professional scientists, was called “dangerous.”⁶ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the famous environmentalist and attorney who questioned the science behind the covid vaccines, was called “a conspiracy theorist.”

Wikipedia also defends its fellow narrative managers. MeWe, a competitor to Facebook that is growing in popularity since it does not censor posts, is smeared by Wikipedia as “popular among conspiracy theorists,” a place for “extreme views, like… white supremacy,” and “a haven for anti-vaxxers.”⁷

Like all of these “astroturf” sites, Wikipedia features abundant solid information. But if its content is user-generated, why does this humble nonprofit have such huge revenue streams? The answer is that it performs an important and lucrative role in narrative management in today’s complex media world. Wikipedia might be the most dangerous site listed here because its readers don’t know the true source of the information. Intelligence agencies and others with a vested interest and a hidden agenda can add or remove information anonymously. This makes it a perfect vehicle for the modern mockingbirds of nefarious bias.

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3. The Young Turks

Founded by Cenk Uygur, whom we feature in Chapter 12 as a silenced independent journalist, The Young Turks (TYT) became an early YouTube success story. TYT jumped into independent media with both feet, and in 2006 it was the first daily online streaming program.⁸ Uygur joined just as MSNBC was about to fire him for being too progressive. From day one, TYT took an unapologetically progressive angle to news coverage. Over the ensuing decade, it built an online progressive media powerhouse with multiple channels, dozens of shows, and $3 million in annual revenue. TYT provided support, if not an outright launching pad, for many independent, left-leaning journalists who are well known today, including Jimmy Dore, Dave Rubin, Jordan Chariton, Emma Vigeland, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, and Sam Seder.

During the pivotal 2016 election campaign, when independent media came of age, TYT became a home for Bernie Sanders supporters who abhorred the corporate media’s incessant disinformation about their favored candidate. And at that very moment everything changed.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, a former chairman of one of the five modern corporate media behemoths, Disney, and a prominent supporter of Hillary Clinton, first provided financial support to TYT in 2016, at about the same time Huffington Post censored me. Uygur and co-hosts Ana Kasparian and Ben Mankiewicz immediately began to talk less about Sanders. The election season continued, Clinton won the primary, and Trump defeated Clinton in the general election. Katzenberg increased his support of TYT in 2017 to the princely sum—for independent media—of $20 million.⁹ TYT continued to promote itself with the same language and marketing but began increasingly to resemble, ironically, MSNBC, the network that had fired Uygur. Where once Uygur was silenced by the corporate media giants, he was now handed one of its megaphones, albeit a smaller one.

Today, TYT is a reliable Blue News outlet, a strident supporter of the loyal left side of the Democratic Party. It is no longer independent media, in this sense, as it works to manage the daily news narratives alongside the corporate media, particularly when independent media channels question the narratives in chorus. TYT’s truly independent journalists, such as Dore and Chariton, both of whom we highlight in this book, have long since departed. Uygur still hosts the site and provides skillful information laundering for Blue News talking points.

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4. The Intercept

Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, started a media corporation of his own in 2014. This company debuted with the launch of an online magazine called The Intercept. Omidyar’s key hire was Glenn Greenwald, one of the English-speaking world’s more important independent journalists. Greenwald was immediately appointed the new magazine’s editor and publisher, and he brought on board Laura Poitras as a cofounder, a journalist with whom he had worked closely when helping NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal many truths about domestic surveillance in this country. Jeremy Scahill, a longtime national security writer at prominent left-leaning journal The Nation, was the other cofounder.

At its founding, The Intercept promised to be a voice for privacy, civil liberties, and government transparency. Some of its first published pieces exposed the US drone strike program¹⁰ and revealed how a British intelligence agency sought to digitally surveil every internet user.¹¹ Right out of the gate, it released additional Snowden NSA documents. It appeared Greenwald had sacrificed none of his integrity to come on board the billionaire tech mogul’s project. The magazine garnered praise and a reputation for courageous independent journalism, a reputation it has unfortunately, steadily lost in the ensuing years.

Unusual for a political magazine, The Intercept’s website is black with white text. This design lends an aura of intrigue and independence. The magazine presents itself as a revealer—an “interceptor”—of secrets, as if by visiting the site you’re party to intercepted intelligence. Visitors who value privacy and don’t want to share their email address are instructed to get past the site’s paywall by using their browser’s “incognito” tab. The Intercept takes privacy and secrecy seriously, it seems. They don’t expect you to know that “incognito” browser tabs don’t mask your identity or IP address when you visit a website; they only prevent your own computer from storing your browsing history. Being an “interceptor” and “going incognito” provide a powerful, albeit false, visitor experience.

During its heyday in 2016, the magazine burnished its image as a voice independent of the corporate media. Articles by Greenwald, for instance, debunked the false narrative of the “Bernie Bros” that was used to drive support away from Sanders.¹² The magazine also continued to focus on revealing misdeeds by US government and military agencies. At one point, the US Army took the rare step of singling out The Intercept as dangerous, forbidding soldiers from reading it.¹³

The connection to The Nation grew from a trickle to a river. Following Scahill came regular Nation contributors Naomi Klein and Lee Fang; and then Betsy Reed, longtime executive editor of The Nation, was made editor-in-chief of The Intercept.

Things changed quickly in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump. The magazine increasingly echoed The Nation and more mainstream Blue News outlets in tone and substance, and its bias increasingly resembled those pervasive in Silicon Valley chronicled in the previous chapter. It continued to cultivate its image as a place to learn secrets and read narratives outside the mainstream.

In 2019, the magazine printed a long, circuitous, ambivalent piece about the alleged gas attacks in Syria. Written by James Harkin,¹⁴ it muddied the waters, a bit like the New York Times’s coverage of the Water Protectors in North Dakota we discussed earlier. One of the primary sources that the piece relied on was Bellingcat.

The Intercept didn’t report on Jeffery Epstein prior to his second arrest in 2019. On the Steele dossier and #Russiagate—a media narrative it was perfectly positioned to discredit—its coverage wasn’t substantially different from that in Blue News outlets NPR, CNN, and the New York Times.

In 2020, as the election neared, Glenn Greenwald, the magazine’s founder, penned an article that was investigative, adversarial, and timely. Focusing on the Hunter Biden laptop and the Bidens’ relationship to Ukraine and Burisma, the piece came out right at the time Twitter censored the New York Post story. Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed read Greenwald’s piece and blocked it, saying it lacked sufficient evidence. She requested Greenwald remove parts critical of Biden. Greenwald called Reed’s spiking of the piece “ridiculous” and just one of many signs that the magazine he had founded had become exactly what it had set out to oppose. Rather than the aggressive “adversarial journalism” that it promised at its founding and on its masthead, and despite its cultivated aura as an independent online voice, The Intercept had become another Blue News outlet and lapdog to the powerful brass in the DNC. Greenwald resigned two days later, and what was left of The Intercept’s anti-establishment reputation went with him.¹⁵ His cofounder Laura Poitras was fired a month later. Only Scahill, and his connections to The Nation, remain.

After watching these developments closely, I recommend Greenwald’s independent journalism—and not The Intercept—in this book’s Balanced Media Diet.

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Bellingcat, The Young Turks, Wikipedia, The Intercept—a tiny sampling of the complex and multi-faceted “astroturf” sites, journals, and publications you’ll find on the internet today. It is beyond the scope of this book to enumerate a longer list, in part because such a list would be ever-changing. A primary goal and benefit of media consciousness is the development of your own radar to parse independent media reporting.

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This article is an excerpt from chapter 10 of my 2023 book Red White & Blind: The Truth About Disinformation and the Path to Media Consciousness. Get your copy today at www.RedWhiteAndBlind.com or subscribe to this newsletter to receive additional free excerpts.

NOTES

1. Browne, Malachy, Christoph Koettl, Anjali Singhvi, et al. “One Building, One Bomb: How Assad Gassed His Own People.” New York Times, June 24, 2018. www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2018/06/25/world/middleeast/syria-chemical-attack-douma.html

2. Maté, Aaron. “Bellingcaught: Who Is the Mysterious Author of Bellingcat’s Attacks on OPCW Whistleblower?” Grayzone, March 24, 2021. thegrayzone.com/2021/03/24/author-bellingcat-opcw-whistleblower

3. MacLeod, Alan. “How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points Into the Press.” MintPress News, April 9, 2021. www.mintpressnews.com/bellingcat-intelligence- agencies-launders-talking-points-media/276603

4. “ComScore Ranks the Top 50 U.S. Digital Media Properties for January 2015.” February 24, 2015. web.archive.org/web/20150317071240/http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Ranks-the-Top-50-US-Digital-Media-Properties-for-January-2015

5. “Wikipedia Co-Founder: I No Longer Trust the Website I Created.” Unherd, July 14, 2021. youtu.be/l0P4Cf0UCwU

6. Stieber, Zachary. “NIH: Check Out Wikipedia To See Why Great Barrington Declaration Is ‘Dangerous.’” Epoch Times, December 24, 2021. www.theepochtimes.com/nih-check-out-wikipedia-to-see-why-great-barrington-declaration-is-dangerous_4176405.html

7. “MeWe.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeWe Retrieved on June 1, 2022.

8. Flomenbaum, Adam. “Why the Young Turks Launched a Facebook-Native Show.” Ad Week, February 24, 2015. www.adweek.com/lostremote/why-the-young-turks-launched-a-facebook-native-show/50404

9. Sprangler, Todd. “Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo Invests in TYT Network As Part of $20 Million Round.” Variety, August 8, 2016. variety.com/2017/digital/news/young-turks- jeffrey-katzenberg-wndrco-funding-1202518938

10. “The Drone Papers.” The Intercept. theintercept.com/drone-papers

11. Gallagher, Ryan. “Profiled - From Radio To Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities.” The Intercept, September 25, 2015. theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities

12. Glenn, Greenwald. “The ‘Bernie Bros’ Narrative: a Cheap Campaign Tactic Masquerading As Journalism and Social Activism.” The Intercept, January 31, 2016. theintercept.com/2016/01/31/the-bernie-bros-narrative-a-cheap-false-campaign-tactic-masquerading-as-journalism-and-social-activism

13. Gallagher, Ryan. “U.S. Military Bans The Intercept.” The Intercept, August 20, 2014. theintercept.com/2014/08/20/u-s-military-bans-the-intercept

14. Harkin, James. “Douma Chemical Attacks and the Fog of Syria’s Propaganda War.” The Intercept, February 9 2019. www.theintercept.com/2019/02/09/douma-chemical-attack-evidence-syria

15. Nelson, Steven. “Glenn Greenwald Quits The Intercept Over ‘Censorship’ of Hunter Biden Article.” New York Post, October 29, 2020. nypost.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-quits-the-intercept-over-hunter-biden-article