Days ago the Washington Post published (and energetically advertised) a “news story” alleging that the 2016 Trump election was produced by “hundreds” of “fake news” stories created by Russian propagandists. (Of course, the Washington Post itself has been identified as a government CIA propaganda mouthpiece by numerous whistleblowers.) (Senate hearing in the ’70s and ’80s showed that Post “reporters” have secretly received millions of dollars from U.S. government sources in exchange for pro-government news reporting.)
The November 2016 Washington Post story was widely circulated. Hundreds of other newspapers repeated the claims.
At the heart of the Post’s “reporting” was an appeal to authority: a group of “foreign policy experts” calling themselves “PropOrNot” who remain anonymous (but who clearly favored Hillary in the election).
Now the intrepid Glenn Greenwald has rebutted the Post story in a path-breaking article:
According to Greenwald, the Post claimed that “Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary-Clinton/Jeb-Bush spectrum is guilty” of spreading Russian propaganda.
The group eschews alternative media outlets like these and instead recommends that readers rely solely on establishment-friendly publications like NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed and VICE. That is because a big part of the group’s definition for “Russian propaganda outlet” is criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
“What happened here is the essence of fake news,” according to Greenwald. 
