First off, the source, The New Republic (TNR) has for most of its 106 year history been to the left of the American Democrat Party and for long periods has been to the left of your average Marxist.
For some reason I think of Bolsheviks bad-mouthing Mensheviks.
The second interesting point is this is reminiscent of the PropOrNot website the Washington Post was promoting in 2016, more on this after the jump.
The third point of interest is the story itself. From The New Republic, March 9:
The father of the founder of the conspiratorial site filed a criminal complaint against me in Bulgaria. Then things got weird.
About a week before Christmas, I received a most unwelcome email. A criminal complaint had been filed against me in Bulgaria, a country I have never visited and with which I had no personal connection. I stood accused of defamation; attempted censorship; illegally spreading personal, family, and business information; and insulting the memory of someone’s parents and grandparents.....MUCH MORE
The email was from a veteran Bulgarian journalist named Krassimir Ivandjiiski, who took issue with an article I had written about Zero Hedge, the hugely popular website founded by his 41-year-old son, Daniel. My article, which appeared on my personal blog, was an outgrowth of a New Republic story I wrote about the business of conspiracies, in which Zero Hedge plays a major role. Millions of readers visit Zero Hedge each month, drawn by the site’s deeply pessimistic view of Wall Street and its alarmist, conspiratorial take on international affairs. In the world according to Zero Hedge, the financial markets are always on the verge of collapse and the United States is always a power in decline.
Zero Hedge is often blamed for spreading false information. In February, Twitter permanently banned Zero Hedge’s account, which boasted more than 670,000 followers, for violating Twitter’s policy prohibiting fake accounts and spam—part of a crackdown that intensified in response to Russia’s use of social media to influence voters during the 2016 presidential election. Within hours of the ban, Zero Hedge posted a counternarrative on its site, asserting—falsely, according to Twitter—that it had been suspended over its conspiratorial, evidence-free claims that the coronavirus was a Chinese biological weapon that escaped from a lab in Wuhan, “accidentally or not.” Zero Hedge’s Twitter ban was big news, and the knee-jerk response by journalists to cover both sides further spread the bogus coronavirus conspiracy, which has continued to gain ground since Republican Senator Tom Cotton repeated it on Fox News.
At first, I thought the criminal complaint was a joke. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would go to such lengths over a personal blog post that, at the time I received the complaint, had been read by little more than 100 people. The rambling email seemed paranoid, and it was rife with misspellings, including one for the word “comlpaint.” Ivandjiiski and his Bulgarian attorney refused to provide me a copy of the original, Bulgarian-language version of the complaint, leaving it unclear what laws I might have violated or even what country’s laws I might have stood charged with violating. Further checking, however, showed that a complaint had been lodged with the office of the Bulgarian prosecutor general.
In Bulgaria, the news that the publisher of Zero Hedge had filed a criminal complaint against an American journalist created a firestorm. I appeared on Bulgarian TV twice to answer questions, and the story was covered on multiple news sites. Journalists in Bulgaria were just as confused as I was about the criminal complaint. “Is this a common practice in the United States?” a journalist for a Bulgarian online publication asked me. No, it certainly is not. “Did you feel you were in danger?” a Bulgarian TV host asked me. Not really, though there was the possibility that I might have a Bulgarian court judgment hanging over my head. Still, an awful precedent could be set, so I decided to hire an attorney in Bulgaria and fight it.
Among the various “crimes” of which I stood accused was posting publicly available information that revealed Zero Hedge’s ties to Bulgaria. While Ivandjiiski’s son, Daniel, lives in an affluent northern New Jersey suburb, Zero Hedge’s domain was registered not in the U.S., but in Sofia. Court records revealed that Zero Hedge was owned by a company called ABC Media Ltd, a Bulgarian company whose sole manager was Krassimir Ivandjiiski.
The Bulgarian connection intrigued me because Zero Hedge runs political news and commentary that “frequently echo the Kremlin line,” as a 2018 RAND Institute study put it. Among Zero Hedge’s most Russia-friendly fare were stories depicting the Mueller investigation as a hoax, pieces claiming that the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was staged by British intelligence, and posts asserting that the Steele dossier was a work of “fanfiction” by internet trolls on 4chan. Andrew Weisburd, a private intelligence analyst who has done work for the U.S. intelligence community, has found that Zero Hedge is at the center of a web of conspiracy sites with spokes extending out into the darkest fringes of the internet.
Zero Hedge takes a particular interest in the controversy surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger jet that was shot down in Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led criminal investigation last year charged four people, three of whom had ties to Russian intelligence, with shooting down the plane. A few days after the criminal charges were filed, Zero Hedge published a story claiming, without evidence, that the U.S. was using the MH17 crash as a pretext for a NATO invasion of eastern Ukraine. An analysis by the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a project of the Atlantic Council, found that even though Zero Hedge is written in English, this disinformation narrative was picked up by Russian-language media, demonstrating “the synergy between conspiracy outlets in English and pro-Kremlin fringe media in Russian.”
A former Zero Hedge employee named Colin Lokey, who says he earned more than $100,000 in a year writing much of the site’s political content, claimed that he felt pressure to frame issues in a misleading way. “I tried to inject as much truth as I could into my posts, but there’s no room for it,” Lokey told Bloomberg in 2016. “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” In its published reply, Zero Hedge blasted Lokey as “deranged” and said critics had falsely called the website a Russian disinformation outlet “simply because we refused to follow the pro-U.S. script.”
All this only made the criminal complaint against me more puzzling. Why file a criminal complaint, instead of a lawsuit, in Bulgaria? Why call attention to the site’s ties to Bulgaria, and possibly to Russia? And all for a post hardly anyone had read?
It was clear I had touched a nerve. But how? What had I stumbled into? ...
The PropOrNot site that the WaPo was pushing had an old-timey blacklist of sites, including ZeroHedge that they said had all sorts of nefarious connections.
Another site PropOrNot went after was Naked Capitalism.
December 5, 2016
Fake News' Site Threatens Washington Post With Real Lawsuit
From Naked Capitalism:December 6, 2016
We Demand That The Washington Post Retract Its Propaganda Story Defaming Naked Capitalism and Other Sites and Issue an Apology
The Site Behind the Washington Post's 'Fake News' Hit Piece Appears To Be Ukrainian
And just to be clear, when I called some of the WaPo folks a bunch of 'Bozos', that was just a typo.December 8
I meant 'Bezos', they're a bunch of Bezos.
Yeah, that's the ticket....
"Media That Focus on Scandals and Spread Fake News to Smear Politicians Risk Becoming Like People Who Have a Morbid Fascination with Excrement"--Pope Francis
BOMBSHELL: Prince Was Secretly Married, Died To Protect CIA Connection !!!
Rolling Stone Slams Washington Post Over Fake News Story
And a few others, use the search blog box if interested.
