Trump Appointee Removes 'Firewall' Preventing Administration From Meddling In VOA Reporting

from the impossible-to-breach-a-firewall-that-no-longer-exists dept

Earlier this month, it was reported that the "rule of law" Trump administration was (yet again) violating the law. In this particular case, Trump appointee Michael Pack -- the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media -- was breaching a codified "firewall" to target Voice of America reporters he believed were too critical of Trump and his actions.

The "firewall" was erected to prevent exactly what Pack was doing. It was supposed to allow VOA reporters to act independently, rather than be subjected to the whims of presidential administrations. Breaching the firewall allowed Pack and the White House to control the narrative by sidelining or targeting journalists who expressed anti-administration sentiments elsewhere. Specifically cited were "retweets" and "likes" of social media posts criticizing Trump, as well as certain VOA pieces that highlighted the negative aspects of administration efforts.

Apparently, the problem was the law, not the lawbreaking. As NPR reports, Michael Pack has removed the law that prevented him from meddling in the day-to-day operation of Voice of America. It was done like most unseemly moves by governments are done: late in the day during a very busy news cycle.

A regulatory "firewall" intended to protect Voice of America and its affiliated newsrooms from political interference in their journalism was swept aside late Monday night by the chief executive of the federal agency which oversees the government's international broadcasters.

Michael Pack, a Trump appointee who assumed leadership of the U.S. Agency for Global Media in June, wrote that he acted to eliminate policies that were "harmful to the agency and the U.S. national interest." And Pack argued they had interfered with his mandate "to support the foreign policy of the United States."

[...]

Pack's bold move was taken in the dark of night — announced at 10:18 p.m. Eastern Time in a note to all of USAGM's several thousand employees, on the same night as the swearing-in of a new U.S. Supreme Court justice, and just eight days before Election Day.

Pack's late night memo says the law needed to go because it was preventing him from directly meddling in VOA affairs. According to Pack and his "extensive legal analysis," the VOA was always supposed to be a potential propaganda mouthpiece for sitting presidents and their administrations.

In its final hours of existence, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) issued a so-called “firewall rule,” instituting a significant misinterpretation of the 1994 International Broadcasting Act (IBA). I rescinded that rule based upon extensive legal analysis of the regulation and its conflict with Congress’s statutory mandate for USAGM – BBG’s successor – to support the foreign policy of the United States.

The “firewall rule” created a barrier between USAGM and the U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcasters and grantees under its management: the Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia, and the Open Technology Fund. The rule prohibited the CEO from engaging in managerial and editorial oversight, which Congress mandated the CEO to conduct to ensure that the agency carries out its proper governmental mission.

I'm sure the FOIA requests have been sent out for copies of the "extensive legal analysis" supporting Pack's unilateral removal of the firewall. And I'm sure no one will be seeing any responses any time soon, especially when it's certain the USAGM will claim it's a "deliberative" document that's also shielded by attorney-client privilege… even if it contains little more than Pack talking himself into doing something he was already doing.

No one who represents the Administration should be directly steering the editorial direction of the Voice of America, least of all this particular appointee.

[Pack] has embraced Trump's talk of a so-called "deep state" thwarting the president's priorities at USAGM, and Pack echoed White House immigration policies in denying visa extensions for foreign employees. Pack also instigated investigations of the Urdu language service, the French-to-Africa service and VOA's White House bureau chief over perceived anti-Trump bias in stories involving Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, or their wives, as NPR previously revealed.

Pack truly seems to believe Voice of America should be a cheerleader for the Administration. His own bio page links to a Washington Examiner article with the headline "New foreign broadcasting chief cleans house, pushes pro-America reporting." The article discusses Pack's firing of every VOA radio director and his feeling that VOA should be pushing "American ideals," along with "responsible criticism." This housecleaning -- and Pack's latest actions -- appear to be the end result of the Administration's criticism of VOA earlier this year, just as the pandemic was taking hold in the United States.

Now that the firewall is gone, so is the language on the USAGM's site touting the firewall's guarantee of journalistic independence. This part of the USAGM's "Myths and Untruths" FAQ has been memory-holed.

An essential guarantee of the journalistic credibility of U.S. global media content is the firewall enshrined in USAGM’s enabling legislation, the U.S. International Broadcasting Act.

The firewall prohibits interference by U.S. government officials, including the USAGM’s Chief Executive Officer, in the objective, independent reporting of news by USAGM networks (VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, MBN, and Radio and TV Martí), thereby safeguarding the ability of USAGM journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference.

There won't be any more of this apparently useless "journalistic credibility," not with Pack in charge. The VOA belongs to the Administration now. And if Pack's rollback sticks, future presidential administrations will be able to steer the VOA towards more favorable reporting on their activities.

Filed Under: journalism, michael pack, propaganda, usagm, voice of america
Companies: voice of america

Twitter Fixes Its Bad Policy On Blocking 'Hacked' Documents

from the good-to-see dept

As I'm sure you're already aware, there was a lot of focus this week on Twitter's content moderation practices, after it chose to stop people from linking to a sketchy NY Post article that contained some emails taken from a computer that was claimed to have been Hunter Biden's laptop. While many in the Trump orbit were insisting that this was "anti-conservative bias," the company said that the issue was violating its "hacked content" policies, as well as its policies against showing images revealing personal information, such as email addresses.

As we have discussed in the past this policy was already quite controversial, out of fear that it would be used to block reporting on leaked documents.

Late last night, Twitter announced that after hearing those concerns, they were changing the policy. Rather than responding to the controversy, and the nonsense grandstanding by clueless politicians, they were actually responding to the legitimate concerns many of raised about how this policy could block legitimate reporting, journalism organizations, and activist groups:

The new policy is that Twitter may -- instead of blocking such links outright -- begin to add labels and context to such links. In other words (once again) taking a "more speech" approach, rather than a straight up "block" decision. I think this is the right move and, while I wish Twitter had made it earlier, it's good to see the company paying attention and improving.

As the new announcement notes, the policy against linking to private information or manipulated media remain in place -- suggesting that this won't actually change the ability to link to that NY Post article. But it does fix the hamfisted nature of that policy.

Filed Under: content moderation, friction, hacked documents, journalism, labelling, more speech, reporting
Companies: twitter

ICE Spent Your Tax Dollars Dragging A Journalist Through The Internet Sewer Over A Mistake She Apologized For

from the fine-people dept

Law enforcement officers protect their own. Even when they shouldn't. They are quick to react when one of them is slighted and they do so knowing their position as arbiters of law affords them more protection against internet randos than the little people they're supposed to be serving.

But something that gets lost in these far-too-common reactions is that this is how taxpayers' money is being spent: on vindictive actions that could have been handled with a 30-second statement or a press release that might take all of 20 minutes to compose.

But instead of letting things go and realizing their position of power is probably all the response that's needed, tax dollars are spent converting hurt feelings into investigations of private citizens who managed to offend the powers that be. Ken Klippenstein has obtained documents from a FOIA request (and the de rigueur FOIA lawsuit) that shows ICE decided to get all investigatory when someone mistook a tattoo on one of its officials for a racist symbol. That this person was a journalist makes it all that more problematic.

In June of 2018, Talia Lavin, then a fact-checker for The New Yorker, found herself in an unusual position for a journalist: She personally became the target of a government agency. She had come under the scrutiny of ICE’s Office of Public Affairs, the public face of the agency that played a central role in President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented migrants.

[...]

When Lavin saw a tweet from ICE featuring one of its officials, Justin Gaertner, with a cross-shaped tattoo, she wondered if it was the Iron Cross familiar to Nazi iconography. She posted a tweet comparing them. When people began pointing out that it could be another symbol, like a Maltese cross, Lavin promptly removed the tweet. But it was already too late.

ICE first responded with a press release. It was not your normal press release. It accused Lavin (mentioning her name [but misspelled as "Levin") of "baselessly slandering" the "American hero" who worked for the agency. It demanded an apology and a retraction from Lavin and The New Yorker. Following ICE's public flogging of Lavin, she became a target for vitriol and abuse by white supremacists and alt-right figureheads. Fox News called her a "little journo terrorist."

Eye for an eye and all that, I guess. You'd think ICE would have been satisfied with the shitstorm it had stirred up. It provoked a response and got some of what it wanted. Lavin not only apologized but she resigned from The New Yorker.

ICE's main focus -- according to the documents obtained by Klippenstein -- was securing the future of the official pointed out in Lavin's since-deleted tweet. The Public Affairs office began burnishing the official's war record and claimed to have evidence of credible threats to the official's life. But the only "threat" detailed in email threads was one from someone responding to Lavin's tweet, stating that the person wished whoever had wounded the official in combat "would've finished the job." Cue a whole bunch of government gears, all grinding tax dollars into salve for skin-deep scratches.

“HSI Tampa will be carefully assessing the twitter based threats and will take appropriate action,” an HSI official replied. “Looping in AD [Assistant Director] Ip for C3 [ICE Cyber Crimes Center] support. HSI Tampa will be submitting a SIR [Significant Incident Report] shortly.”

More remarkably, the email communications indicate ICE may never have seen Lavin's tweet before it was deleted. ICE's press office -- for all the time it spent making sure its official remained unslighted -- didn't bother preserving the tweet it found so offensive that it issued a press release decrying the person who had published it.

One tweet by a journalist containing one innocent mistake (it's no secret white supremacists are drawn to law enforcement positions) led to multiple DHS agencies being apprised of non-credible threats while ICE's public affairs office decided it was in the best interest of the public to publicly attack a journalist for screwing up. It got what it wanted -- a retraction, an apology, and a resignation -- but at what cost?

Certainly ICE took a hit to its credibility. It may have been correct about the innocuous nature of the tattoo, but it made its point by turning a journalist into a target for internet pitchforks. This is called "punching down." It could have issued a statement in support of the official and left it at that, but instead, it felt compelled to turn this into a public flogging and an internal investigation handled so sloppily the multi-billion dollar agency couldn't even search the Wayback Machine for the tweet prompting its deluge of unprofessional behavior.

Filed Under: dhs, foia, hsi, ice, intimidation, investigation, journalism, justin gaertner, talia lavin, the new yorker

New Study: Once Again, The Mainstream Media Is A Bigger Problem In Spreading Disinformation Than Social Media

from the deal-with-fox-news-first dept

We've discussed in the past Yochai Benkler's excellent book "Network Propaganda," (and had Benkler on our podcast) showing (with a ton of data) how the inclination many have to immediately blame social media for the spread of disinformation is, in its own way, misinformation itself. What the research found was that crazy conspiracy theories didn't really spread as fast until they showed up on Fox News. That was basically the catalyst for them to then spread wildly on social media.

Benkler and his team are back with a new study, specifically regarding how disinformation about mail-in ballots has spread. And, again, the details show that mass media was the key in making it spread, with social media "playing a secondary role."

Despite the consensus among independent academic and journalistic investigations that voter fraud is rare and extremely unlikely to determine a national election, tens of millions of Americans believe the opposite. This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.

Using the same methods in Network Propaganda, they found that this time it went beyond Fox News, but that the President was basically using his position at President, to harness the big mainstream media operations -- which still have simply failed to contend with how to cover a President who deliberately lies, who deliberately tries to bully the media into spreading utter nonsense. The report shows that he's been very, very successful in turning the media -- who he frequently accuses of publishing "fake news" -- into actual purveyors of fake news: namely the fake news Donald Trump himself wants them to spread.

Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation.

Of course, Fox News and the wider Republican Party and media ecosystem also remains a key issue:

The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.

Benkler wrote a detailed post for the Columbia Journalism Review that gives you a more reader friendly version of the paper's findings. In it, he notes that when it comes to mail-in ballot disinformation, it's not happening because of foreign interference or social media algorithms. The disinformation is coming from inside the White House.

What this means is that the “usual suspects” in public debates about disinformation are not the central actors in voting disinformation. We found no examples where clickbait factories, fake pages (Russian or otherwise), or Facebook’s algorithms could explain any peak in engagement that was not better explained as having been set in motion and heavily promoted by political figures and elite right-wing media personalities, and disseminated to millions by major media outlets. On Twitter, if bots or trolls played any role, it was dwarfed by tweets from the president, his staff, and other institutional and media allies.

While the information does eventually spread on social media, that happens after the mainstream media discusses it. As Benkler notes, all the worries and attacks about social media appear to be somewhat misguided:

There is a profound disconnect between the broad public concern with social media disinformation, the persistent scientific evidence that exposure to online fake news is concentrated in a tiny minority of users, and survey evidence that repeatedly shows that less than 20 percent of US respondents say they rely on social media as a major source of political news. Network and local TV, by contrast, are the primary source of political news for about 30 percent of the population, and news websites or apps accounted for another 25 percent, according to the most recent Pew survey. When arranged according to the degree to which they report believing mail-in voter fraud is a major problem, adults who get their news from ABC, CBS, and NBC occupy an intermediate position between Fox News viewers, on one end, and readers of the New York Times, viewers of MSNBC, or NPR listeners, on the other. Local TV news viewers, in turn, form the least politically knowledgeable group of Americans, edging out the much younger respondents who mostly rely on social media. When we analyzed the stories about mail-in voter fraud, we observed that peaks in media coverage usually consisted of large numbers of syndicated stories reported by the online sites of local papers and television stations.

There's a lot more in the full paper, but the underlying message is that perhaps we should stop blaming social media for disinformation. That does not appear to be the root of the problem at all.

Filed Under: disinformation, donald trump, journalism, mail in ballots, mainstream media, misinformation, social media
Companies: associated press, facebook, fox news

Fake 'Russian Hack' Of Public Michigan Voter Rolls Gets Absurdly Overhyped On The Interwebs

from the good-old-fashioned-freak-out dept

On Tuesday morning a story began making the rounds indicating that Russian hackers had somehow managed to hack into Michigan's election systems, gaining access to a treasure trove of voter data. Russian newspaper Kommersant was quick to proclaim that nearly every voter in Michigan -- and a number of voters in additional states -- had had their personal information compromised. The report was quickly parroted by other outlets including the Riga-based online newspaper Meduza, which insisted that the breach was simply massive:

"Russian hackers have leaked the personal data of nearly every voter in Michigan (7.6 million of the state’s 7.8 million voters), as well as the information of another million voters in Arkansas, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Florida, according to the newspaper Kommersant. The data recently appeared on a Darknet forum, posted by a user nicknamed “Gorka9.” The information was current as of March 2020 and a source at the security firm “InfoWatch” confirmed to Kommersant that the data is authentic.

For each American voter targeted in the leak, the following information is now available: full name, date of birth, sex, date of registration, home address, zip code, email address, voter ID number, and polling station number."

The reports also insisted that hackers were then exploiting the U.S. Rewards for Justice Program to get paid for bringing the hack to the attention of the U.S. government. From there, the story quickly ballooned across Twitter, thanks in part to journalists:

The problem? This data was already either widely available, or available via a basic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Much like the recent hysteria over TikTok (in which many people act as if banning the app prohibits China from accessing U.S. user data that's available pretty much everywhere thanks to our crap privacy and security standards), people that actually study or report on infosec for a living were then forced to try and do damage control by adding useful context. That context being that the ease in which anybody could obtain this data means it doesn't actually hold much value:

The disconnect between those that cover infosec for a living, and those who engage in security or privacy tourism on Twitter was a bit jarring:

The one truly interesting bit, that the U.S. tip line was being exploited to pay hackers for directing them to publicly accessible data, is far more interesting and will require additional reporting. Meanwhile, the Michigan Department of State was forced to issue a statement noting it was never hacked, and urging internet users to exercise a little better judgement in terms of what they choose to hyperventilate over:

All told, just another day on the internet. Granted, our non-transparent and dodgy election security systems in many states still pose a genuine threat to U.S. security. A threat that's not being fully addressed due to the fact we seem to have idiotically made basic election security a partisan issue. But freaking out over inflated claims of hacks that never happened sure as hell isn't helping to fix that problem.

Filed Under: fact checking, hacks, journalism, michigan, russia, voter rolls