“Disinformation”

WASHINGTON—In January 2023, a representative claiming to work with a European finance professional named Eduard Grigoriann shared instructions with a popular U.S. conservative media influencer to start a new YouTube channel.

“Find a personality that could serve as the face of the channel,” Grigoriann’s representative said. “For the right candidate we’re willing to pay around $1-2 million per year.”

The representative was a fictitious persona, as was Grigoriann, U.S. prosecutors said this week. They were fake identities being secretly operated by two Russian nationals seeking to advance Moscow’s desires to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.

The social media accounts of two of Canada’s most vocal far-right pundits have fallen unusually silent after U.S. officials accused them of being collaborators of a covert Russian propaganda campaign.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment against two Russian nationals, accusing them of setting up a conservative media outlet as a front for pro-Kremlin propaganda.

True thing: I never heard of Lauren Chen or Tenet media before this story broke.

All of the other “right wing influencers” in Tenet’s stable have issued statements claiming to have been duped by Chen and her husband.

That Southern has not issued a public statement or responded to a CBC request for comment does not imply complicity as CBC hopes.

@fancypants_s https://t.co/VBDw4EHl2Y

— Patti Jo (@TheSupeHero) September 5, 2024

h/t Patti Jo

The BBC tracks down a Canadian hockey player, a dad in Pakistan and a Texan named Kevin linked to Channel3Now.

What connects a dad living in Lahore in Pakistan, an amateur hockey player from Nova Scotia – and a man named Kevin from Houston, Texas?

They’re all linked to Channel3Now – a website whose story giving a false name for the 17-year-old charged over the Southport attack was widely quoted in viral posts on X. Channel3Now also wrongly suggested the attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK by boat last year.

This, combined with untrue claims the attacker was a Muslim from other sources, has been widely blamed for contributing to riots across the UK – some of which have targeted mosques and Muslim communities.

The UK is now seeing Soviet levels of propaganda with fake stories of '100 riots planned' by the 'far-right' which never happened supplanted with puff pieces for regime backed far-left 'counter-demonstrations'.#TwoTierKier pic.twitter.com/MwbMPl6kIQ

— David Kurten (@davidkurten) August 8, 2024

Contrary to the Secret Service director’s statement, AGR International’s low-pitch roof presents no special ‘safety factor.’ I would know.

Unless they can serve a broad cultural and geographic cross section of the nation, NPR and PBS don’t merit taxpayer support.

Concern about media bias — specifically politically liberal bias — has moved center stage thanks to the cri de coeur by National Public Radio’s Uri Berliner in the Free Press. The network’s business editor, who resigned in the aftermath of his speaking truth to power, wrote that “politics intruded” on a wide variety of coverage, from Covid to “Russiagate,” connecting what he regards as the network’s movement to the Left to the fact that he could identify exactly zero registered Republicans in its D.C. newsroom.

The same can be said of our CBC. Most of what they produce seems to be for CBC staff and their transgender, social justice friends.