This article is a logical sequel to an Argentum Post article published on  December 25, 2016   and titled :

Anne Applebaum Claiming Being Victim of “Fake News” Actually Used “Fake News”, in Her Washington Post Op Ed, Wittingly or Not.

In said article it is pointed out that The Washington Post writer Anne Applebaum, trying to point out that she was the victim of “Fake News” in effect used,  “Fake News” by repeating the false meme that “Russia invaded Crimea”.

Anyone who is aware of the history of Crimea, or who engages in cursory research about Crimea’s history , knows that Russia did not invade Crimea since Crimea has been an integral part of Russia since 1783.

Crimea was historically part of Russia, and then in 1954, President Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR, who was born in the Ukraine, gave that Soviet republic added autonomy.

As even Forbes magazine notes, in an article dated March 20, 2015, .

“ The U.S and European Union may want to save Crimeans from themselves. But the Crimeans are happy right where they are:”

A total of 82.8% of Crimeans said yes in a referendum and when broken down by ethnicity, 93.6% of ethnic Russians said they believed the vote to secede from the Ukraine was legitimate, a Gallup poll published in June 2104 determined.

This writer wrote a letter-to-editor to The Washington Post to point out this false narrative by Anne Applebaum, and as a result was called days later by an editor of The Washington Post who indicated that said letter to the editor would be published, but first needed to ask a few questions comprising one as to whether this writer had “any relationship with Russia” which was replied to negatively.

So, in effect in Anne Applebaum’s op-ed in The Washington Post, where Ms. Applebaum claims to have been a victim of “Fake News” , actually used the  supra described “Fake News” to buttress her case of victimhood.

Incidentally, the editor of The Washington Post who contacted this writer and indicated that his “Letter to the Editor” on the supra noted subject matter would be published, subsequently informed this writer that the decision was made to not publish it because this writer had previously published an article on Anne Applebaum’s false claim that “Russia invaded Crimea”.

This fact is noted without prejudice against said editor though.

Now it turns out that The Washington Post has admitted to have published Russia what this writer characterizes as Russia dehumanizing and Russia demonizing “Fake News”, something which seemed obvious all along, since all of the charges of Russian hackers being responsible for the exposure of the Hillary Clinton e-mails and of the e-mails indicating the scandalous behavior of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and more articles such as the one claiming that Russian hackers attacked the electrical grid of the state of Vermont,  were not just specious, but were utterly bereft of any underlying solid forensic evidence.

Thanks to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks documented evidence, the DNC was exposed as brazenly conspiring to sabotage the Bernie Sanders campaign, something for which the director of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to resign  in disgrace as she and her top operatives in the DNC ,  engaged shamelessly in egregious unethical and illegal wrongdoing by attempting to harm the Bernie Sanders campaign by discussing to secretly float the false information that Bernie Sanders is not Jewish enough, or even, that he may be secular.

This was a disgrace for Schultz and for the DNC, and yet its disgraced director, Debbie Wasserman Schulz, as a very close friend of Hillary Clinton, was immediately hired by her to become an official of her campaign.

Immediately thereafter, Hillary Clinton, refused to speak about the content of the scandalous documentation which had just been exposed by Wikileaks, and to boot, and to deflect attention, she charged incredibly the Russian government and Putin  for the exposure of the sordid attempt by her friend, the DNC director and her top operatives, and yet, did not offer ever any evidence whatsoever of what turned out to be her “Fake News” charges against Russia and Putin.

But the Russia bashing, demonizing, dehumanizing campaign via the use of “Fake News” continued to be disseminated by the mainstream media as well as by hysterically opportunistic and corrupted politicians such as greedy agenda driven Senators as John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

There is now a plethora of sources which have debunked the myth of the Kremlin intervention in the DNC scandal exposure, as well in other fabricated stories such as that of a Russian cyber attack on the GE run electrical grid in Vermont, or that the journalist and founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is  a stooge of the Kremlin.

Not only did The Washington Post get involved in the spreading of these false stories, but even the New York Times jumped into this reckless, inflammatory, and dangerous  demonizing, dehumanizing, bashing of Russia which reminds us, of course, of the same kind of unprofessional, and recklessly inflammatory series of articles which led up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, again on false grounds, again by – inter alia – The Washington Post and the New York Times, not to mention the three major television networks.

To this day, 13 years later, the American people is experiencing the hemorrhage of treasury and blood, for not to mention the horrendous evolution of Al Qaeda, Al Nousra, and the monstrous Daesh / ISIS / ISL war which have robbed us of the funds we need to have a decent public health care system which truly affordable, the funds to massively invest in affordable public higher education, infrastructure and collective transportation systems, and so on, and have robbed the decent innocent inhabitants of Syria, Iraq, Lybia, Yemen of their lives, the lives of their loved ones,  and of their properties, and lifetime savings.

The following are the reports which focus on the The Washington Post’s collaboration in this attempt to deceive instead of inform publish opinion.

Kalev Leetaru of Forbes Reports:

[ On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.” The lead sentence offered “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.”

Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top-tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts.]

Aaron Short of the New York Post reports :

[ The Washington Post has retracted its story about Russian hackers penetrating the nation’s electricity grid with a virus found in a Burlington, Vt., electric company laptop.

“Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s website.

News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a thug” earlier Saturday, after one of the state’s electric utilities found a virus on a laptop computer. ]

Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge reports :

[ In “ Washington Post Appends “Russian Propaganda Fake News” Story, Admits It May Be Fake “

In the latest example why the “mainstream media” is facing a historic crisis of confidence among its readership, facing unprecedented blowback following Craig Timberg November 24 Washington Post story “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say“, on Wednesday a lengthy editor’s note appeared on top of the original article in which the editor not only distances the WaPo from the “experts” quoted in the original article whose “work” served as the basis for the entire article (and which became the most read WaPo story the day it was published) but also admits the Post could not “vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s finding regarding any individual media outlet”, in effect admitting the entire story may have been, drumroll “fake news” and conceding the Bezos-owned publication may have engaged in defamation by smearing numerous websites – Zero Hedge included – with patently false and unsubstantiated allegations.

It was the closest the Washington Post would come to formally retracting the story, which has now been thoroughly discredited not only by outside commentators, but by its own editor. ]

See infra the appended  note directly from The Washington Post.

Editor’s Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.

What is now most disturbing is that, while “Fake News” trash goes “viral” just as the “Fake News” went,  which sensationalistic ally titillated unselectively retired Lt. General Michael Flynn,  who absurdly was nominated by the president-in-waiting Trump to become his “National Security Adviser” (?!) who along with his son bought into the tabloid smut “Fake News” that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilia ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria,   what remains understated, is the fact the both, The Washington Post and the New York Times, inter alia, did  not yet have the decency to retract themselves loudly and clearly in first page headlines for engaging uncritically, inflammatorily, and dangerously sin the dissemination of lies which can lead countries to war and which deceive and mislead the American people scandalously.

The press is the only institution mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, as it is ideally a pillar of support for authentically participative democracy.

The press has a sacred privilege, honor, and therefore duty to inform honestly, and any deviation thereof  is a most serious dereliction of duty which can have the most grave  of consequences, as for vivid example this consequence of the its failure of that duty which facilitated the Bush/Cheney et al. war on Iraq on the basis of incitement, fear and hate mongering, and falsehoods.

Added to said acknowledgment of public disservice, not only by The Washington Post and The New York Times, but by all other MSM outlets and corrupted neocon and neolib politicians who fan the flames of dishonest agenda driven disinformation must come around to deliver categorical apologies and promises that reform coupled to the dismissal of senior officials involved in this odious practice, something that is an imperative which will be required if these institutions and politicians focus on maintaining credibility by providing the necessary evidence for their duty to inform objectively in the case of the media, and their duty to perform ethically and honestly in the case of the political elected officials.

Just today we learned additionally that the DNC declared that the FBI never even asked for access to supposedly hacked computer servers and that no U.S. government entity has run an independent forensic analysis of supposedly hacked computers involved in these allegations.

Finally a most incisive and professionally ethical analysis of this degradation of mainstream media and of the  political ethics panorama is herein incorporated infra by the Argentum Post within the context of the provision to its reader of the video clip of an interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now,  of Pulitzer Prize award investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the founders of Intercept .

This superb interview of this extraordinarily talented, bright, illustrious, ethical, and honest journalist is titled :

Glenn Greenwald on “Dearth of Evidence” Linking Russia to WikiLeaks Release of DNC Emails