Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump's empire of disinformation?; The Guardian, April 4, 2021

David Smith, The Guardian; Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump's empire of disinformation?

"“Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.”...

Eisen, a former White House “ethics czar”, suggests that the Dominion case could provide at least one model for dealing with the war on truth.

“The United States and the world need to deal with disinformation,” he said.

“There can be no doubt that every method is going to be required but certainly libel law provides one very important vehicle for establishing consequences and while there’s no such thing as a guarantee when you go to court, this is an exceptionally high risk for Fox with a large price tag attached as well.”...

 RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Washington Post: “We are seeing the way that libel has become a real battleground in the fight against disinformation."

Inside The Russian Disinformation Playbook: Exploit Tension, Sow Chaos; Fresh Air with Terry Gross via 91.7 FM San Francisco KALW,

[Podcast] Fresh Air with Terry Gross via 91.7 FM San Francisco KALW; Inside The Russian Disinformation Playbook: Exploit Tension, Sow Chaos

"This is FRESH AIR I'm Terry Gross. The Russian playbook for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories is the subject of a new three-part video series on The New York Times website titled "Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation: From The Cold War To Kanye." One episode goes back to the 1980s, when the Russians created and spread the conspiracy theory that the AIDS virus was created by the U.S. military for use as a biological weapon. The other episodes are "The Seven Commandments Of Fake News" and "The Worldwide War On Truth." My guest, Adam Ellick, produced and co-directed the series. He's the executive producer of opinion video at The New York Times, which is a new feature on their website.

Previously, he was senior international video correspondent and a reporter at the Times who focused on human rights. When he was reporting from Pakistan in 2009, he was the first journalist to tell the story of Malala and how, with her father, she fought for girls to have the right to attend school. That was three years before she was shot. In 2015, Ellick co-produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning video about an Afghan woman who was burned to death by a mob. Ellick won three Overseas Press Club awards for his coverage of Pakistan and the Arab Spring. He produced videos from North Korea one year ago.

Adam Ellick, welcome to FRESH AIR. So I want to start with the conspiracy theory about the AIDS virus. And you track how this originates with Russian fake news, with Russian disinformation. So just describe the conspiracy theory for those people who don't remember it."

What Flake got right — and wrong; Washington Post, January 17, 2018

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post; What Flake got right — and wrong

"Flake gave an impressive and far-reaching speech indicting Trump’s web of lies and the damage his international pals (e.g., Vladimir Putin) are doing to freedom of the press. He correctly admonished his Senate colleagues that undermining truth strengthens the hand of despots. Give him credit — but only partial credit. Elected Republicans engage in much of the same anti-truth propaganda as the president does. The evening programming of an entire TV cable “news” network is dedicated to conspiracy theories, misleading information about immigrants and terrorists, and refusal to cover facts that contradict the president’s tropes.

Trump did not materialize out of thin air. He masterfully manipulated white grievance and anti-elite conspiracy-mongering. But the ground was plowed by many of Flake’s colleagues and by Republicans’ self-selected news outlets. Getting rid of Trump will help, but unless and until the mind-set that permeates the right is dismantled, the war on the truth will rage on."