10 Ways to Call Something Russian Disinformation Without Evidence
27th October 2020
Matt Taibbi weighs in on the latest fashionable fantasy.
How do you call something “Russian disinformation” when you don’t have evidence it is? Let’s count the ways.
We don’t know a whole lot about how the New York Post story about Hunter Biden got into print. There are some reasons to think the material is genuine (including its cache of graphic photos and some apparent limited confirmation from people on the email chains), but in terms of sourcing, anything is possible. This material could have been hacked by any number of actors, and shopped for millions (as Time has reported), and all sorts of insidious characters – including notorious Russian partisans like Andrei Derkach – could have been behind it.
None of these details are known, however, which hasn’t stopped media companies from saying otherwise. Most major outlets began denouncing the story as foreign propaganda right away and haven’t stopped. A quick list of the creative methods seen lately of saying, “We don’t know, but we know!”