If NewsGuard Says It's Fake, It's Gotta Be Good

NewsGuard and Microsoft Team Up To Destroy Independent Media Ahead Of 2020 Elections: Linked To Several Think Tanks, Government Officials

PatriotRising, January 31, 2019: The service NewsGuard, an establishment attempt to silence alternative media and independent media sites, has teamed up with Microsoft to help its effort to destroy free press. Meanwhile, the mysterious firm connected to intelligence agencies and former government officials on their advisory board has also just been linked to Saudi Arabia through Publicis Groupe, an investor in NewsGuard.

NewsGuard is now automatically included in Microsoft’s Edge browser on iOS, Android and Microsoft phones. Microsoft’s press release regarding the partnership states that NewsGuard “will empower voters by providing them with high-quality information about the integrity and transparency of online news sites.” Just one problem, who is providing transparency about the news rating agency?

When a user decides to search the Web, the extension tells the user whether or not a story is credible or not credible with 5 indicators and an information box judging the website.

• Green icon — Sites that follow “basic standards of accuracy and accountability” based on nine criteria,which include full disclosure of possible conflicts of interest, financing, and “notable ideological or political positions held by those with significant financial interests in the site.”
• Red icon — Sites that do not fulfill NewsGuard’s criteria for credibility and transparency.
• Orange icon — Satire and humor sites that mimic real news.
• Blue icon — Sites that primarily host user-generated content.
• Gray icon —Unrated sites.

There is just one problem: the plugin is only blacklisting certain sites and does not actually have fact checkers looking into the story in question. So, in fact, the service is censoring alternative and independent media. But, let’s be honest, that’s exactly what its founders, creators, funders, and advisors want.

About that transparency … the list of advisors for NewsGuard includes Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time magazine and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy (Obama administration), (Ret.) General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA, former Director of the National Security Agency and former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (George W. Bush administration), Don Baer, chairman of Burson, Cohn & Wolfe and former White House Communications Director (Clinton administration), Elise Jordan, political analyst, NBC, and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Oh and then there are the journalists (traitors of free speech) like John Battelle, co-founding editor of Wired and founding chief executive of Industry Standard and Jessica Lessin, founder, and editor-in-chief of The Information.

If you aren’t worried about a company with a former CIA director (who lied under oath to Congress misleading officials, according to the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program) and a former secretary of Homeland Security official as its advisors, you may need a reality check. Please go see Dr. Ben Swann for a checkup stat!

Then there is Richard Stengel, a member of the Atlantic Council (neo-liberal think tank) and former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy under President Barack Obama who deserves a short blurb for his own involvement. Why? Because Stengel admitted his role in life at a previous discussion hosted last May by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). At the event Stengel described his past position at the State Department as a “chief propagandist” and further stated that he is “not against propaganda” and it was needed. H/T Disobedient Media.

“Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful,” Stengel said.

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The Skripal Poisonings: How? By Whom? With What? And Where Are The Skripals Now?

A post by Rob Slane of the Blogmire Blog offers some significant details concerning the alleged Russian poisoning of the pardoned Russian traitor and British agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, as they sat on a park bench in the quiet English cathedral city of Salisbury on the afternoon of March 4, this year.

Based on video evidence from the scene of the crime, Lane proposes a plausible theory of how, and by whom, the Skripal's were poisoned, a key question intensively obfuscated by the British media.

Lane also explains why the poison could not have been the deadly nerve agent, Novichok, as claimed by UK Prime Minister Theresa May, a claim endlessly repeated by the British media.


Instead, Lane suggests that the poison could have been, as we have also suggested, the widely available and much less deadly nerve agent BZ, which was initially reported to have been found in blood samples from the Skripal's, a fact that was later attributed to it having been added to the blood samples by the analytical laboratory for the purpose, so it was bizarrely claimed, of calibration.

In connection with the question of the identity of the poison,  Lane constructs the following relevant time-line of events:

15:35 – Sergei Skripal and Yulia leave Zizzis. They make their way to The Maltings, presumably along Market Walk (although strangely there is no CCTV footage of this), a walk of about two minutes or so.  15:37 – When they got to The Maltings, they appear not to have gone straight to the bench, but to the Avon Playground (approximately 50 yards from the bench), where they spent some time feeding ducks. They presumably then went over to the bench, a few minutes after this. 15:47 – The mysterious pair, one of whom is carrying a red bag, are seen on CCTV walking through Market Walk in the direction of The Maltings.  16:03 – One of the first witnesses to the scene, Freya Church, who was working in the nearby Snap Fitness, leaves work at 16:00 or thereabouts, and sees the Skripals on the bench at approximately 16:03. According to her account, they were already “out of it”, which suggests that they had been poisoned some minutes previously. She noted that there was a red bag on the floor next to Yulia’s feet.  16:15 – Emergency services are called and the pair are taken to Salisbury District Hospital, Yulia by helicopter and Sergei by ambulance. Upon admittance, the hospital believed that the pair had overdosed on Fentanyl, and treated this as an opioid poisoning for at least 24 hours after the incident. Later that evening – Police remove the red bag, and it has never been heard of or mentioned in connection with the story since.

The last point, that the Skripals were assumed to have overdosed on fentanyl, would explain the letter by Stephen Davies, the Salisbury Hospital Resident in Emergency Medicine, stating that no one was treated at the hospital for nerve agent poisoning.

A question that Lane does not address is the video that was released showing Julia Skripal in an interview with Reuters following her release from hospital. This video is worthy of close examination.


There are at least two remarkable things to note. First, Yulia Skripal appears not only much slimmer, than before her poisoning ordeal, but distinctly younger too, which is an odd consequence of long drawn out struggle for life.

Second, Yulia, wears a dress with a high collar, but open at the front as if intended to focus attention on her deep tracheotomy scar. That seems strange. Would not most women with the misfortune to bear such a disfiguring scar have chosen a garment with a collar that concealed the scar? And if that is conceded, then it seems reasonable to assume that Yulia displayed her scar for a purpose, namely, to leave no doubt in the public mind that she had indeed been close to death and in need of surgical intervention as a result of her alleged Russian poisoning.

But if the video is a piece of theatre to reinforce the British Government narrative on the Skripal poisoning, it would seem wise to consider the possibility that the entire interview is fake. It would surely not be difficult, given the latest methods of film creation and modification, to take an old video of a slightly younger and slimmer Yulia in an unidentifiable location and dub it with a different script. How many British or American viewers would be any the wiser? Surely few indeed: she is after all, speaking Russian, not English. And to such a false presentation, the addition of a tracheotomy scar would surely not have been difficult.

Will we have a chance to learn more from Yulia in the coming months? Unlikely. The story about the Skripals has already caused the British Government enough embarrassment. More than a month ago the CIA offered to "protect" the Skripals by providing them with new identities in America. Presumably, therefore, the Skripals will by now have been taken care of, whether of their own volition or not.

What this story seems to show is that not only is the news fake, but that it is now faked at the direct instigation of the state.

Related Posts:

The Skripal File

Aangirfan, aka Aanirfan, Is STILL a Fraudster

As we pointed out in:

Aangirfan, aka Aanirfan, Is a Fraudster,

the conspiracy theory blog, Aangirfan-aka-Aanirfan, has used pictures of Donald Trump with his own children to imply that Trump is a child abuser.

 Aangirfan, aka Aanirfan, is thus, in the current terminology, a creator of fake news.

The Aangirfan, aka Aanirfan, post referred to in our earlier report, which described Donald Trump as a Nazi Zionist, has now been deleted. However, in a post published today entitled:

 TRUMP BEING BLACKMAILED BY RUSSIANS'

Aangirfan, aka Aanirfan, employs the same fraudulent technique to smear Trump as a paedophile.