Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 16, 2017

Sean Adl-Tabatabai doesnt look much like a Russian propagandist. He doesnt come across much like your average alt-Right agitator either, with his neat Burberry polo shirt and his overwhelming nimbus of aftershave. And if you call what he does FAKE NEWS, he gets a little defensive.

I define my job as overseeing and editing an alternative news website thats what I do, says the founder-editor of Your News Wire as he squints into the sun on the roof of his apartment in Los Angeles. He regrets the fact that Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trumps long-suffering spokeswoman, has given alternative facts a bad name. What I mean is that we cover stories that the mainstream media isnt covering.

Stories such as: George Soros Orchestrates Devastating Plan to Kill 100,000 Haitians. And: Autism Rates in California Skyrocket Following Mandatory Vaccine Bill. And: Nicole Kidman Sent For Reprogramming After Supporting Trump. Stories that report from a looking-glass world where Hillary Clinton is connected to elite paedophile rings in Washington pizzerias, where climate change is a hoax, where Trump is mobilising US troops to counter a Chinese Pearl Harbor-style attack on California. All under a banner of NEWS. TRUTH. UNFILTERED.

Stories that have had Adl-Tabatabai, a former MTV producer from north London, accused of being part of a deliberate campaign to destabilise Western democracies with disinformation. His site has been blacklisted by an EU task force set up to combat Russian propaganda, and cited as one of the main reasons that Trump would win (or more accurately, Hillary Clinton would lose) the US presidential election.

Adl-Tabatabai, 35, lives in a Hollywood-Gothic apartment complex that you can imagine Philip Marlowe staking out in a Raymond Chandler novel. Theres something guileless about him. He actually seems to believe the stuff his site publishes or at least, to relish its textures and its tremors, like a teenager whos got a little lost inside a role-playing game. He lives with Sinclair, his American husband they signed the register in Camden at one minute past midnight on the day that David Cameron legalised gay marriage. Their apartment is filled with art, and I cant help but notice a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker too. Most of my friends and I would say, me too are liberals, he says. Im not some member of the alt-Right trying to stir up racial hatred or homophobia or anything. Im just ... very open to ideas.

He believes that the war on fake news is ridiculous its just ridiculous. The mainstream media is the sole reason for Trumps victory. They ignored the public. They didnt have their finger on the pulse. And I think whats happened since with this whole fake news debate is sour grapes. Instead of fixing the problem, theyre trying to blame someone else. And theres a certain truth to this; a recent Stanford University study concluded that the influence of sites such as his was marginal compared to the might of, say, Fox News. However, it did also note the stunning and dismaying consistency with which the participants of the study failed to tell the difference between advert, news and conspiracy.

As for the idea that hes an unwitting stooge of the Kremlin: Its so weird. Does he read Russia Today, the Moscow-sponsored news network? I love Russia Today! (Of course he does its one of his most cited sources.) You are aware that its Russian propaganda, right? Well, the BBC is British propaganda. Its the same thing. Its not the same thing. Britain has a free press, Russia does not. British journalists are not censored for criticising the Government, Russian journalists are. Publicly funded is not the same as state broadcaster I could go on. I just think theres some hypocrisy there, he pleads. What about his article that claimed the Queen would flee Britain if we didnt leave the EU, since World War Three was on its way? This particular story featured direct quotes from Her Majesty, apparently overheard by a BBC employee: One is making the necessary preparations to abandon ship A violent storm is coming, the likes of which Britain has never seen.

I knew youd mention that one, he sighs. He justifies it by telling me he put it in his CONSPIRACIES section, where the most wackadoo content ends up. (A distinction that wouldnt trouble someone who came across the story on a Facebook news feed of course.) It was a BBC employee who emailed the website. The information he was giving us was so far-fetched, it was not something I could present to my audience as 100 per cent verified fact. But I did investigate and discovered that this person could have been party to that information. And I could say: Someone is claiming this, make of it what you will. I cant say whether that was real or not.

Between clickbait, sensationalism, exaggeration, satire, trolling and agenda-driven reporting, there is a whole dreamland of grey. Adl-Tabatabai claims kinship with Info Wars, whose creator Alex Jones promoted the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. (Trumps a fan.) But his dafter stuff isnt much different from, say, US supermarket tabloids such as the Weekly World News or the BIZARRE sections of our own much- vaunted press, which relish UFO stories and celebrity reincarnations. People are so hysterical now, theres this idea that anything weird must be wiped from the web because readers are crazy, says Adl-Tabatabai. No ones saying The Sun or the Express or the Mail should be banned.

Adl-Tabatabai had what he describes as an average childhood. His father is an accountant of Iranian origin; his mother Carol is an alternative health practitioner; he grew up in a council estate with a brother and a sister and attended an all-boys Catholic school. He wasnt academic but a teenage role as an extra on Grange Hill excited his interest in the media and when he left school he found a job as a runner on Top of the Pops. (Presumably this is where his faith in the BBC began to erode the stars were MIMING! Its fake pop, folks!) He later took a course in media studies It was a pile of s**t really and worked his way up through various TV production jobs. But it was a meeting with David Icke the former BBC presenter who announced that he was the son of God on Wogan in 1990 that he describes as the biggest step to what he does now.

Inspiration: David Icke (Bruce Adams)

Adl-Tabatabi was working on a pilot for a conspiracy theory show on MTV and had been tasked with duping Icke into making a fool of himself again. He was actually a really decent guy with a few wacky ideas and I thought, no, he doesnt deserve this. He tipped off Icke who was grateful. When he was sacked from MTV, he worked for Icke for years as a web designer and producer. Icke has since turned on his amanuensis (WHY ARE YOU FILLED WITH SUCH HATRED SEAN ADL-TABATABAI? What is your motivation? And who benefits?) But Adl-Tabatabai remains respectful. Hes just misinformed. Thats fine. What I liked about him was that he was fearless.

He reflects that his mothers approach to medicine may have made him more open-minded. A lot of people dabble in strange theories. Its not confined to this small subsection of ignorant people. Believing one or two things that another person doesnt think is legitimate doesnt mean that theyre thick.

You can be really passionate that these are the facts but someone else can come along whos equally as passionate. But it doesnt matter how passionate you are the facts remain the same. When you say facts are sacred, I would argue that no theyre not.

Adl-Tabatabai does have some regard for facts. As editor, he says he spends around 30 minutes fact-checking all the stories he publishes. If a story is particularly complex it can take a lot longer. He produces most of his news from a Macbook Pro on a glass desk next to a butterfly palm beneath a circular sunburst mirror. On a typical day he writes four or five stories personally, and puts up about 15 on the site. There are four or five regular contributors, including Baxter Dmitry (a Milo Yiannopoulos fanboy whose Facebook profile is taken in front of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg) and his mum, Carol. They tend to be paid commission, so the more clicks a story gets, the more cash the site generates thank you Google! He makes an OK living, he says, but the overheads are high and its all a bit harder since people started to worry about fake news. Still, the site receives between three and five million hits per month and hes delighted to say it has celebrity fans: Roseanne Barr loves us And Elijah Wood. And whos that woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey?

What was the last story he rejected? He thinks about this one for a while. There was a story about Hillary Clinton dying in hospital and having a body double and heres the proof ... I considered it. People like that stuff. Wed covered a lot of her illness. But it just felt a bit cheap and nasty and there was no real merit to it.

Follow Richard Godwin on Twitter: @richardjgodwin

Read more from the original source:
Sean Adl-Tabatabai on being in the eye of the 'fake news' storm - Evening Standard

Category: Anti-Defamation League
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