Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media | Federal prosecutors say Russia paid an American media company to push pro-Kremlin messages from social media influencers
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/business/media/russia-tenet-media-tim-pool.html?unlocked_article_code=1.I04.xmnT.fRa_S8Q_hm2l&smid=url-shareOpen linkView original on slrpnk.net725
Comments83
"secretly"? lol, cmon
Anybody paying attention to how weird GOP media has been becoming for over a decade has been speculating in this direction. It's good that the DOJ has finally done something. And lol, tenet media has folded.
This story was in The New York Times. During 2016 election The New York Times published thousands of stories about Clinton email/Benghazi, not one on Trumps lifelong ties to NY/Russian mob. As if The New York Times wasn't in a particularly knowledgeable position to report on 70 years of NYC construction & mob history. All the money in my pocket says The Paper of Record has been taking Russian money for decades.
New York Times front page, three days before the 2016 election:
Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia
FUCK YOU NEW YORK TIMES
shooting the messenger
They knew what the fuck they were doing. They're not innocent at all.
"Shoot the messenger" is hundreds of years ago. That isn't this at all.
Yup! Remember Romney saying that Russia was our geopolitical enemy and Obama being the one who called that ridiculous? Ever since then the Republicans have had an absurd love affair with Putin.
To be fair, there was an honest gambit there with Our Pal Russia, the same one that was tried with China. It didn't work but it seemed like a fair thing to try, especially considering the economic constraints of the alternative.
Oh yeah, at the time Obama was right to try to repair relations with Russia. They’ve simply grown worse as they figured out how to poke at the world via information warfare.
Putin wanted to join NATO. The US rejected Russia as an ally, while adding other former Soviet republics to NATO. Russia was slow to realize America wasn't merely content with the fall of Soviet communism, but also wanted cheap access to its natural resources. Russia has adjusted accordingly.
America would've won cold war 1 & 2 in one move by admitting Russia to NATO and pitting them against China, but it got greedy.
A good bit of shit in Chechnya already happened by that point, Russia showed itself as having not totally abandoned its old ways. Best case scenario Russia improves, worst case they do exactly what theyve done and fuck up NATO in the process. And given how Russia has been historically, well lets just say better to not take a stupid gamble.
Russia in NATO is a stretch, but okay, maybe.
Putin in NATO is absurd. I don't know how you can even suggest that should have been entertained.
"Secretly"
This is the dead giveaway that NYT does not give a SHIT about all the fucked up pro-Trump shit they've pulled. Not even a little.
This is why I have zero problems when conservatives want to shit on it. "Yeah!" I say. Even though yeah usually they have something good there. Liberal media - yeah right. Fuck.
I agree with you, but let's try to not treat massive organizations as a single being. I'm sure even there some people were not ok with how pervasive Russian talking points were there. But then again, maybe I'm being naive.
If it weren’t pervasive, ubiquitous, and predictable I’d agree with you. But it’s as close to systemic as we can measure.
Why they do it is debatable, but that they do it is not.
I’m so glad this was top comment.
Yeah secretly my ass, this shit has been so obvious for years now
Then why didn't you fucking tell us you knew Tenet and Poole were shopping millions of dollars of propaganda?? Why the fuck didn't you tell us???
Tucker reports his shock at the current turn of events from his summer home in St. Petersburg Florida. 😉😉
"Secretly" lmao
Come on now. Worst kept secret in politics.
Secretly?
Secretly?! 🤣👌🏼
Worst kept secret ever.
Secretly?
Shit, I'm from the UK and I don't know a single person here that doesn't already know that the Conservatives in the US are infested with russian mouth pieces.
Horribly kept secret if you can even call it one.
This seems like kind of a poorly kept secret...
Weren't they bragging about it back when Trump was in office?
Yep, it went from "Better Dead Than Red" in the late 20th century to "I'd rather be Russian than be a democrat" on actual t-shirts.
Real "Socialism or Barbarian?" moment
‘an American media company’
Fucking who? Why this protection through obfuscation. Ugh
They do in the article. It's Tenet, Dave Rubin, Dim Fool, and a third person are also named.
I’m just frustrated they use this technique to drag people into the article. Maybe I just wanna see the company and if I’d heard of it before.
It's in the indictment: Tenet Media
The consensus (in most press) is that it's Tim Poole's company.
He's even made a statement about it. So it seems like a solid guess.
We have implemented this new thing called clickbaiting. How do you like it so far?
Companies should be dissolved. Men should go to prison. This is tantamount to treason
I think we should imprison the women involved as well
You'll get a bunch of headline gore followed by a DOJ that shelves this all as "unprosecutable".
In five years, Tim Poole will have a show on CNN where guest Jon Stewart recalls that he got caught taking Russian money. And we'll all get a laugh about how he did this with Crossfire to the same effect.
"secretly worms" is a pretty good way to describe Tucker Carlson, actually
Man, everybody knows T-cucks is just a pile of worms in a suit. Worst-kept secret in media. IIRC, he had to admit it in court—in connection with that leaked texts scandal.
What scandal?
It’s not a fucking secret. Russia has been fucking with America for like 70 years.
Secretly my ass. Anyone with a brain can see the same thing happening on Facebook, popular podcasts, and YouTube as what we see Lemmy from HB and ml.
Hot off the derp files.
No shit.
Fox News— Tucker Carlson, Shawn Hannity, Stepford Nazi edition wife Laura Ingraham and now Jesse Watters have been in the bag forever.
Rupert Murdoch has been licking Pootie’s sack and trying to bring down democracy.
"worms it's way into"? Boy, you're late, that worming has been done ages ago. It laid its eggs, and they did hatch already.
https://youtu.be/IpV1meRSqeE
This reads like a Baptist minister discovering a boyfriend his daughter's room, and then losing his shit like the boyfriend hadn't been invited in. "How could you dupe my sweet, innocent political party with your seductive money and influence!"
In case you missed the little summary above: Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin are the big ones.
And if you've never heard of them, your average Trump voter has.
to be clear, these are the just the end points of the money, lauren chen and her husband were the ones actually funneling the money into this corp and to these people. (and the two indicted russians obviously)
Her and her husband also knew about it being from russia, so they're likely getting fucked over by the fed soon for this one.
I would be surprised if there weren’t well placed Russian influence in most conservative media in the United States.
Bingo. People keep saying how obvious because views aligned 100% with Russia (which, randomly, is like lottery odds). I have conservative friends who believe all that shit and they don't follow any of these clowns. The amount of times they've regurgitated Russian propaganda to me verbatim is hard to comprehend, and I've been shouting this from the rooftops for the better part of 2 years. It was just so damn obvious. People who have never given a thought to news outside of the US all the sudden telling me about Nazis in Ukraine was just a little too on the nose.
I'd bet my savings account this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Tim Pool! I once knew a guy who thought everything he said was amazing
Tim Pool really recently said that he supports the death penalty for treason...
https://x.com/ItsDeanBlundell/status/1831677147146080386
Unsurprising news from anyone with half a brain cell...
Now do Congress
Open secret
I'll just leave this here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Fox News curiously silent.
Fox "news"
They won't say shit, get ready for some bullshit from them like finally finding Hunter's laptop or some bullshit about Walz or Kamala.
You guys!!! Why didn't anyone tell me about the secret? I had NO idea and now I look like an ASSHOLE!
Now do Tucker
What ever happened to the NRA after that russian spy thing?
IIRC, they declared bankruptcy then went back to business as usual.
Probably nothing
Secretly doing a illegitimate amount of lifting I that headline.
The fucking Muscovites influenced and supported their Orange Sock Puppet since the 2016 election.
A lot longer than that.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/
hey! just like the us have been doing to other countries for decades!
ironic if true.
Weird downvotes. Truth hurts I suppose.
Are they gonna make these same accusations on companies and people working on behalf of Israel?
weird whattaboutism. bit beyond a caasual "accusation", they've been officially indicted. I am sure that if Israeli propagandists had been indicted, you would hear about it.
I thought it was a Canadian company that then contracted out right-wing American personalities.
I remember thinking when I heard it that it's probably the smartest thing Russia could have done; sneak in the back door by using the Canadians as a go-between.
We've had a big problem with foreign agents in Canada. The federal government keeps downplaying it but several states appear to be acting with near impunity in Canada.
the guy behind it "eduard" who isn't real and doesnt exist was supposedly the canada guy.
It's possible lauren is based in canada, but the company was listed in kentucky? i think. The money was funneled in from various different shell corps.
Lauren and her partner are Canadians (Persons 1&2 in the indictment). They set up a company in Tennessee to manage production and pay the 'talent'.
yeah, i didn't and still don't know much about them personally, but i still believe unless i'm just pulling this part out of my ass that the fake person was supposed to be based either, somewhere in europe or possibly canada?
Regardless, they're still worse than the two russians that were indicted lol.
Yes. "Grigorian" was the fictitious investor they set up to act as the funding source.
However, in the communication between Chen and her husband they were able to figure out whoever that they were based out of Russia. In one of the messages between the they are found looking up Moscow time to check why Grigorian hadn't replied to a communication.
It's crazy.
yeah, it's truly wild. Especially when you consider how much tim pool was being paid, i think it was 400k a month? About 100k per video. Which is wildly outside of market value for what he was doing.
The fact that chen and her husband definitely knew, and that the primary hosts probably knew the funding was at the very least suspect, doesn't paint a good picture for the outcome of any of these people.
Now report on Iran, Qatar, and China worming their way into leftist media and college campuses.
Biggest foreign sponsor of CNN incidentally.
Social media is becoming a battleground for cultural warfare, divide and conquer in the information age