{"id":104613,"date":"2018-01-08T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=104613"},"modified":"2018-01-07T14:27:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-07T14:27:55","slug":"ghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/ghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts in the Propaganda Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

S. Mangal\u2019s social media profile and author photo.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhen I use a word,\u201d Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, \u201cit means just what I choose it to mean\u2014neither more nor less.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u201cThe question is,\u201d said Alice, \u201cwhether you can make words mean so many different things.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u201cThe question is,\u201d said Humpty Dumpty, \u201cwhich is to be master\u2014that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/em>Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

5 Jan 2018 – <\/em>Is this what online journalism looks like in the era of Russiagate fever?\u00a0A fake writer (read Alice Donovan<\/a>) catfishes CounterPunch and a dozen other online websites. A handful of her articles are published over a two-year period. The FBI is tracking her and believes this writer, whoever is behind the moniker, has some ties to Russia. What kind of ties and how deep do they go? We aren\u2019t sure. No evidence is presented, perhaps because there isn\u2019t much, or perhaps because the NSA and the FBI are also spying on actual journalists and editors right along with the alleged imposters. The Washington Post<\/em> calls for a quote on the FBI\u2019s allegation and runs an article<\/a> a month later on Kremlin operatives \u201cburning across the internet\u201d.<\/p>\n

More panic ensues.<\/p>\n

But only one troll was named in the Washington Post<\/em> piece, Alice Donovan \u2014 our suspected interloper. Prior to the Post<\/em>\u2019s article, we found out Donovan likely was not who she claimed to be and was a plagiarist to boot. We apologized for our screw-up and issued a lengthy investigation into the whole Donovan ordeal<\/a>\u00a0and the challenges of vetting writers in the fast-paced world of cyber-journalism. The story ends there, or does it?<\/p>\n

For the record, what you are about to read isn\u2019t typical fare here at CounterPunch. We aren\u2019t in the business of investigating the legitimacy of other independent media outlets, their editors, their contributors or even their motives. In the muddy trenches of online journalism, we often find sympathy and camaraderie with others trudging the same difficult terrain. We strongly believe in the tenets of a free and unfettered press. We\u2019d much rather save our energy to cover the issues we face day in and day out; environmental degradation, corporate and political corruption, war, abuses of power and all those brave souls fighting back. Even so, for better or worse, we are still journalists, and when a story begins to reveal itself, we have no choice but to dig deeper and follow the trail where it leads us.\"\"<\/a>In our quest to unravel the identity of the now infamous Alice Donovan, we realized she wasn\u2019t only a fraud, she was also a quack journalist. Many of Donovan\u2019s stories were in part plagiarized, none more flagrantly than an article titled \u201cUS-led Coalition Airstrike On Assad\u2019s Forces Was Not Accidental.\u201d It took a few quick searches to uncover the original source of the piece, which was ripped off entirely from a writer named Sophie Mangal, whose article by the same title was published at The International Reporter<\/a> on the exact same day Donovan submitted the piece to CounterPunch under her own byline.<\/p>\n

We were slightly familiar with Mangal, who claimed to be an \u201cinvestigative correspondent\u201d and editor at an obscure site called Inside Syria Media Center<\/a> (ISMC), which publishes both in Arabic and English. Mangal occasionally goes by Sophie with an \u201ce\u201d, yet her Medium author page<\/a> lists her name as \u201cSophia\u201d, and at ISMC, often simply \u201cS. Mangal\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Emails from Mangal had arrived two or three times a week over the past twelve months, piling up in our inboxes. Nearly every piece she wrote, it seemed, was submitted to us for publication. We passed on all of them, but many were picked up by Global Research<\/a>, International Reporter<\/a> and\u00a0Veterans Today<\/a>. The piece Donovan stole, however, was never submitted to CounterPunch by Mangal. No doubt the same article pitched by two different authors on the same day would have raised a red flag.<\/p>\n

When we realized Donovan had plagiarized Mangal we immediately reached out to her via email to 1) confirm she indeed wrote the piece in question and 2) apologize for making such a big mistake.<\/p>\n

Mangal quickly responded to our query. \u201cFor sure, it\u2019s my article. It was originally published on the website of Inside Syria Media Center. Actually, I don\u2019t know Alice Donovan and who this person is,\u201d asserted Mangal. \u201cBesides, I wonder why my article was published on CounterPunch by that name though copyrights belong to me. I would be quite grateful if you publish my articles with the reference to me in future instead of others suspicious persons who steal my intellectual property.\u201d<\/p>\n

We decided to remove the article entirely from our site and issue an apology to Mangal for the error. By now Alice Donovan had vanished, so all we could do was assume she was a plagiarist, if not something more sinister. Mangal accepted our apology and even continued soliciting her work to us in the weeks to follow.<\/p>\n

Even so, we believed something in Mangal\u2019s awkward response to us was fishy. First, the English in most of her submissions was fractured, especially for someone who claims to have attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a \u201cMedia and Journalism\u201d major<\/a>. Second, as noted, Donovan\u2019s pilfered piece was emailed to us around the very same time that Mangal\u2019s story was being posted to the International Reporter site. How had Donovan seen it, cribbed it and sent it to us so quickly? Breaking her normal pattern of submitting her pieces to multiple venues, Donovan sent the plagiarized piece only<\/em> to us and not to some of her other typical outlets. Why? Had someone screwed up? Hit the wrong send button on the wrong email account? In search of answers, we began looking more closely at Mangal\u2019s blizzard of submissions, dating back to December 22, 2016.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long before we realized why we had passed on them. Most of Mangal\u2019s writings embraced a rigidly narrow view of the war in Syria. The crux of her works read like regime-sponsored press releases. There was no nuance to the writing and few told the story from a war victim\u2019s perspective. Virtually all exalted Russia\u2019s military prowess and the tenacity of the Assad regime, as if she was embedded within the Syrian Army. Embedded reporting has its place, naturally, but were Mangal\u2019s numerous dispatches from inside Syria actually \u201creported\u201d? And how was it being done? Who were the nameless \u201cInside Syria Media Center sources,\u201d which were referenced in so many of her pieces? Moreover, Mangal\u2019s prose was unusually brittle and dull. Even if you are open about your bias, why render your war reporting in such boring sentences?<\/p>\n

We receive submissions from writers from across the globe, so we are used to awkward sentence structures, but this was something different. Wasn\u2019t Mangal an English-speaking editor? Wasn\u2019t she a reporter who attended a top-tier journalism program in the United States? What was this Inside Syria Media Center all about? We had never heard of it before. The site claims to be an \u201cindependent medium that contributes to peace in Syria,\u201d but would a truly independent outlet openly express their admiration for Assad with a #WeLoveYourBashar and #StillMyPresident on its Twitter page<\/a>? You don\u2019t hear that kind of unbridled sycophancy from Sputnik and RT.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/Inside_Syria\/status\/945296828773355521?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.counterpunch.org%2F2018%2F01%2F05%2Fghosts-in-the-propaganda-machine%2F<\/p>\n

Fortunately, we thought, Mangal wasn\u2019t exactly a ghost, like our friend Donovan. She was an editor at an actual news site, no matter its agenda, and was widely published across the web, with over 55 articles at Global Research alone. She had an active Facebook page. She even interviewed one of our writers<\/a> via email about the prospects of a Syrian constitution. Most importantly, we thought, she was communicating with us.<\/p>\n

As we noted in our piece on Alice Donovan, something else struck us as odd with Mangal. Both writers used a MAIL.com account for their initial emails to us. Out of the past 3,000 submissions to CounterPunch only four writers used MAIL.com accounts, that includes Donovan and Mangal. What this proves isn\u2019t clear, but MAIL.com is notorious for providing a service where one can quickly produce a number of email accounts<\/a> without any verification on one platform from one location. It is also one of the few email services which masks the IP address of the sender. A hacker\u2019s delight.<\/p>\n

By now we suspected something was up with Alice Donovan and we became suspicious of how Donovan had interacted with Mangal. Donovan had plagiarized verbatim an entire piece by Mangal and lifted passages from another. In both instances, Donovan\u2019s submissions to CounterPunch arrived shortly after Mangal\u2019s pieces had appeared on other sites. How did she have access to Mangal\u2019s stories so quickly? Was Syria the key to unlocking the ultimate mystery of Alice Donovan? Couldn\u2019t we just talk to Mangal and figure this all out? Were we just being paranoid?<\/p>\n

We repeatedly attempted to schedule a chat with Mangal via Skype. Four times to be exact. Mangal initially emailed to say she couldn\u2019t speak via Skype because she was in the mountains of Syria with a bad internet connection \u2014 hey, but thanks for the gesture, she said.<\/p>\n

Yet, here she was, emailing us and dispatching her work across the web. She was even sending photos along with her pieces. How poor could her internet connection be? Activist and scholar Dr. Hawzhin Azeez spoke with CounterPunch Radio host Eric Draitser for an hour from war-torn Syria<\/a> last year and we have writers in Syria who are able to communicate with us when needed.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t buying Mangal\u2019s evasions. In the midst of the Donovan saga, Mangal had somehow sparked our intrigue.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Snapshot of Mangal\u2019s Facebook page, which was deleted sometime in mid-December 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the course of 2016 to 2017, we published a total of five articles<\/a> by the intruder Alice Donovan. We aren\u2019t proud we didn\u2019t catch on and realize she wasn\u2019t the living and breathing New Yorker she claimed to be. But despite the Washington Post\u2019<\/em>s assertion that Kremlin trolls are invading, by all accounts Alice was a rather insignificant and benign presence. Before the Post<\/em> and our own expos\u00e9 dropped, Donovan enjoyed fewer than 50 Twitter followers. Her articles weren\u2019t widely read or shared.<\/p>\n

However, Mangal, unlike Donovan, had a much larger online footprint. She had published dozens of more pieces and was an editor of an outlet with nearly 13,000 Twitter followers. In virtually every way she seemed more relevant than Donovan as an online journalist.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s nearly impossible to prove who\u2019s really behind an ambiguous online persona like Mangal\u2019s, it is rather easy to break down one\u2019s text and check for accuracies, influences, patterns and quirks. We couldn\u2019t prove Alice Donovan was or was not a Russian huckster (we didn\u2019t take the FBI\u2019s word for it, see the ordeal of Wen Ho Lee<\/a>), but we were able to unmask her as a plagiarist, which in journalistic quarters, at least, is a more grievous offense.<\/p>\n

Could we accomplish something similar with Mangal?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

On various websites, Sophia Mangal has been described as \u201ca woman with a passion for Syria, the Church and justice<\/a>,\u201d as an \u201cAmerican patriot<\/a>,\u201d and as \u201ca young University of North Carolina media and journalism grad<\/a>.\u201d But was she any of these things?<\/p>\n

Mangal, much like Alice Donovan, seemed to have appeared out of thin air. There are no tracks of her days as a college student. There are no podcast appearances, radio or video interviews promoting her work as a reporter, almost de rigeuer <\/em>activities\u00a0<\/em>for contemporary journalists.<\/em>\u00a0 ISMC, which maintains its own YouTube channel<\/a>, has posted many videos from Syria, yet none feature any of their writers, either interviewing anyone or being interviewed. In the Age of the Selfie, there\u2019s only the one noirish photograph of Mangal, much of her face obscured behind large sunglasses.\u00a0In her bio, Mangal claims to have \u201cmonitored\u201d the European refugee crisis after leaving UNC, where she drew \u201cparallels between the Syrian conflict and the Balkan problem.\u201d If so, there is no evidence of her reporting on these issues, either before or after joining ISMC.<\/p>\n

The first online trace of Mangal we could find is from November 2016, when she authored an article titled \u201cSyria ISIS-Daesh Terrorists\u2019 Financing Schemes Unveiled<\/a>\u201d, which was published at ISMC and Global Research, among others. That\u2019s a pretty eye-popping story to break for your debut as an international correspondent. Even Seymour Hersh started out as a lowly beat reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago.<\/p>\n

CounterPunch did not receive the \u201cterrorist financing\u201d submission, but we were approached by Mangal on December 21, 2016, with a piece that attempted to discredit Bana al-Abed, an eight-year-old Syrian girl, who, with the help of her English speaking mother, became a Twitter sensation<\/a> during the battle for Aleppo. \u00a0Assad-friendly writers<\/a> were quick to push back against al-Abed\u2019s version of events and her growing popularity. Mangal\u2019s piece mimicked these talking points and wasn\u2019t exceptionally groundbreaking, so we passed.<\/p>\n

No doubt there were grounds to be suspicious of al-Abed\u2019s overnight rise, but the counter-propaganda campaign was equally as shallow<\/a>. In retrospect, the fact that Mangal was writing about the alleged fake identity of al-Abed (she had a habit of trying to expose fakers<\/a>) \u2014 who is a very real girl now living in New York<\/a> \u2014 is a bit comical. It seems Mangal has done her best to vanish, while al-Abed is still promoting herself and her family\u2019s plight in Syria.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear to us when Mangal became an editor at ISMC. Her first submission to CounterPunch that identified her as co-editor landed in February 2017. She appeared to remain an editor until we attempted to talk to her via Skype. After our last attempt to schedule a conversation on December 15, her name was suddenly removed from ISMC\u2019s contact page<\/a>, though it remains on the contributors page (see below.) Around this time, Mangal also deleted her Facebook page. Soon after our piece on Alice Donovan was published on Christmas Day, which named Mangal as the victim<\/em> of Donovan\u2019s cut-and-paste theft, Mangal\u2019s name was scrubbed from the bylines at ISMC for every article she had written.\u00a0Over the course of 2017, Mangal regularly published one or two pieces a week. Then the submissions and publications on other sites abruptly stopped. Her last published story at Global Research appeared on December 15.<\/p>\n

What was going on? Mangal\u2019s pieces weren\u2019t being removed, just reassigned to a simple \u201cISMC\u201d byline. But wasn\u2019t Mangal the one who had been wronged by Donovan? We were confused. Rare for a \u201cmedia center,\u201d ISMC lists no physical address or phone number on their contact page. Were ISMC\u2019s offices located in Chapel Hill? London? the Netherlands? Austria? Virginia? Damascus? There\u2019s no clue. So we were forced to drop an email to the site\u2019s chief-editor, Mariam Al-Hijab. After several attempts and days of waiting, we threw in the towel. No response.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was certainly strange. First, Mangal wasn\u2019t responding and now her co-editor wasn\u2019t communicating either. So we reached out to ISMC\u2019s other most prolific writer, Anna Jaunger,<\/a> who is so astoundingly productive that she regularly churns out 3 or 4 stories a day. We noticed her pace of filing dispatches increased after Mangal faded away.<\/p>\n

Again, we heard nothing. We sensed a pattern developing.<\/p>\n

We decided to analyze a report Mangal had just dropped titled, \u201cNew Trends of A Resurgent Syrian Economy<\/a>\u201d, which claimed to have been written in collaboration with a writer named Anan Tello.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, Tello wrote a similar article<\/a> with a few of the same paragraphs for Arab News. Tello\u2019s was certainly the better of the two pieces, but whole sections appeared in Mangal\u2019s version as well. Fortunately, it didn\u2019t take long to realize Tello was an actual human being. She\u2019s widely published and has an active, personal online presence<\/a>. She was willing and eager to talk.<\/p>\n

When asked if Tello knew Mangal, or had worked with her on the piece, she was emphatic, \u201cI spent more than a week working on [that piece] for Arab News, and I worked on it all alone.\u201d Tello explained, \u201cThe people I interviewed, as well as my editors, know that I worked on the piece alone \u2026 What [Mangal] did is outrageous and unacceptable. How could I have \u2018cooperated\u2019 with someone I\u2019ve never spoken to in any way, never heard of and with whom I never had any kind of correspondence?\u201d<\/p>\n

Alice Donovan plagiarized Sophie Mangal and now Mangal ripped off Anan Tello? What the hell are we dealing with here? It compelled us to take a closer look at Mangal\u2019s work, even though we had never published it. Sure enough, like Donovan, she had lifted lede grafs from other writers, most recently from a piece in The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Mangal\u2019s lede in a piece at ISMC on December 12, in \u201cWH Recognized Assad as the Only Power Capable to Restore Syria?<\/a>\u201d (Mangal\u2019s byline has since changed to ISMC):<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump Administration is now prepared to accept President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s continued rule until Syria\u2019s next scheduled Presidential election, in 2021, according to U.S. and European officials. The decision reverses repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step down as part of a peace process.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here\u2019s Robin Wright for The New Yorker<\/em> one day earlier on December 11, 2017, in \u201cTrump to Let Assad Stay Until 2021, as Putin Declares Victory in Syria<\/a>\u201d (Mangal\u2019s theft in bold):<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the deaths of as many as half a million people, dozens by chemical weapons, in the Syrian civil war, the Trump Administration is now prepared to accept President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s continued rule until Syria\u2019s next scheduled Presidential election, in 2021, according to U.S. and European officials. The decision reverses repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step down as part of a peace process.<\/strong>\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was obvious. Mangal, like Donovan, was a journalistic klepto. The plagiarized was herself a plagiarizer.<\/p>\n

Mangal also collaborated with journalist Sarah Abed, who writes for Mint Press News<\/a> and edits The Rabbit Hole<\/a>. Abed tells CounterPunch she never met Mangal in person and only communicated with her by email during their various collaborations<\/a>. Mangal and Abed never spoke on the phone or via Skype and Abed says she hasn\u2019t heard from Mangal for at least six months.<\/p>\n

We also looked into Anna Jaunger\u2019s work. She is even more prolific than Mangal. Jaunger\u2019s first story for ISMC, \u201cThe Strange Logic of US Coalition Mistakes in Syria<\/a>,\u201d was published on October 27, 2016. \u00a0Over the next 14 months, Jaunger\u2019s byline<\/a> appeared on more than 500 hundred<\/em>\u00a0stories\u2013or about 1.25 stories every day. The ISMC archive for her articles is 56 pages long, at 8 to 10 articles per page. That\u2019s an impressive clippings file for many journalists to amass over a decade, but Jaunger produced that many pieces in little over a year\u2019s time. \u00a0While many of the pieces are short rudimentary reports, others are more in depth. Her articles detailed troop movements, battle casualties, weapons shipments to rebel forces\u00a0and intelligence estimates; they charted secret money networks, exposed covert operations, and analyzed US and European political debates and strategies. Stories that would take seasoned war correspondents days, even weeks, to report, flew off of Jaunger\u2019s keyboard almost daily. How did she keep it up? Where was the information coming from?<\/p>\n

On her Twitter page, Jaunger describes herself as an Austrian journalist working (\u201cI love my job!\u201d) for ISMC. Her work has been published by\u00a0Global Research<\/a>, Off Guardian<\/a>, Information Clearinghouse<\/a>, Dissident Voice<\/a>\u00a0and many other media outlets.\u00a0<\/a>We discovered she presents something of a fa\u00e7ade as well. The profile\u00a0photo on Jaunger\u2019s Twitter<\/a>\u00a0page is actually a photograph of a woman named Anna Buxton from London, which was lifted directly from an employee directory at a company<\/a> called LaSalle Investment Management. Apparently, Jaunger\u2019s seven lucky followers didn\u2019t question the authenticity of the snappy photo.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Anna Jaunger\u2019s Twitter page.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The real Anna, photo from LaSalle Investment Management\u2019s staff page.<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course, it goes without saying that all of this absurdity raises serious questions about the legitimacy of ISMC. Who is behind the project? We aren\u2019t certain, exactly. But it\u2019s been a fruitful endeavor. Altogether, Mangal and Jaunger have published hundreds of articles that have appeared all over the web. How do they pay for the site and ISMC\u2019s three staffers, who supposedly travel frequently to Syria and back from Europe and the States? We couldn\u2019t tell. Unlike most independent media outlets, they don\u2019t ask for donations, don\u2019t list an address or phone number and offer no biographical information about their editors and writers.<\/p>\n

Tom Ginsberg<\/a>, a respected international law professor at the University of Chicago participated in an interview<\/a>\u00a0with ISMC last February on the proposed Syrian constitution. We reached out to see what he knew about the site.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had not heard of them before,\u201d explains Ginsberg, whose interview with ISMC was conducted via email. \u201cWhen the interview came out, a friend from the region told me they had some kind of pro-Assad bias \u2026 I never actually spoke to a human being on the phone.\u201d<\/p>\n

We attempted to look under the hood of the operation to see if we could find a leak. The url\u00a0\u201cinsidesyriamc.com\u201d was registered to Barna Robert from Noord-Brabant, Netherlands<\/a> on September 16, 2016. Who is Barna Robert? We couldn\u2019t track him down through the email or phone number listed on the site\u2019s registration page. (Like Donovan and Mangal, Robert used GMX.com as his email client, which functions the same as MAIL.COM, both of which are owned by United Internet<\/a>.) It\u2019s an unusual name. There just aren\u2019t that many Barna Roberts in the world. (Or Robert Barnas for that matter.) We were only able to a locate a handful online, including a Hungarian body-builder<\/a> who died in 2013, a Romanian soccer player<\/a> and a Hungarian mathematician<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But a now-deleted Facebook page listed a Barna Robert as being from Aleppo, Syria, currently living in Carolina Beach, North Carolina. If that\u2019s the same Barna Robert who registered the ISMC website, he lives just a two-hour drive from Sophie Mangal\u2019s purported home<\/a> in Wake County, NC. We searched for phone and property records for Mr. Robert in Carolina Beach and came up empty.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Inside Syria Media Center appears to have initially shown up as a Facebook group called \u201cSyria: Look Inside!\u201d<\/a>, which is now also called Inside Syria Media Center. It is unclear when the name was changed. The group was created in February 2016, about a month before ISMC was operating online as a media project. Once ISMC went live, it was hosted on WordPress and later transferred to \u201cinsidesyriamc.com\u201d, as noted above. One of the first individuals to promote the Facebook group was a journalist named Said Al-Khalaki, who also wrote some of the earliest content for ISMC and is an administrator for the Facebook group. Al-Khalaki did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Strangely, after we attempted to reach out to Al-Khalaki, his<\/em> bylines at Inside Syria Media Center were also changed to the generic \u201cISMC\u201d. (Here\u2019s a piece<\/a> by Al-Khalaki that appeared at Veteran\u2019s Today and also at ISMC<\/a>. Note the byline discrepancies.) Al-Khalaki\u2019s online work dates back<\/a> to at least 2013.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

A records inquiry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mangal\u2019s alleged stomping grounds, could not verify that either a \u201cSophie\u201d or \u201cSophia\u201d Mangal had ever graduated from or even attended the university. A search of the UNC General Alumni Association<\/a> rolls also proved fruitless. We also searched the archives<\/a> of The Daily Tar Heel, <\/em>UNC\u2019s school paper,\u00a0<\/em>and found no trace of Mangal. As far as we can tell, she\u2019s never written for the paper. Erica Beshears Perel, General Manager of The Daily Tar Heel,\u00a0<\/em>says after a quick search she couldn\u2019t find a record of Mangal over the past ten years but cautioned that hundreds of students join her staff every year.<\/p>\n

A month ago, we plunged down a rabbit hole in pursuit of Alice and emerged in a house of mirrors, populated by at least one phantom writer (Donovan), vanishing bylines and stolen texts that had proliferated across the web. Why does it matter? From bitter experience, we\u2019ve learned that the price of the deception will be paid by the anti-war media, not the ghostwriters. \u00a0The architects of COINTELPRO themselves couldn\u2019t have devised a more insidious way to discredit the anti-war movement. This time, however, the wounds may be largely self-inflicted.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Jeffrey St. Clair<\/em>\u00a0is editor of <\/em>CounterPunch. His new book is\u00a0<\/em>Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence<\/a>\u00a0(with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at:\u00a0sitka@comcast.net<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Joshua Frank<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0managing editor of <\/em>CounterPunch.\u00a0He can be reached at\u00a0brickburner@gmail.com<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5 Jan 2018 – Is this what online journalism looks like in the era of Russiagate fever? A fake writer catfishes CounterPunch and a dozen other online websites. A handful of her articles are published over a two-year period. Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank expose an entire network of internet trolls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}