US media intensify pretext for ousting Trump

By Finian Cunningham

It’s no secret that since his election in 2016, powerful elements in the US political and media establishment have been running a non-stop campaign to remove Trump from the White House. Lately, the stakes have been raised.

Spearheading the media effort to defenestrate Trump are the New York Times and Washington Post. Both have been prominent purveyors of the “Russiagate” narrative over the past two years, claiming that Republican candidate colluded with Russian state intelligence, or at least was a beneficiary of alleged Russian interference, to win the presidency against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Congressional investigations and a probe by a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, along with relentless media innuendo, have failed to produce any evidence to support the Russiagate narrative.

Now, the anti-Trump media in alliance with the Democratic leadership, the foreign policy establishment and senior ranks of the state intelligence agencies appear to have come up with a new angle on President Trump – he is a national security risk.

Ingeniously, the latest media effort lessens the burden of proof required against Trump. No longer has it to be proven that he deliberately collaborated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump could have done it “unwittingly,” the media are now claiming, because he is a buffoon and reckless. But the upshot, for them, is he’s still a national security risk. The only conclusion, therefore, is that he should be removed from office. In short, a coup.

Over the past couple of weeks, the supposed media bastions have been full of it against Trump. An op-ed in the New York Times on January 5 by David Leonhardt could not have made more plain the absolute disdain. “He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?”

Follow-up editorials and reports have piled on the pressure. The Times reported how the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the state’s internal security agency – opened a counterintelligence file on Trump back in 2017 out of concern that he was “working for Russia against US interests.”

That unprecedented move was prompted partly because of Trump’s comments during the election campaign in 2016 when he jokingly called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s incriminating emails. Never mind the fact that Russian hackers were not the culprits for Clinton’s email breach.

Then the Washington Post reported former US officials were concerned about what they said was Trump’s “extraordinary lengths” to keep secret his private conversations with Russia’s Putin when the pair met on the sidelines of conferences or during their one-on-one summit in Helsinki last July.

The Post claimed that Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter after one meeting with Putin, allegedly admonishing the aide to not tell other officials in the administration about the notes being sequestered. The inference is Trump was allegedly in cahoots with the Kremlin.

This week, in response to the media speculation, Trump was obliged to strenuously deny such claims, saying: “I have never worked for Russia… it’s a big fat hoax.”

What’s going on here is a staggering abuse of power by the US’ top internal state intelligence agency to fatally undermine a sitting president based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover, the nation’s most prominent news media outlets – supposedly the Fourth Estate defenders of democracy – are complacently giving their assent, indeed encouragement, to this abuse of power.

The Times in the above report admitted, in a buried one-line disclaimer, that there was no evidence linking Trump to Russia.

Nevertheless, the media campaign doubled down to paint Trump as a national security risk.

The Times reported on January 14 about deep “concerns” among Pentagon officials over Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The reporting portrays Trump as incompetent, ignorant of policy details and habitually rude to American allies. His capricious temper tantrums could result in the US walking away from NATO at any time, the newspaper contends.

Such a move would collapse the transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe which has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” claimed the Times.

The paper quotes US Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, calling Trump’s withdrawal whims “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”

“Even discussing the idea of leaving NATO — let alone actually doing so — would be the gift of the century for Putin,” added Stavridis.

The Times goes on to divulge the media campaign coordination when it editorialized: “Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”

Still another Times report this week reinforced the theme of Trump being a national security risk when it claimed that the president’s Middle East policy of pulling troops out of Syria was “losing leverage” in the region. It again quoted Pentagon officials “voicing deepening fears” that Trump and his hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran”.

That’s a bit hard to stomach: the Pentagon being presented as a voice of sanity and peace, keeping vigilance over a wrecking-ball president and his administration.

READ MORE: Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere

But the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump corporate media have long been extolling the military generals who were formerly in the administration as “the adults in the room.”

Generals H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, and James Mattis, the former defense secretary until he was elbowed out last month by the president, were continually valorized in the US media as being a constraining force on Trump’s infantile and impetuous behavior.

The absence of “the adults” seems to have prompted the US media to intensify their efforts to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

A new House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party has also invigorated calls for impeachment of Trump over a range of unsubstantiated accusations, Russian collusion being prime among them. But any impeachment process promises to be long and uncertain of success, according to several US legal and political authorities.

Such a tactic is fraught with risk of failing, no doubt due to the lack of evidence against Trump’s alleged wrongdoing. A failed impeachment effort could backfire politically, increase his popularity, and return him to the White House in 2020.

Given the uncertainty of impeaching Trump, his political enemies, including large sections of the media establishment, seem to be opting for the tactic of characterizing him as a danger to national security, primarily regarding Russia. Trump doesn’t have to be a proven agent of the Kremlin – a preposterous idea. Repeated portrayal of him as an incompetent unwitting president is calculated to be sufficient grounds for his ouster.

When the Washington Post editorial board urges a state of emergency to be invoked because of “Russian meddling in US elections”, then the national mood is being fomented to accept a coup against Trump. The media’s fawning over the Pentagon and state intelligence agencies as some kind of virtuous bastion of democracy is a sinister signal for a military-police state.

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BETO O’ROURKE SUGGESTS AMERICA SHOULD DITCH THE CONSTITUTION

Beto O’Rourke Suggests America Should Ditch the Constitution

Potential presidential candidate makes stunning claim

Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com – JANUARY 16, 2019

Potential presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has stunningly suggested that the United States should ditch its own Constitution.

During an interview with the Washington Post, the Texas Congressman openly mulled whether the rapidly changing nature of the world meant that the founding document of the country was out of date.

Throughout the two-hour interview — which was often interrupted by bystanders urging him to run for president — O’Rourke boomeranged between a bright-eyed hope that the United States will soon dramatically change its approach to a whole host of issues and a dismal suspicion that the country is now incapable of implementing sweeping change.

When asked which it is, O’Rourke paused.

“I’m hesitant to answer it because I really feel like it deserves its due, and I don’t want to give you a — actually, just selfishly, I don’t want a sound bite of it reported, but, yeah, I think that’s the question of the moment: Does this still work?” O’Rourke said. “Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?

The bizarre quote is sure to come up again should O’Rourke decide to run for president, a scenario that looks more likely in the aftermath of his Senate challenge, which O’Rourke almost certainly knew he would lose but embarked upon anyway to increase his name recognition.

Some analysts think that Beto is more likely to seek a spot on the 2020 ticket as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, but with views like this, many conservatives will want him nowhere near the White House.

‘Land of censorship & home of the fake’ Facebook is getting into the local news business

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Facebook is investing $300 million in local newsrooms and training initiatives for regional journalists over the next three years. But can Mark Zuckerberg be trusted to keep the press free?

With print newspapers’ advertising revenues in freefall for almost two decades, and local newspapers conglomerating and laying off staff to survive, the industry will take any help it can get. Facebook – with its mountains of fake news, clickbait, and a tricky environment for digital publishers to make money in – has in no small way contributed to the precarious state of modern journalism, but the company now wants to give the fourth estate a booster shot.

The company decided to focus specifically on local news. Vice President of Global News Partnerships Campbell Brown said in a blog post that after examining what kind of news people want to see on Facebook, the company “heard one consistent answer: people want more local news, and local newsrooms are looking for more support.”

Facebook’s support for the new industry has thus far been limited to funding a small selection of news programs from CNN, Fox News, and a handful of others. The social media giant has been far more keen to play policeman, partnering up with an array of third-party “fact checkers”last year to filter out “false narratives” and “intentionally divisive headlines and language that exploit disagreements and sow conflict”from users’ timelines.

Troublingly, even Facebook’s own staff could not explain what exactly the term “false narratives” meant. Additionally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with a consortium of media executives shortly afterwards to talk about his company’s use of algorithms to promote ‘reputable news’ and suppress other content, all to ensure that “people can get trustworthy news on our platform.”

Drawn from CNN, the New York Times, Buzzfeed and others, the overwhelmingly liberal makeup of the panel of executives did little to persuade conservatives – who have long accused the platform of bias – that Facebook would act impartially.

Neither did Facebook’s announcement in August that it would partner up with the aggressively pro-NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council vowed to serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears” in the fight against fake news, but that fight resulted in hundreds of alternative news pages being purged from the platform in October. The 800 pages spanned the political spectrum, and their removal triggered cries of censorship and accusations that Facebook was waging “a wider war on dissident narratives.”

One banned cartoonist declared Facebook to be “land of the censorship and home of the fake,” while anti-war journalist Caitlin Johnstone called the purge the “latest escalation of corporate censorship used as state censorship in the West.”

Can Facebook then be trusted to fund local journalism?

The answer is unclear. The $300 million will be given to a number of organizations to distribute further. Some of these organizations, like the Pulitzer Center, are household names. Others, like Report for America, are less well known. The Pulitzer Center will receive $5 million to award as grants to local newsrooms around the country, and social justice non-profit Report for America will get $2 million to go towards the hiring of 1,000 journalists over the next five years.

Pulitzer Center founder and executive director Jon Sawyer welcomed the funding, and took time to “applaud Facebook’s commitment to the editorial independence that is absolutely essential to our success.”

No matter how hands-off Facebook stays, some commentators were angered by the company’s new-found role as champion of the local press. After contributing in a large way to the decline of print media, Facebook’s $300 million investment in the industry is, as one cartoon implied, “peanuts.”

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HOUSE GOP LEADERS REMOVE STEVE KING FROM COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS

House GOP Leaders Remove Steve King from Committee Assignments

“Steve’s remarks are beneath the dignity of the Party of Lincoln and the United States of America.”

By Katherine Rodriguez

House Republican leaders voted Monday to remove Rep. Steve King (R-IA) from all of his assigned committees after the Iowa Republican came under fire for his comments about white nationalism in a New York Times interview.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced Monday that the Republican Steering Committee voted not to give King any committee assignments in the current session of Congress.

McCarthy, in his statement announcing the decision, called King’s comments “beneath the dignity of the Party of Lincoln and the United States of America.”

“Steve’s remarks are beneath the dignity of the Party of Lincoln and the United States of America. His comments call into question whether he will treat all Americans equally, without regard for race and ethnicity,” McCarthy said in a statement.

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“House Republicans are clear: We are all in this together, as fellow citizens equal before God and the law. As Congressman King’s fellow citizens, let us hope and pray earnestly that this action will lead to greater reflection and ultimately change on his part,” McCarthy added.

In the previous session of Congress, King had served on the House Agriculture, Judiciary, and Small Business committees. He also chaired the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice and was on his way to becoming a ranking member of that committee in the current session before the Steering Committee’s vote.

The Iowa Republican decried the committee’s decision as a “political decision that ignores the truth,” adding that the committee misinterpreted his remarks:

King faced pushback on Thursday after he told the Times that he raised questions about why the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are considered offensive.

His comments caused an uproar, prompting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to call his remarks “unworthy” of the office he holds.

“If he doesn’t understand why ‘white supremacy’ is offensive, he should find another line of work,” McConnell said.

King released a statement clarifying his comments soon after the Times article went live, stating that the Times‘ assumption that he was “an advocate for white nationalism” was incorrect.

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King also “condemned” people who support bigotry and rejected “those labels and the evil ideology that they define.

Microsoft Partners With Neocon-Backed ‘Fact Checker’ Seeking To ‘Wage War On Independent Media’

by Chris Menahan

Microsoft has partnered with a shoddy Neocon-backed “fact checker” called NewsGuard which rates websites’ “credibility” in-browser and NewsGuard’s CEO says their goal is to have their software on all smartphones and computers by default. 

From MintPressNews:

How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

As Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.
by Whitney Webb
January 09th, 2019

Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.

While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.

As MintPress News Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh recently wrote, MintPress was informed that it was under review by an organization called Newsguard Technologies, which described itself to MintPress as simply a “news rating agency” and asked Muhawesh to comment on a series of allegations, several of which were blatantly untrue. However, further examination of this organization reveals that it is funded by and deeply connected to the U.S. government, neo-conservatives, and powerful monied interests, all of whom have been working overtime since the 2016 election to silence dissent to American forever-wars and corporate-led oligarchy.

More troubling still, Newsguard — by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley — is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.

In other words, as Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States. Worse still, if its efforts to quash dissenting voices in the U.S. are successful, Newsguard promises that its next move will be to take its system global.

Red light, green light . . .

Newsguard has received considerable attention in the mainstream media of late, having been the subject of a slew of articles in the Washington Post, the Hill, the Boston Globe, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired, and many others just over the past few months. Those articles portray Newsguard as using “old-school journalism” to fight “fake news” through its reliance on nine criteria allegedly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to online news.

Newsguard separates sites it deems worthy and sites it considers unreliable by using a color-coded rating — green, yellow, or red — and more detailed “nutrition labels” regarding a site’s credibility or lack thereof. Rankings are created by Newsguard’s team of “trained analysts.” The color-coding system may remind some readers of the color-coded terror threat-level warning system that was created after 9/11, making it worth noting that Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security who oversaw the implementation of that system under George W. Bush, is on Newsguard’s advisory board.

As Newsguard releases a new rating of a site, that rating automatically spreads to all computers that have installed its news ranking browser plug-in. That plug-in is currently available for free for the most commonly used internet browsers. NewsGuard directly markets the browser plug-in to libraries, schools and internet users in general.

According to its website, Newsguard has rated more than 2,000 news and information sites. However, it plans to take its ranking efforts much farther by eventually reviewing “the 7,500 most-read news and information websites in the U.S.—about 98 percent of news and information people read and share online” in the United States in English.

[…]

According to local media, Newsguard “now works with library systems representing public libraries across the country, and is also partnering with middle schools, high schools, universities, and educational organizations to support their news literacy efforts,” suggesting that these Newsguard services targeting libraries and schools are soon to become a compulsory component of the American library and education system, despite Newsguard’s glaring conflicts of interest with massive multinational corporations and powerful government power-brokers.

Notably, Newsguard has a powerful partner that has allowed it to start finding its way into public library and school computers throughout the country. As part of its new “Defending Democracy” initiative, Microsoft announced last August that it would be partnering with Newsguard to actively market the company’s ranking app and other services to libraries and schools throughout the country. 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.”

Since then, Microsoft has now added the Newsguard app as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices, and is unlikely to stop there. Indeed, as a recent report in favor of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard noted, “we could hope that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well.”

Newsguard, for its part, seems confident that its app will soon be added by default to all mobile devices. On its website, the organization notes that “NewsGuard will be available on mobile devices when the digital platforms such as social media sites and search engines or mobile operating systems add our ratings and Nutrition Labels directly.” This shows that Newsguard isn’t expecting its rating systems to be offered as a downloadable application for mobile devices but something that social media sites like Facebook, search engines like Google, and mobile device operating systems that are dominated by Apple and Google will “directly” integrate into nearly every smartphone and tablet sold in the United States.

A Boston Globe article on Newsguard from this past October makes this plan even more clear. The Globe wrote at the time:
Microsoft has already agreed to make NewsGuard a built-in feature in future products, and [Newsguard co-CEO] Brill said he’s in talks with other online titans. The goal is to have NewsGuard running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news.”
This eventuality is made all the more likely given the fact that, in addition to Microsoft, Newsguard is also closely connected to Google, as Google has been a partner of the Publicis Groupe since 2014, when the two massive companies joined Condé Nast to create a new marketing service called La Maison that is “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.” Given Google’s power in the digital sphere as the dominant search engine, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, and the owner of YouTube, its partnership with Publicis means that Newsguard’s rating system will soon see itself being promoted by yet another of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.

Furthermore, there is an effort underway to integrate Newsguard into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, as Newsguard was launched, co-CEO Brill stated that he planned to sell the company’s ratings of news sites to Facebook and Twitter. Last March, Brill told CNN that “We’re asking them [Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google] to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”

[…]

Notably, Newsguard has a powerful partner that has allowed it to start finding its way into public library and school computers throughout the country. As part of its new “Defending Democracy” initiative, Microsoft announced last August that it would be partnering with Newsguard to actively market the company’s ranking app and other services to libraries and schools throughout the country. 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.”

Since then, Microsoft has now added the Newsguard app as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices, and is unlikely to stop there. Indeed, as a recent report in favor of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard noted, “we could hope that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well.”

Newsguard, for its part, seems confident that its app will soon be added by default to all mobile devices. On its website, the organization notes that “NewsGuard will be available on mobile devices when the digital platforms such as social media sites and search engines or mobile operating systems add our ratings and Nutrition Labels directly.” This shows that Newsguard isn’t expecting its rating systems to be offered as a downloadable application for mobile devices but something that social media sites like Facebook, search engines like Google, and mobile device operating systems that are dominated by Apple and Google will “directly” integrate into nearly every smartphone and tablet sold in the United States.

A Boston Globe article on Newsguard from this past October makes this plan even more clear. The Globe wrote at the time:
Microsoft has already agreed to make NewsGuard a built-in feature in future products, and [Newsguard co-CEO] Brill said he’s in talks with other online titans. The goal is to have NewsGuard running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news.”
This eventuality is made all the more likely given the fact that, in addition to Microsoft, Newsguard is also closely connected to Google, as Google has been a partner of the Publicis Groupe since 2014, when the two massive companies joined Conde Nast to create a new marketing service called La Maison that is “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.” Given Google’s power in the digital sphere as the dominant search engine, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, and the owner of YouTube, its partnership with Publicis means that Newsguard’s rating system will soon see itself being promoted by yet another of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.

Furthermore, there is an effort underway to integrate Newsguard into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, as Newsguard was launched, co-CEO Brill stated that he planned to sell the company’s ratings of news sites to Facebook and Twitter. Last March, Brill told CNN that “We’re asking them [Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google] to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”

[…]

Financial censorship

Another Newsguard service shows that this organization is also seeking to harm independent media financially by targeting online revenue. Through a service called “Brandguard,” which it describes as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.”

At the time the service was announced last November, Newsguard co-CEO Brill stated that the company was “in discussions with the ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers” eager to adopt a blacklist of news sites deemed “unreliable” by Newsguard. This is unsurprising given the leading role of the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising and PR firms, has in funding Newsguard. As a consequence, it seems likely that many, if not all, of Publicis’ client companies will choose to adopt this blacklist to help crush many of the news sites that are unafraid to hold them accountable.

It is also important to note here that Google’s connection to Publicis and thus Newsguard could spell trouble for independent news pages that rely on Google Adsense for some or all of their ad-based revenue. Google Adsense has long been targeting sites like MintPress by demonetizing articles for information or photographs it deemed controversial, including demonetizing one article for including a photo showing U.S. soldiers involved in torturing Iraqi detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Since then, Google — a U.S. military contractor — has repeatedly tried to shutter ad access to MintPress articles that involve reporting that is critical of U.S. empire and military expansion. One article that has been repeatedly flagged by Google details how many African-Americans have questioned whether the Women’s March has aided or harmed the advancement of African-Americans in the United States. Google has repeatedly claimed that the article, which was written by African-American author and former Washington Post bureau chief Jon Jeter, contains “dangerous content.”

Given Google’s already established practice of targeting factual reporting it deemed controversial through Adsense, Brandguard will likely offer the tech giant just the excuse it needs to cut off sites like MintPress, and other pages equally critical of empire, altogether.
Read their full report.

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This has been a dream of the establishment for over a decade.

One of these NewsGuard “journalists” contacted yours truly with a review of Information Liberation that was so shoddy I didn’t even bother to respond as almost everything he said was wrong and his reading comprehension was terrible.

I figured it’s a waste of time to respond as I would be doing the reporter’s job for him by correcting him and I would only be improving his shoddy work.

It’s blatantly obvious their goal is not to create an honest assessment of any of our websites but instead to compile whatever slander they can throw together to suit their pre-ordained narrative.

JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer has also written an excellent article exposing NewsGuard titled, “Steven Brill’s NewsGuard and the ‘fact-checking’ scam.”

Just look at the guys behind this:

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Would you trust those men to walk your dog?

The reason no one ever bothered implementing any scheme like this is because it’s so obviously a fraud and an affront to people’s intelligence that it is more likely to have the opposite effect — negative rated sites are going to be viewed as more credible as evidenced by the fact they’re being slandered by these establishment hacks.

‘Deepfakes’ in action: Seattle TV station accused of doctoring Trump speech video

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As the nation tuned in to President Trump’s national address on border security, one Seattle TV station apparently manipulated its coverage on the fly, editing the footage to show Trump sticking out his tongue at viewers.

In a side-by-side comparison, Q13 Fox in Seattle appears to have edited its coverage of Trump’s address, turning the president’s skin color a ludicrous shade of orange. In between sentences, the station seems to have doctored the footage to show Trump sticking out his tongue and licking his lips.

Q13 told MyNorthWest that the footage was indeed doctored, and that the culprit has been placed on leave.

“We are investigating this to determine what happened,” said Q13’s news director. “This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the President in a negative light. The editor responsible for editing the footage is being placed on leave while we investigate further.”

Faking video footage has become easy in recent years, thanks to the widespread availability of video editing software. A combative press conference debate between CNN anchor Jim Acosta and President Trump in November put the issue in the spotlight, after internet detectives accused Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson of editing video footage of Acosta pushing a White House intern to make the anchor look bad. The ‘edited’ video was shared by the White House, Watson denied the accusation, and eventually the debate was forgotten about.

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Deepfakes could change porn and politics

Slowing down video footage is one thing, but so-called ‘deepfake’ videos – real and fake footage spliced together with the help of artificial intelligence – are becoming increasingly harder to spot and can be put to a limitless array of malicious uses.

Deepfake technology has been used by the porn industry to superimpose celebrity faces onto porn actors’ bodies. One company, Naughty America, is launching a service to allow users to place their own likenesses – or those of their friends – onto performers’ bodies.

ALSO ON RT.COMFace swap porn: Naughty America to superimpose viewers heads onto actors’ bodies

In political circles, concern has been raised that ‘deepfakes’ can be used to doctor footage of politicians and leaders, making them appear to do or say just about anything. As Russian hysteria gripped the nation following the 2016 election, news outlets and commentators repeatedly warned that ‘Russian trolls’ were planning on using deepfake videos to disrupt the 2018 midterm elections.

The predictions never came to pass. However, as the footage from Seattle this week shows, AI-enhanced meddling is a legitimate concern, and is being put to use at home in the US.

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