What is a bellingcat.
He should stop working for CIA funded outlets and parroting a state department like foreign policy line on Bolivia then.
I think his relative rise to prominence over the summer and his pretty sus foreign policy takes while being attached to a NATO propaganda factory whilst lots of less critical leftists and radlibs online fall head over heels for him is a mixture that’s guaranteed to get backlash from this community and rightly so.
I do think it’s become a bit of a one upmanship meme almost randomly dropped in to some posts though.
:geordi-no: Dodgy regime change fueled foreign policy articles.
:geordi-yes: Domestic work exposing white supremacist organisations.
:cat-com: Com-cats over Bellingcats.
You guys know that grayzone is an op too, right? They’re just a Russian op.
They hate Bellingcat because Bellingcat is an American op. It’s ops all the way down.
Critical support for the Russian op in their righteous fight against NATO imperialism.
But seriously. No russian ever dropped bombs on my people and no Russian gets hard thinking about bombing Tehran. You can fuck of with that enlightened Centrism shit.
It’s not “enlightened centrism” to consume media critically. Russia isn’t some anti-imperialist bulwark, they’re just another empire advancing their own interests.
Bellingcat is considered an American government op because it’s funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is funded by the US government. According to NED president Allen Weinstein:
A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.
The Grayzone can’t really be considered an op as they’re only funded by their readers through direct donations and by their Patreon members and don’t accept state funding. I’ve donated to them before. They’re just Marxist journalists that primarily cover Western government-led regime change efforts, regardless of whether the regime change targets are socialist governments (Bolivia, Nicaragua, China, and Venezuela) or not socialist (Iran, Syria, and Russia). You could make the case that RT is a Russian op though as it is funded at least partially by the Russian government although they do host a lot of leftist content with Richard Wolff and Chris Hedges being frequent contributors.
Bellingcat is considered an American government op because it’s funded by the National Endowment for Democracy
Part of its funding is from the NED. It’s sus, but without knowing how much of their funding comes from the NED I hesitate to call it more than that.
For what it’s worth, Bellingcat claims 35% of its money is from workshops it holds, describes other non-NED funding sources, and it describes its NED money as a grant. The NED claims it issues more than 1,600 grants per year that average $50,000 each.
The NED is obviously an op, but it’s less plausible to claim that any news outlet that receives any money from the NED is also a full-on op, and it’s still less plausible to claim that any journalist who receives any income from such a news outlet is a full-on fed.
Yeah, I agree that it’s doubtful that every employee of a NED-funded outlet is necessarily a literal undercover CIA officer. We don’t know the exact extent of just outright full collaboration or US government micromanagement within some of these NED-funded organizations. Maybe more of a case here of the US government just cultivating outlets and their employees as at least generally reliable assets for advancing American government interests (Perhaps they were already at least partially ideologically-aligned, share some similar key goals, support current US foreign policy, or just like what NATO has to offer. Hell, maybe the US just sees them as “useful idiots”.) and financially supporting them accordingly via NED funding to promote them after recognizing their value. So, yeah, maybe not necessarily always 100% full-on ops or full-on feds.
Without evidence this is just badjacketing. We should have a pretty low tolerance for accusations like this unless they’re supported by something at least semi-plausible.
Grayzone. Until this thread I haven’t seen even a suggestion that they’re suspect, and the accusation here is totally unsupported. We have to be a little smarter than jumping every time someone shouts “this thing is an op.”
With Bellingcat, there’s unquestionably a source of funding (the NED) that’s justifiably suspect. I don’t think the book’s written on them, but there’s at least something to back up accusations that it’s not legit.
