From Rolling Stone to the #MattesFile - Information War Contest entry

It wasn't long ago that I believed being involved in any sort of political activity was pointless, as it seemed that the power of the corporate media was too strong for individuals to actually have any effect. About six years ago, fresh of a presidential election, the Columbia Journalism Review decided to do a piece on "The most hated blogger in America", Chris Chase. Although that story was hilarious, and one I had personal experience with as did millions of other Americans that commented on Chase's inane nonsense blogs on uniforms and logos that were featured by USA Today, the fact is that this was just a sports reporter. And if one looks at the archives of CJR, one of the most prestigious media analysis publications.

In reality, the American public was oblivious to a real vacuum of ethical standards in journalism, one that led to the sensationalist journalism that brought down the profession in the years to follow. In 2014 this came to a head when Rolling Stone magazine released a story that broke every rule of journalistic standards and published "A Rape on Campus". This is the story that I credit with causing me to challenge what I was reading in news reports. It relied on the account of a single person, a claimed victim of a gang rape at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville (UVA), whose account was so uncorroborated that CJR labelled it the worst story of journalism of 2014.

Due to the fallout from this disgraceful episode, Rolling Stone retracted the story and attempted to remove it from the internet, but it remains available at an archived link. However, when it came to making peace with UVA administrator Nicole Eramo and the people of the Phi Kappa Psi defamed in the story the magazine dragged it out until December 2017.

"A Rape on Campus" was the story that caused me to get into blog writing and put my opinions out there, so I wrote "Rolling Slander" in April 2015 for a personal blog. As a graduate student in engineering at the time, I was watching and reading as campus society under President Obama was increasingly drifting toward a culture of faux outrage. It comes as no surprise that since then Rolling Stone has not improved, rather the rest of the popular mainstream media has devolved to RS standards. Nothing could be more indicative of this media trend than the Russian collusion myth propagated after the 2016 election. Against the backdrop of this convoluted nonsense festival of #fakenews where media organizations post updates and reactions on an almost daily if not more frequent basis claiming in myriad ways that the Trump-Pence 2016 campaign was tainted by "ties" to Russia.

Without delving into the dubious merit of that charge, this year I found out first hand that there are media opportunists eager to attract the attention of the mainstream media. In February, I noticed that in a series of articles by POLITICO's Edward-Isaac Dovere attacking US Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont that many of the allegations rely on the allegations that an "investigative journalist" named John Mattes allegedly made in September 2016 to American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC run by Hillary Clinton loyalist David Brock.

Thanks to that one detail, I now have made what I feel is a first contribution to the #informationwar. I have now written three articles for the Hard News Network and two interviews with #Bernie delegates exposing the details of this shameful series of journalistic malpractice cases by Rachel Maddow, Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, Ari Melber, Politico, The New Yorker and several other mainstream publications considered "reliable sources".

As of right now I am engaged in sharing this investigation as far as I can. The sooner we can dispel with the #Russia myth, the faster Americans can focus on the broader disinformation that Americans are consuming every day. Please help me share the #MattesFile. Together we can draw in more fighters for the #informationwar.

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