With backing from the US government’s regime-change arm, an Operation Mockingbird-style website called Coda Story is attacking American journalists who have punctured Washington’s sensationalist narratives against China.
by Ben Norton
Part 4 - Coda Story’s singular fixation on non-Western ‘disinformation’
by Ben Norton
Part 4 - Coda Story’s singular fixation on non-Western ‘disinformation’
Coda Story’s extensive links to Western governments and neoconservative organizations might explain its obsessive, almost singular focus on China and Russia, portraying them as the roots of all evil in the world.
The website says its bloggers “exclusively cover three subjects: disinformation, authoritarian tech, and the war on science.” Its interest in these topics scarcely extends beyond the realm of Moscow and Beijing to places like Washington or Brussels.
Coda Story offers appetizing fellowships to journalists, pledging to subsidize their reporting with tens of thousands of dollars, as long as they cover one of the blog’s three approved topics.
The Coda Story smear piece attacking The Grayzone was filed under “disinformation.” This is ironic, because the NED-funded blog has demonstrated itself to be in essence an instrument of US and NATO propaganda.
On Twitter, Antelava claimed that Coda Story doesn’t “take money from governments, oligarchs, and tech platforms.” That statement is simply false, as the NED that provides her outfit with grants is an arm of the US government that is funded by Congress.
Coda Story has other notable sources of financing. When the neoconservative website launched its “Authoritarian Tech” channel under the editorial guidance of the son of Georgia’s pro-Western president, the blog acknowledged that it was provided seed funding by a foundation called Access Now.
Access Now is a pass-through that uses millions of dollars from Western governments and massive corporations to fund “open technology” initiatives targeting countries where the US and EU want regime change.
Coda Story did not reveal who gave Access Now the money to create its “Authoritarian Tech” channel, but in 2019, the year it launched, the foundation reported millions of dollars in funding from the governments of Britain, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as corporate tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Facebook, and Twitter.
Access Now also gets significant pass-through money from other foundation giants, which have historic ties to the CIA and the regime-change industry, such as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations of billionaire George Soros, and the Omidyar Network and Luminate Group of tech oligarch Pierre Omidyar.
On its website, Coda Story also lists the Content Fund as a financial supporter. The Content Fund describes itself as “a private law foundation based in Brussels with its office in Kyiv.” Its mission is to spread pro-Western, anti-Moscow messaging in the Russian-language media.
The Content Fund discloses on its website, “Our funding comes from voluntary contributions of like-minded governments, private foundations and international organisations.” Which specific governments bankroll it is not revealed.
Coda Story did not respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone, including a detailed series of questions about its funding sources.
The website is part of a larger constellation of pro-NATO Eastern European media outlets called Coda Network. Other members include the pro-Western Ukrainian website Ukrayinska Pravda, which holds friendly interviews with the US ambassador and is also funded by avowed anti-communist billionaire George Soros, a generous sponsor of regime-change campaigns from Venezuela to Syria.
Coda Story enjoys crossover with another pro-Western website bankrolled by US government-linked regime-change billionaire George Soros: Eurasianet, a project spun out of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) that was created as the media arm of the oligarch’s Eurasia Program, which is aimed at strengthening NATO and the EU and weakening any independent countries that refuse to join the hegemonic US-led imperial bloc.
Eurasianet was in 2016 transferred from OSF over to Columbia University’s hawkish Harriman Institute, a relic of the first cold war that was created by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce anti-communist scholarship on the Soviet Union. Today, the Rockefeller Foundation is headed by the former director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and is historically linked to US intelligence as a CIA pass-through.
In 2018, editor Antelava tweeted, “many thanks to Eurasianet for allowing us to commission” Joshua Kucera, the Turkey/Caucasus editor at the pro-Western website, who produced a lengthy article for Coda Story bashing Russia’s attempt to create a Eurasian Economic Union.
Coda Story’s articles are also very frequently reprinted by Rappler, another media outlet funded by the US government’s NED. These pieces, naturally, portray China and Russia as dystopian authoritarian hellscapes, and even try to blame racial tensions in the United States on Moscow. Rappler’s primary funder is Omidyar, the big tech billionaire who also sponsors Access Now.
In fact, editor Natalia Atelava stated that Rappler is an “editorial partner” of Coda Story.
These extensive ties reveal Coda Story’s location in the center of an ecosystem of online publications sponsored by Western governments and oligarchs that were established to wage information warfare on Washington’s designated adversaries. And those enemies not only include Russia and China, but also independent US journalists who challenge the hegemonic political line.
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