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 3 - Coda Story provides neoconservative disinformation warriors with a new home
by Ben Norton
Part 3 - Coda Story provides neoconservative disinformation warriors with a new home
Natalia Antelava founded Coda Story with a little-known professor of journalism named Ilan Greenberg. Greenberg, who serves as publisher and editorial director of the website, states on his bio that he began discussing the idea for Coda Story with Antelava when he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center is a US government-funded think tank whose offices are located in the government’s Ronald Reagan Building. The organization is dedicated to producing research that advances Washington’s foreign policy interests. It is directed by hawkish former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, whose congressional campaigns were heavily funded by the arms industry, and whose husband, Sidney Harman, was a longtime Pentagon contractor.
Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo is a member of the board of trustees of the Wilson Center. Other members of the board of the elite organization – which claims to be the most-quoted think tank in the corporate media – include Trump’s education secretary, billionaire privatization enthusiast Betsy DeVos, and Trump’s health secretary, the former Big Pharma lobbyist and corporate executive Alex Azar.
In February 2018, Greenberg announced that Coda Story had merged with The Interpreter, an anti-Russian blog that has also relied on US government backing.
The two neocon websites proudly stated they had “entered into a strategic partnership to closely cooperate, share resources, and expand the scope of their journalism.”
Greenberg proclaimed in a press release, “The bridging of Coda’s storytelling and The Interpreter’s approach to explaining Russian politics and anatomizing disinformation campaigns is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and fruitful partnership.”
The Interpreter is a pet project of neoconservative operative Michael Weiss. The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal published an exposé on Weiss, showing how the fanatical war hawk has undergone a series of rebrandings, while always pushing the most belligerent line on US foreign policy.
Weiss kicked off his career as an anti-Muslim agitator and moderate Republican who organized rallies with far-right Islamophobe Pamela Geller. Once the Syria proxy war kicked off, he fashioned himself a supposed “Russia expert” and friend of the Islamist Syrian opposition, lobbying for more Western military support for Salafi-jihadist rebels in Syria while demanding the most aggressive policies possible against Moscow.
Weiss has attacked The Grayzone with obsessive fury, and has sponsored less distinguished henchmen to spin out smear pieces.
In fact, when Coda Story asked him for a comment for its hit piece on The Grayzone, editor Max Blumenthal pointed to the editorial role Weiss plays in the neoconservative website. But Coda Story edited Blumenthal’s quote, removing this salient piece of information.
The Interpreter was created by Weiss in 2013 with the backing of former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a staunch opponent of President Vladimir Putin, who was one of a group of men who plundered Russia’s economy in the 1990’s, quickly becoming billionaires as millions were reduced to paupers.
In its early years, the Interpreter blog was overseen by the Institute of Modern Russia, a think tank run by the powerful Khodorkovsky family to push anti-Russia propaganda. Additionally, the blog stated that it was the recipient of a “seed grant” from the London-based Herzen Foundation. Strangely, there are no references online to Herzen outside of its association with The Interpreter.
In 2015, The Interpreter announced that it was being sponsored as a special project of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US government propaganda outlet founded by the CIA during the first cold war to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union.
Then in 2017, The Interpreter became a “media partner” of NATO’s de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council. This notoriously hawkish organization, which is funded by NATO, the governments of the US and Britain, corporate weapons manufacturers, and the fossil fuels industry, has also benefited from huge sums of money from the Burisma Group, the scandalously corrupt Ukrainian gas company that paid former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter $83,000 per month to sit on its board.
The 2018 “strategic partnership” stipulated that Michael Weiss would still remain editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, while also serving as “Consulting Executive Editor” for Coda Story. The press release noted that Weiss “will provide guidance and thought leadership to Coda’s senior editorial management and will contribute his own journalism to both publications.”
But The Interpreter is not the only neoconservative US organization that enjoys a close relationship with Coda Story. The website also lists hawkish think tank the Center for European Policy Analysis as a “partner.”
Despite its name, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is not based in Europe but rather in Washington. The neoconservative group is made up of a who’s who of anti-Russian, pro-NATO hawks, including Coda Story advisor Anne Applebaum and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
This Coda Story partner is also bankrolled by Western governments, NATO, and the weapons industry. CEPA states clearly on its website that past donors include the NED, the US State Department, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, and the arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Bell Helicopter.
Coda Story did not respond to The Grayzone’s request for comment inquiring about its exact relationship with CEPA.
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