[10/19/16] SPUTNIK– After Sputnik published a series of emails from Newsweek writer and Vanity Fair editor Kurt Eichenwald to a former Sputnik editor — exposing Eichenwald’s claims that he was fed a false story by US intelligence — the magazine has remained shamefully silent on the issue.
Eichenwald not only offered former Sputnik writer and editor Bill Moran a new job if he agreed to remain silent about the lies contained in the Newsweek piece, he also wrote that he was fed the story by US intelligence officials.
“You need to ask yourself — how does someone like me who is deeply wired into the intelligence community know so fast that you had posted this? It’s not like I was sitting around reading Sputnik. Others are though, and they are not reading it 24-hours a day in real time for the purpose of keeping abreast of the news,” Eichenwald wrote to Moran. Immediately after Sputnik’s exposé was published, Eichenwald’s mentions on Twitter exploded with demands from people wanting to know whether the man who won a 2006 award for Ethics in Journalism was lying to Moran — or if US intel is actually trying to sway the election in Hillary Clinton’s favor by manipulating the media.
Instead of responding to this writer’s request for an answer to a valid question, he blocked her. He also blocked hundreds of others who dared to question his integrity.
Sputnik journalists are not the first Eichenwald has blocked over questions of ethics and integrity — TechDirt writer Mike Masnick, who wrote two pieces about the Eichenwald Trump-Putin conspiracy, also suffered the same fate.
“The Blumenthal email was not manipulated. It was just misrepresented — this is a big difference — just as Eichenwald is now misrepresenting what Sputnik did,” Masnick argued in one of his articles on the issue, titled ‘Media Bias And The Death Of Intellectual Honesty, Doubling Down.’
In a tweet following Sputnik’s publication of Eichenwald’s emails to Moran on Tuesday, Eichenwald wrote: “U cant argue with propagandists who deceive you into compassion with lies.” Eichenwald here seems to be admitting to the authenticity of the emails, as he truly appears to believe his threatening tone and quid pro quo offer in exchange for Moran’s silence is “compassion.”
The irony of an award-winning Washington journalist, who was just exposed as being fed stories by a US government agency, having the nerve to call anyone else a propagandist, is delightful.
At the time of this article’s publication, Newsweek has still not corrected or retracted their article — nor have they responded to requests from Sputnik for comment on the issue. The New Republic, which was also implicated in the quid pro quo offer, has likewise not responded to Sputnik’s request for comment.