Craig Timberg

Craig Timberg    (journalist?, spook?)
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Interests	• AIDS? • “Fake News”?

Craig Timberg is the name of a journalist who has written for The Washington Post. As of December 2016, he was cited over 80 times by the English Wikipedia, but did not have his own page. Many of these were about technology, including an article he co-wrote in December 2013 headlined "By cracking cellphone code, NSA has ability to decode private conversations".

Paul Craig Roberts referred to Timberg as a CIA agent in a response to the "Fake News" campaign. Shortlisting Timberg for their 2017 Horace Greeley Award for Best Fake News Journalist, 21st Century Wire remarked about the PropOrNot site which named them as an outlet of "Fake News" that "More than likely, this was a CIA put-up".

"Fake news"

On 24 November, 2016 an article with Timberg's name appeared in the Washington Post, entitled "Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say". The story was widely criticised, not least by the sites he alleged were outlets for Russian propaganda. For CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn commented "concocted his story based on allegations from a vaporous group called ProporNot, run by nameless individuals of unknown origin, whom Timberg (cribbing from the Bob Woodward stylesheet) agreed to quote as anonymous sources."

On 25 November, he spoke with Ari Shapiro, claiming that "there's legions of botnets and paid human trolls that collect information and tweet it to one another and amplify it online. And that makes these stories that in many cases are false or misleading look much bigger than they are, and they're more likely to end up trending on Google News or end up in your Facebook feed."

Propornot

Timberg cites Propornot, describing the site as "a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds".

Criticism

The story sparked a lot of discussion on the internet and is seen to have started the "Fake News" propaganda campaign. Within 10 days of publication, Timberg's story had attracted 14,800 comments.

No comment

Timberg stated “I’m sorry, I can’t comment about stories I’ve written for the Post” and stated that "questions about decisions about what the Post publishes and why are properly directed to Marty Baron."

Publications

Timberg co-authored Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It with epidemiologist Daniel Halperin.

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