Report: Conservative outlets duped into publishing fake Middle East ‘hot takes’
(JTA) — Conservative news outlets, including some reporting on the Jewish community, were duped into publishing Middle East “hot takes” from fake columnists, the Daily Beast reported.
The news outlets, including The Jerusalem Post and Jewish News Syndicate, were among 46 publications that published opinion pieces by 19 nonexistent authors originating from a massive Middle East propaganda campaign that appears to have started in July 2019, according to a Daily Beast investigation published Monday.
The Jerusalem Post has removed the one op-ed that it published.
Jonathan Tobin, the editor in chief at JNS, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the news outlet is investigating the six op-eds that it published, “but in the meantime those posts are being removed from our website.”
The purported writers were contributors to two news websites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now, which appear to be linked, and to be fake, including having a nonexistent mailing address, according to the Daily Beast.
The articles praised the United Arab Emirates and called for a more heavy-handed approach to Qatar, Turkey and Iran, according to the report.
Twitter has suspended the accounts of 16 of the fictitious writers in the wake of the Daily Beast investigation.
The post Conservative news outlets were duped into publishing Middle East ‘hot takes’ from fake columnists, report finds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
