TeleSUR English: Junk News
TeleSUR publishes some weird “news” stories.
I get that the types of articles are meant to drive traffic, but it does make me wonder about the credibility of a news organization whose go to trope for drawing readers is about the sex lives of animals.
It’s not just a matter of “why should anyone care about this?” it’s more a matter of “why does TeleSUR think that people looking through their Latin American coverage want to learn about this?”
TeleSUR English: Fake News
As part of Telesur’s coverage of Costa Rica’s presidential elections, they once said that there was a U.S. Southern Command military based in Costa Rica.
The base, according to the report, “Presencia de milicia de EE.UU. en Costa Rica es evidente”, was located in the Guanacaste province.
In a formal letter by Telesur’s managing director, Patricia Villegas, the television station acknowledged it had made a “regrettable mistake”.
The Fake Tweet About Stephen Hawking
TeleSUR and TeleSUR English have a major problem when it comes to fake news.
In the wake of Stephen Hawkings death, TeleSUR English posted the above. The original writing said:
“Here is a photo of a young Stephen Hawking (with the canes) in London marching against the war in Vietnam in 1969”
After the identity of Hawking as the person with the canes in the image was proven to be false, by of all people TeleSUR’s own Tariq Ali, a disclaimer has now been added to the post stating that the National Portrait Gallery claims that the person is Hawking. This, however is not true.
The National Portrait Gallery in London has also confirmed that the person in the picture is not Stephen Hawking. “The National Portrait Gallery apologizes that a sitter in a photograph taken at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in London in October 1968 was previously mistakenly identified as Stephen Hawking,” a spokesperson at the National Portrait Gallery in London said. “The photographer, Lewis Morley indicated that Hawking was in the image but the Gallery has since ascertained that this was incorrect.”
Thus rather than merely take it down – they keep up a false claim that someone else says that the image is of Hawking protesting the war when it was not.
TeleSUR’s Other Fake News About Stephen Hawking
The first sentence for this TeleSUR article that was re-posted by a number of major media outlets, is as follows.
“A mysterious, cigar-shaped, 400-meter-long object is speeding through our solar system at almost 200,000 miles per hour, and astronomers – including Professor Stephen Hawking – believe it might (or might not) be an alien spaceship.”
What’s interesting about TeleSUR’s take is that they explicitly give the belief that this object is an alien spaceship to Stephen Hawking- despite the fact that he never made such a comment.
How did serious news outlets depict the story? With the truth: Scientists Led by Stephen Hawking Believe Interstellar Object Visiting Us Could be Alien Spacecraft. Making up quotes and ascribing them to people is not something that a real news outlet does, it’s what a “fake news” outlet does.
The Fake News About Bees
According to TeleSUR English, the fact that scientists aren’t sure as to the cause of colony collapse means that it’s possible that aliens have abducted bees. There’s literally no mention in the article about aliens, just this weird headline.
TeleSUR’s Uncorrected Fake News Cheddar Man
Like many other news outlets, TeleSUR published a story about Cheddar Man, the reconstructed bones found in England dating back to 10,000 years ago and published the story: First People in Britain Had ‘Dark to Black Skin’: DNA Analysis.
New Scientist, the journal which first reported this, later published a retraction.
Two months later and has TeleSUR bothered to correct their story? Nope.
TeleSUR English and Russian Propaganda 
One of the more ridiculous articles that TeleSUR English has published was about ‘Mummified Humanoid’ Found in Peru Raises ‘Alien’ Claims.
The American Council on Science and Health has an interesting take on this article in particular and those within this category in general as being a part of a general Russian campaign to influence Americans to have an anti-science. This isn’t just conjecture, but a part of research they’ve done to determine the sources of these articles.
As you can see from the above, after doing a Google search for other outlets that had published the “fake news” story, TeleSUR was first, with Russian media outlets coming in second. I blockquote the ACSH article below, which is
Truthfully, no respectable news outlet should have covered this. The head researcher is Konstantin Korotkov, a well-known crank who once claimed to have photographed a soul leaving a human body. He is a hoaxer, so this is a non-story, just like “Crazy Person on Street Keeps Yelling Crazy Things” is also a non-story. Korotkov should have been ignored. But he wasn’t. Why?
Fake Aliens and Fake News: It’s Always the Russians
The timeline seems to go like this:
The story began in Russia’s state-controlled media. On March 5th, Mir 24 picked up the story, which was then followed by Sputnik on March 10th. Then, the mother of all Russian propaganda outlets, RT, ran the story early on March 13th. From there, the story went “mainstream” in the Western press.
Stop and think about that for a second. A complete hoax was circulated among Russian state-controlled media as legitimate news, and the Western media fell for it. Sure, some of them provided “caveats,” but the point is that Russian propaganda has so infiltrated the public discourse that it appears regularly in mainstream Western media outlets. That’s shocking.
Why is Russia doing this? It appears that the Kremlin is waging a war on truth. (There is a book that discusses this by Peter Pomerantsev called Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.) By purposefully muddying the distinction between fact and fiction, the Kremlin can further its own agenda.
That’s also why propaganda outlets like Sputnik and RT are vehemently opposed to GMOs and fracking. Undermining America’s agriculture and energy sectors benefits Russia’s economy.
Before Western journalists, who seem only to care about boosting traffic, copy-and-paste these clickbait stories from their Russian counterparts, they might want to first ask, “Is it true?” and, “Whom does the story benefit?” You know… the sorts of questions journalists are supposed to ask.
What’s particularly interesting about TeleSUR English’s approach to journalism is that in their follow up article to this “Controversial Researcher Claims Mummies in Peru ‘Possibly Alien’” is the disclaimer that they add on the bottom:
Disclaimer: the initial headline of this story has been changed from “Ancient Mummies in Peru ‘Not Human, Possibly Alien’: Scientists” to the current headline identifying Russian researcher Konstantin Korotkov as the scientist who claimed such findings. We have also included refutals of the claims by these Russian researchers in bold.
and the fact that the rebuttals of the claims that they add clearly show that the entire story is bogus.