Type of site | News website, Blog |
---|---|
Founder(s) | Max Blumenthal |
Editor | Wyatt Reed (managing) [1] |
Key people | Ben Norton (until January 2022) Aaron Maté Anya Parampil Alex Rubenstein Kit Klarenberg |
URL | thegrayzone |
Launched | December 2015 |
The Grayzone is an American fringe [7] news website and blog [12] characterized as far-left by numerous sources. [23] It was founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal. [9] The website was initially founded as The Grayzone Project [24] and was affiliated with AlterNet until early 2018. [4]
Coverage of The Grayzone has focused on its misleading [25] [26] [27] reporting, its criticism of American foreign policy, [1] [4] and its sympathetic coverage of the Russian, Chinese and Syrian governments. [32] The Grayzone has been accused of downplaying and justifying the persecution of Uyghurs in China, [33] [37] of publishing conspiracy theories about Xinjiang, Syria and other regions, [38] [39] [40] [1] and of publishing pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation, especially during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [36] [40] [31] [1] [41]
The Grayzone was founded as a blog called The Grayzone Project in December 2015 by Max Blumenthal. [4] [9] [24] The blog was hosted on AlterNet until early 2018, when The Grayzone became independent of the website. [4] [42] Managing editor Wyatt Reed, contributor Mohamed Elmaazi and regular freelancer Jeremy Loffredo worked for Russian state media before contributing to website. [43]
The English Wikipedia formally deprecated the use of The Grayzone as a source for facts in its articles in March 2020, citing issues with the website's factual reliability. [4] [11]
Grayzone staff Blumenthal and Aaron Maté acted as briefers on behalf of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations at UN meetings organized by Russia. [44] [45] [46] [47] [48]
The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe, [3] [4] [5] [6] and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line, [26] [49] centered around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world. [4] The site has been criticized for defending Russia and other authoritarian regimes. [4] [9] [39] [42] [50] In Reorienting Hong Kong's Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism, The Grayzone was described as "known for misleading reporting in the service of authoritarian states". [25] Nerma Jelacic, writing in the Index on Censorship , described The Grayzone as "a Kremlin-connected online outlet that pushes pro-Russian conspiracy theories and genocide denial." [51] In 2019, The Grayzone had claimed the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, of which Jelacic is a director, collaborated with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra affiliates. [51]
In February 2021, tweets concerning a Grayzone article by Blumenthal were the first to receive a Twitter warning label stating "These materials may have been obtained through hacking". The story was titled "Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office–funded programs to 'weaken Russia', leaked docs reveal". The story referred to hacked and leaked documents and alleged that a British Army unit has used "social media to help fight wars". [52] [53]
In early October 2023, former Grayzone contributor Ben Norton feuded with Blumenthal on Twitter over Norton's accusation that The Grayzone had taken a right-wing turn to appeal to supporters of Donald Trump. During the dispute, Blumenthal revealed that Norton had been fired for criticizing other contributors' anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine stances with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. Norton said that Blumenthal had wrested control of Norton's Grayzone-affiliated but independently produced podcast from him through legal maneuvering. [54]
When a humanitarian aid convoy on the border of Venezuela caught fire in February 2019, The Grayzone published an article by Blumenthal in which he stated that the U.S. government and mainstream media had falsely reported forces supporting President Nicolás Maduro were responsible for sparking the flames, writing that "the claim was absurd on its face." Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Intercept, commented that Blumenthal "compiled substantial evidence strongly suggesting that the trucks were set ablaze by anti-Maduro protesters" and that The New York Times took credit for reporting evidence compiled by The Grayzone weeks earlier when the Times later reversed its position. [55]
The Grayzone promoted the Nicaraguan government's narrative on the 2018–2022 Nicaraguan protests and the November 2021 Nicaraguan general election. [6] [56] [24] The platform also conducted an "unquestioning interview", according to The Guardian, with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. [57] [58] Blumenthal and Norton expressed their support to the regime dancing to "El Comandante se queda" (English: The Comandante Stays) a cumbia song composed in support of Ortega during the 2018 protests. [58] The Grayzone published an open letter, promoted by RT, criticizing The Guardian 's coverage of Nicaragua and one of its contributors, Carl David Goette-Luciak. Goette-Luciak was later arrested and deported by the Nicaraguan government. John Perry, writing under the pseudonym Charles Redvers, published a "confession" on The Grayzone of student protester Valeska Sandoval. [24] The confession was false and Sandoval made it under duress while in prison. [6] [24] [56]
Amid the Syrian civil war, the website supported the government of Bashar al-Assad. [26] Articles by Grayzone reporter Aaron Maté echoed claims by the Russian and Syrian governments that documents leaked to Wikileaks showed that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had "doctored" its report on the Douma chemical attack "to frame the Syrian government and justify the missile strikes launched by the US, UK and France against forces loyal to the government," [59] denying that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians, [30] [60] [59] [61] and accusing the OPCW of a "cover-up". [62]
Research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which studied 28 social media accounts, individuals, outlets and organisations, stated that Maté was the "most prolific spreader of disinformation" on matters concerning Syria amongst its study group, having surpassed Vanessa Beeley in 2020. [63] [64] Research published in 2020 in the Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review found Blumenthal in the top 20 amplified accounts and Grayzone in the top 20 linked domains in a Twitter information ecosystem promoting pro-government narratives about Syria's White Helmets. [65]
The government of China, officials within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese state media have viewed The Grayzone's coverage of China positively. [3] [4] [9] [10] In order to dispute accusations of ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang, Chinese media and officials have increasingly cited posts from The Grayzone in their public communications. [70] According to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Chinese media and affiliated entities began to amplify articles from The Grayzone in December 2019 after the site posted an article critical of Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz. [3] Chinese media cited The Grayzone at least 313 times between December 2019 and February 2021, 252 of which were in English-language publications, the report said. [3] [34] [71]
The site has promoted pro-Beijing narratives on Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan. [72] In particular, it downplayed the widely reported scope of China's Xinjiang internment camps and other abuses by the Chinese government against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities. [3] [4] [9] [10] [30] Blumenthal has said that reports of the persecution of Uyghurs in China use "the hostile language of a Cold War, weaponizing a minority group". He stated in July 2020 that, "I don't have reason to doubt that there's something going in Xinjiang, that there could even be repression. But we haven't seen the evidence for these massive claims." [4] The Grayzone has published articles intended to discredit researchers and organizations investigating the persecution of Uyghurs, saying that the figure of 1 million Uyghurs in re-education camps is based on "highly dubious" studies published by Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Adrian Zenz, and that those studies cannot be trusted because CHRD receives funding from the US government and Zenz is employed by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Contributor Ajit Singh and Blumenthal called Zenz an “evangelical religious fanatic” who “believes he is ‘led by God’ on a ‘mission’ against China.”
Writing in World magazine, June Cheng has defended CHRD and Zenz's research, saying that they used publicly available data released by the Chinese government to estimate the number of Uyghurs in detention, and that The Grayzone exaggerated the extent to which their research was based on a small number of interviews. Cheng has also criticized Singh and Blumenthal's attempts to discredit reports by Radio Free Asia, saying that despite it being funded and supervised by the US government, it is "the only Uighur-language news outlet in the world independent of the Chinese government." [21] Azeezah Kanji and David Palumbo-Liu wrote that The Grayzone focuses on "discrediting some prominent messengers calling attention to the Uighur’s persecution while leaving the vast body of evidence behind the message largely untouched"; they argue that much of the evidence for persectution comes directly from Chinese state sources and that The Grayzone systematically ignore this evidence even in sources it cites. [35]
Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the website has published disinformation, including the debunked claim that Ukrainian fighters were using civilians as human shields, and that the 2022 Mariupol theatre bombing was staged by the Azov Regiment to warrant NATO intervention. [36] [73] The Grayzone's invitation to the 2022 Web Summit, the largest technology conference in Europe, was withdrawn over backlash against the website's anti-Ukrainian narratives amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [16] [74] [75]
According to the Brookings Institution in 2023, Grayzone contributors such as Aaron Mate are among the most-promoted social media accounts boosted by Russian information networks in Latin America to promote Russia's narrative on its war with Ukraine. [76]
After the documentary Navalny won an Academy Award in February 2023, The Grayzone published an article by Lucy Komisar criticizing the film; the article was written by the neural network Writesonic and referenced sources that did not exist. [77] [78] [79] [80] The Grayzone amended the article following a controversy about the use of AI in the writing of the article, and then removed it at the request of Komisar. [81]
The Russian fake news website Peace Data has republished articles by The Grayzone in order to build a reputation as a progressive and anti-Western media source and to attract contributors. [82] False claims published by The Grayzone are referenced by many Twitter users who back Assad and the Russian government. [26]
An August 2018 Grayzone report revealed the identity of the owner of Canary Mission, a website reportedly dedicated to demonising pro-Palestinian students. Hamzah Raza, co-author of the report and a victim of Canary Mission himself, told Middle East Eye he hoped his research can stop the "defamation and harassment" of students "by taking away the anonymity that Canary Mission hides behind". [83] [84]
According to a November 2023 opinion article by biology researcher Michal Perach in Haaretz , Max Blumenthal wrote a Grayzone article that denied evidence of Hamas' war crimes in the 7 October attacks and manipulated quotes from Israeli sources to paint Israel (instead of Hamas) as being responsible for most of the victims. [85] Asa Winstanley, writing in The Electronic Intifada , said that The Electronic Intifada , The Grayzone, Mondoweiss and The Cradle have “all found that many – if not most – of the 1,154 Israelis the government claims were killed by Palestinians were actually killed by Israel itself.” [86] The Intercept said Blumenthal in The Grayzone and Electronic Intifada were among the outlets to flag inconsistencies in a New York Times report about sexual abuse during the 7 October attacks. [87] [88] An analysis in The Grayzone of a UN report corroborating Hamas rape allegations during the Israel–Hamas war, claimed the report had put forward "no evidence of systematic rape". The Grayzone also published a transcribed discussion between Max Blumenthal and Chris Hedges in which they agreed that Israel launched a "shock-and-awe campaign of misinformation" to create "political space for its brutal assault on Gaza". [89]
The Al Jazeera Journalism Review wrote a review of Blumenthal's 2024 documentary, Atrocity, Inc. They said that the film both questions the mainstream narratives advanced in the wake of the 7 October attacks, and criticizes the "failure of mainstream Western media to report on Israeli intentions to carry out genocidal massacres in Gaza." AJJR concludes that the film "is a call for media professionals to uphold their duty to the public and humanity by rigorously fact-checking official statements and resisting the seductive ease of propagandistic official narratives." [90]
On October 7, 2024, Grayzone journalist Jeremy Loffredo and three other international and Israeli journalists were detained at a checkpoint in the West Bank on suspicion of "assisting an enemy in war" for their reporting on the October 2024 Iranian strikes against Israel. Loffredo's article showed the locations where Iranian missiles struck an Israeli air base near Nevatim and the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. The same information was also revealed by other media outlets. The journalists' cameras and phones were confiscated. [29] [91] [92] [41] The other journalists were released after six hours with Loffredo but the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court extended Loffredo's remand. His release was ordered by a judge after a Ynet reporter said the military censor had approved publishing Loffredo's video. The Police appealed this order because Loffredo refused to give investigators access to his phone but the Jerusalem District Court denied the appeal. [29] Jonah Valdez in The Intercept and Rivkah Brown in Novara said Loffredo's arrest drew little interest from Western media outlets. [92] [93]
In 2022, Blumenthal stated that The Grayzone receives funding through Patreon and from "private friends of mine who are basically progressive Americans who support progressive media." He said The Grayzone receives no state funding from Russia or China. [60]
In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone, citing unspecified "external concerns". Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform's coverage of the war in Ukraine. The Grayzone's managing editor Wyatt Reed had also had issues with PayPal and Venmo since reporting on Ukraine. [1]
In June 2024, The Washington Post reported that hacked documents revealed that Reed received payments of around $5,500 from Iranian state-controlled broadcaster Press TV for "occasional contributions to its programming in 2020 and 2021". [94] [95]
Several staff, former staff, and freelance writers have previously been employed by Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik, among them Anya Parampil, Alex Rubinstein, Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed, Mohamed Elmaazi and Jeremy Loffredo. [43] [78] [96] [2] Parampil had previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for RT America. [40] Reed, who was credited as a managing editor as of 2023, made occasional contributions to Iranian state-run Press TV in 2020 and 2021. [97]
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."
Xinhua News Agency, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. It is a State Council's ministry-level institution, and was founded in 1931. It is the largest media organ in China.
China Daily is an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
Propaganda in China is used by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and historically by the Kuomintang (KMT), to sway domestic and international opinion in favor of its policies. Domestically, this includes censorship of proscribed views and an active promotion of views that favor the government. Propaganda is considered central to the operation of the CCP and the Chinese government, with propaganda operations in the country being directed by the CCP's Central Propaganda Department.
RT, formerly Russia Today, is a Russian state-controlled international news television network funded by the Russian government. It operates pay television and free-to-air channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in Russian, English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Portuguese and Serbian.
Max Blumenthal is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker. He was a writer for The Nation, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, Mondoweiss, and Media Matters for America, and has contributed to Al Jazeera English, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He has been a writing fellow of the Nation Institute. He is a regular contributor to Sputnik and RT.
The Global Times is a daily tabloid newspaper under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily, commenting on international issues from a Chinese nationalistic perspective. The publication is sometimes called "China's Fox News" for its propaganda and the monetization of nationalism.
MintPress News (MPN) is an American far-left news website. It was founded and edited by Mnar Adley and was launched in January 2012, and also publishes the MintCast podcast. The site covers political, economic, foreign affairs and environmental issues.
State-sponsored Internet propaganda is Internet manipulation and propaganda that is sponsored by a state. States have used the Internet, particularly social media to influence elections, sow distrust in institutions, spread rumors, spread disinformation, typically using bots to create and spread contact. Propaganda is used internally to control populations, and externally to influence other societies.
Sputnik is a Russian state-owned news agency and radio broadcast service. It was established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya on 10 November 2014. With headquarters in Moscow, Sputnik maintains regional editorial offices in Washington, D.C., Cairo, Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. Sputnik describes itself as being focused on global politics and economics and aims for an international audience.
China Global Television Network (CGTN) is one of three branches of state-run China Media Group and the international division of China Central Television (CCTV). Headquartered in Beijing, CGTN broadcasts news in multiple languages. CGTN is under the control of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
Eva Karene Bartlett is an American Canadian activist, journalist, commentator, and blogger who has propagated conspiracy theories in connection to the Syrian civil war, most notably the disproven allegation that the White Helmets stage rescues and "recycle" children in its videos.
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014. Thirty-seven countries have expressed support for China's government for "counter-terrorism and deradicalization measures", including countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Venezuela; meanwhile 22 or 43 countries, depending on source, have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community, including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey and Japan. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs". The camps have been criticized by the subcommittee of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development for persecution of Uyghurs in China, including mistreatment, rape, torture, and genocide.
The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide. There have been reports of mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.
Aaron Maté is a Canadian writer and journalist. He hosts the show Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone and, as of January 2022, he fills in as a host on the Useful Idiots podcast. Maté has worked as a reporter and producer for Democracy Now!, Vice, The Real News Network, and Al Jazeera, and has contributed to The Nation.
Logically is a British multinational technology startup company that specializes in analyzing and fighting disinformation. Logically was founded in 2017 by Lyric Jain and is based in Brighouse, England, with offices in London, Mysore, Bangalore, and Virginia.
As part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian state and state-controlled media have spread disinformation in their information war against Ukraine. Ukrainian media and politicians have also been accused of using propaganda and deception, although such efforts have been described as more limited than the Russian disinformation campaign.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is an agency within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs at the United States Department of State. Established in 2016, its mission is to lead U.S. government efforts to "recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations" around the world.
Jackson Hinkle is an American political commentator and influencer who hosts the web television show Legitimate Targets with Jackson Hinkle on X. He is known for his support of Vladimir Putin in the Russo-Ukrainian War, and for his opposition to Israel in the Gaza–Israel conflict. Hinkle has dubbed himself an "American Conservative Marxist–Leninist", while journalists have described him as conservative, right-wing, and far-right. Promoting a syncretic mix of conservative and communist ideas, he is a self-described proponent of "MAGA communism", calling on those who support the working class to ally with the MAGA movement against an alleged globalist threat. Initially an environmentalist during his high school years, Hinkle has turned to promoting pro-fossil fuels stances in recent years.
The Grayzone is known for its critical coverage of US foreign policy and anti-war views, but has been accused of spreading misinformation and Chinese and Russian government propaganda, including debunked claims about the conflict in Ukraine and whitewashed accounts of Beijing's repression of ethnic minority Muslims in far-western Xinjiang.
The Grayzone has followed a similar path on Syria, challenging reports of atrocities by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. ...Based on a desire for a multipolar world, in which global military, cultural and economic power is distributed among multiple nation states and Western influence greatly diminished, they have been quick to argue on behalf of authoritarian regimes such as China and Syria.
The Grayzone, a publication known for misleading reporting in the service of authoritarian states...
These grassroots communities are particularly evident on Twitter, where they coalesce around individual personalities like right-wing activist Andy Ngo, and around platforms with uncritical pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad editorial lines, like The Grayzone and MintPress News. These personalities and associated outlets act as both producers of counterfactual theories, as well as hubs around which individuals with similar beliefs rally. The damage that these ecosystems and the theories that they spawn can inflict on digital evidence is not based on the quality of the dis/misinformation that they produce but rather on the quantity.
Journalist Jeremy Loffredo works for the U.S.-based news site Grayzone, which is aligned with the far left, engages in conspiracy theories and has ties with Iran and Russia.
Finally, the Grayzone and MintPress News pursue another form of leftist engagement with the fake news phenomenon – condemning the mainstream media for fake news, while amplifying the propaganda of autocratic foreign governments.
We also observed the presence of low-credibility news accounts disseminating narratives that are anti-Ukraine, antisemitic, anti-West, anti-NATO, and promoting pro-Russia and pro-China propaganda narratives in English language (for instance, the Grayzone News and its bloggers).
Digging into Zenz's anti-LGBT and anti-abortion history and labelling him a far-right researcher, the Grayzone itself did not go unchecked. Coda, a New York-based news platform, dismisses Blumenthal as a far-left supporter of the Syrian regime (Thompson, 2020). However, while Blumenthal's political view on Syria might say something about his potential bias on the Uyghur issue, Thompson does not respond to the evidence the Grayzone presented that challenges Zenz's research.
It complicates matters that Loffredo reports for the Grayzone, an outlet that has been accused of carrying Russian and Chinese propaganda. The [US] administration is embroiled in a separate (and constitutionally dubious) fight against alleged propagandists.
Reed is not the only Grayzone author to have worked for Russian outlets. Grayzone contributor and London journalist Mohamed Elmaazi wrote full-time for Sputnik between 2019 and 2021, he says on his LinkedIn profile. Regular Grayzone freelancer Jeremy Loffredo was full-time at RT in the same years, according to his LinkedIn. Neither responded to requests for comment.
And its turn to the far-right, with its founder embracing and appearing with politicians and influencers in the movement, is exemplary of a burgeoning movement of leftists turning to the right.
UPDATE: Feb. 24, 2021, 9:34 a.m. EST According to Twitter, this instance is indeed the first time the "hacked materials" warning label has been used.
During the elections themselves...a carnival sideshow of figures descended on the country to be feted by [the] regime... ubiquitous was the U.S. journalist Ben Norton, affiliated with the website The Grayzone, which has made something of a cottage industry of defending dictators and their crimes. A reliable government booster nonetheless forced to admit on state television that there were no lines at polling booths, Norton was lampooned by the Nicaraguan blog Bacanalnica as a "cartoon … who hangs out with the most nefarious governments on the planet."
journalists have seized upon the documents released by 'Alex' as evidence that the OPCW falsified its report on Douma in order to frame the Syrian government for the attack and justify missile strikes launched by the US, UK and France against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Peter Hitchens at the Mail on Sunday, and Aaron Mate at The Grayzone have both written extensively on the matter.
During a recent interview, Blumenthal denied The Grayzone receives any state funding through Russia or China saying, "Well, you can see we get a lot of support on Patreon, and anyone who supports us outside Patreon are like private friends of mine who are basically progressive Americans who support progressive media."
In a July 7, 2017 article for his self-funded Grayzone Project, Blumenthal and his associate Benjamin Norton likewise cast doubt on the guilt of the only party known to have possessed and used sarin in the Syrian conflict.
Xinhua's interview of de Zayas prominently features references to reporting by The Grayzone, an influential news website well known for misleading reporting, sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes, and conspiracy theories regarding Venezuela, Syria, Ukraine, and Xinjiang.71 Specifically, The Grayzone published articles that characterize US policies to address unfree labour within camp-to-factory pipelines72 in the XUAR as fundamentally 'anti-China' and that actually hurt communities targeted by Chinese counterinsurgency since they 'cost Uyghur workers their jobs'.
Blumenthal, who has authored multiple pieces for Russia Today, a state-owned news agency, and who is a frequent contributor to the outlet, established The Grayzone website just a month following his visit to Moscow. Anya Parampil and Alex Rubinstein, two other executives and journalists associated with The Grayzone, are also regular contributors to Russia Today, led by Margarita Simonyan.
In August, the Grayzone Project identified the owner of Canary Mission's domain name as Howard Davis Sterling...An article published by the Grayzone Project revealed how right-wing groups sent employees to an on-campus protest to compensate for a lack of grassroots support for Israel on campus.
It also corroborates other reports, most recently by the Association for Rape Crisis Centers in Israel as well as by the New York Times, Washington Post, Human Rights Watch, BBC, and others, regarding allegations of rape and ongoing sexual abuse of the hostages held in Gaza...More recently, articles in both the Grayzone and Mondoweiss analyze Patten's report and claim, in the words of the latter, that she actually provided "no evidence of systematic rape." The Grayzone also published a transcript of a discussion between Max Blumenthal and Chris Hedges in which they agree that Israel created a "shock-and-awe campaign of misinformation" in order to create "political space for its brutal assault on Gaza."
Grayzone has been accused of disinformation and strongly pro-Iran, pro-Russia and anti-Israel views
Alexander Rubinstein, a reporter with the Russian state-funded broadcaster RT America, was arrested while covering protests on the day of the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump.