@alternet’s Rania Khalek Fails Journalism 101 Again on Syria

Rania Khalek’s Intercept piece about sanctions on Syria contained so many lies and distortions that it earned her an invitation to an exclusive conference being organized by people with close ties to Bashar al-Assad. When word got out that she would be a featured speaker at this conference alongside people like war criminal Colonel Samer, she was forced to resign from her position a editor at Electronic Intifada since they have no desire to associate even indirectly with people who have the blood of peaceful protesters on their hands.

Evidently Khalek still hasn’t learned that fake news has real consequences because she went on to write more fake news about Syria, this time for Alternet. “British Govt-Funded Outlet Offered Journalist $17,000 a Month to Produce Propaganda for Syrian Rebels” blares a headline whose truthfulness rests on a single uncorroborated anonymous source:

“The salary offered for this task was an eye-popping $17,000 a month.

“The reporter ultimately decided not to pursue the RFS position because he felt it would be journalistically unethical.”

Basing a story on a single uncorroborated source is how Rolling Stone published a fake news story about a gang rape on a college campus. A jury later found the reporter who wrote the story guilty of defamation and the magazine was forced to pay millions of dollars in damages to the school in question.

This is why the Society of Professional Journalists says “it should be standard practice for journalists to ask for other sources to corroborate accounts, stories and information.” This is especially true when ‘eye-popping’ claims are made by a single anonymous source. $17,000 a month for someone overseeing a Syrian rebel media operation means their salary would be $204,000 a year which would be roughly 5% of the entire $3 million budget provided by the British Foreign Office for rebel media outlets. Such amounts beggar belief.

In the same fake news story, Khalek also published correspondence between the source of her story — an anonymous journalist — and someone she describes as this journalist’s “American acquaintance.” Since she never contacted the acquaintance to verify the quoted salary amount, it’s safe to assume she never obtained this person’s permission to publish their private correspondence — another violation of journalistic ethics. (Assuming these emails aren’t also fake.)

But like Alternet’s senior editor Max Blumenthal, Khalek regularly fails to observe the most rudimentary journalistic standards in her work. Even her Tweets attacking a seven-year-old girl and her mother in besieged Aleppo display the same cavalier disregard for facts:

Khalek is not an Arabic speaker so it’s unclear whose culture she thinks is “our culture.” The culture of non-Arabic speaking fake news journalists like Max Blumenthal? The culture of the disproportionately white and male Alt Left she has parasitically attached herself to?

Whatever the case may be, Khalek was definitely not referring to Syrian culture.

Instead of checking with Syrian sources about the Syrian tooth fairy, it seems Khalek mindlessly parroted lies fed to her by anonymous egg accounts on Twitter.