PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2016-12-27 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did Obama Sign a Bill Making Alternative Media Illegal? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On 25 December 2016, the unreliable political site YourNewsWire.com published an article asserting that President Obama had signed a Christmas bill ... quietly that effectively labeled alternative media as propaganda and criminalized it: The original source cited in the above excerpt, WeAreChange.org, claimed that the legislation was timed to coincide with the distraction of Christmas so as to escape public notice: Purposely or not, these sources have conflated and misrepresented two separate pieces of legislation. One, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 (H.R. 6393, reintroduced as H.R. 6480), authorized funding for the federal intelligence services. The other, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2017, authorized funding for the Department of Defense. While both contained provisions related to foreign propaganda, only one, the NDAA, was signed into law before Christmas 2016. It contained a section (originally introduced as separate legislation called the Counter Disinformation and Anti-Propaganda Act) described by its bipartisan co-sponsors as follows: Note that according to its authors, the legislation was conceived not to clamp down on alternative news sources within the U.S., but rather to protect the freedom of the marketplace of ideas on the international stage. Note also that as written into the NDAA, the legislation's provisions establish an inter-agency body to track and evaluate counterfactual narratives abroad that threaten the national security interests of the United States and United States allies, and to develop procedures to expose and refute foreign misinformation and disinformation and proactively promote fact-based narratives and policies to audiences outside the United States. Similarly, language in the Intelligence Authorization Act (passed by the House but not yet, as of this writing, passed by the Senate or signed into law) would establish an executive branch committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments. So, while neither bill explicitly rules out targeting the spread of disinformation on the home front, the stated focus in both cases is on stemming its flow abroad. More to the point, the focus is on disinformation originating from foreign sources (e.g., Russia and China), not domestic ones. Contrary to rumor, therefore, there is nothing in either bill, targeting or criminalizing practitioners of so-called alternative media or independent journalism within the United States. As with any legislation, there is always the possibility that in practice its scope will extend, for good or ill, beyond the authors' original intentions (and that circumstance can be cause for concern), but there is nothing in the language itself that directly threatens the freedom of American journalists. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url