In a classic smear, NBC News “investigated” the Gatestone Institute and found that it is an “anti-Muslim think-tank” with ties to the same Russians who interfered in the 2016 election.
NBC’s report begins with an iteration of the Russia-Trump collusion story: that Gatestone’s former chairman, Ambassador John Bolton, now U.S. National Security Advisor, who has described Russia’s attempts to undermine the U.S. election as an act of war, was affiliated with “a nonprofit that has promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news, some of which was amplified by a Russian troll factory,” implying that he was somehow colluding with Russia to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. NBC initially provides no evidence for this claim, but buried deep inside the article it asserts that, according to its “exclusive database,” Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles – out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. Bolton, on the contrary, is usually criticized for having hawkish views on Russia. …
NBC News also provides no evidence for its insinuation that White House attorneys are “potential[ly]” investigating Bolton’s affiliation with Gatestone. Moreover, after first implying that Bolton is “anti-Muslim,” NBC undercuts its own claims by admitting that his name cannot be found on “the anti-Muslim articles at issue.” NBC also acknowledges that Bolton was opposed to Trump’s so-called Muslim ban.
The NBC report, written by political reporter Heidi Przybyla, appears to be based almost entirely on a series of deceptive reports about Gatestone by The Intercept, a left-leaning digital news site which itself has admitted to fabricating stories and quotes and is listed as one of “The Best Websites to Follow If You’re Plotting the Left-Wing Resistance”. The NBC report, which fails to cite The Intercept, is also intriguingly similar to false allegations in Wikipedia, which also parrots numerous false, but published, claims about Gatestone, such as that Gatestone incorrectly writes about the existence of no-go zones.