Bad News: the anatomy of dodgy news
They're websites built to spread under the guise of freedom, transparency & honesty. They're the opposite.
Hi,
I hope you’re good. I usually ignore websites touting bad ideas, but over the past few weeks people keep writing to me about one site in particular — and I thought it would make an interesting case study: the Daily Telegraph.
The generically named site has been spreading like wildfire over the past month, so I thought it was worth dissecting a little — as it’s the perfect example of a website that’s widely shared in conspiracy theory groups because it complements their thoughts about how the world operates.
Unlike InfoWars which screams at you in loud colours — with plenty of dietary supplement advertisements shoved down your throat — sites like the Daily Telegraph are a little more subtle. A little less obvious.
Looking at its masthead you could be forgiven for thinking you’re reading a news website of a larger organisation. The word “Telegraph” is there to trigger thoughts of papers like, well, The Daily Telegraph in the UK. And like larger news organisations, it lifts wires and reports from other places — but in the case of the Daily Telegraph NZ, it’s mainly Russia’s RT News and Sputnik News, and Latin America’s teleSUR.
Pretty soon you see their bias creeping in — and plenty of opinion pieces: which is how sites like this come to be shared by people like the anti-vax husband from earlier. It’s why they exist.
It’s hardly subtle.
The “about” section gives zero away about who’s behind it. This is the first red herring, because any news outlet worth its weight makes it very clear who is in charge: Who owns it, who edits it, and who writes for it. The only clue as to the sorts of writers the Daily Telegraph “employs” is found on Facebook asking for writers with alternate points of view.
Their Twitter masthead doesn’t give too much away about who’s behind it either: It just boasts independant news and states, “We believe in freedom of speech and information”.
So — I prodded a little.
Meet Malcolm Dreaneen, and his vague legal threats against me
Pretty quickly the Daily Telegraph domain name points you to a company called Monotapu Marketing Ltd, which in turn points to a man named Malcolm Joseph Dreaneen.
I thought I might as well just email him, so I did. I tried to be polite:
Hi there,
I am working on a story about your disinformation site, DailyTelegraph.co.nz.
I will be naming you and what you do — and wanting to know if you had any comment to add on what you are doing.
Best,
David Farrier
Malcolm replied pretty quickly, adding that a family member was currently in hospital — allegedly from an adverse reaction to the vaccine.
He claimed that it was vital my piece (in his words, my “hit piece”) didn’t refer to him as an “anti-vaxxer”:
“All I am is an ‘anti-MRNA mandate’, and it would be accurate to refer to me as such in your hit-piece.
[…]
Daily Telegraph contains some anti-MRNA mandate material, but not exclusively. If you look you will find some articles that are of this nature, albeit at small number, but I have also published a number of government press releases on COVID.
It’s far more balance than what MSM gives to alternative viewpoints and experts.”
Like most men who scream from the rooftops about the mainstream media and freedom of speech (see: Dr “I’m just posting studies about Ivermectin!” Dan, Sean “I love free speech but I also want to constantly talk about serving you!” Plunket, and David “they’re just tickling videos!” D’Amato), Malcolm Dreaneen then added his first vague legal threats:
“My lawyers and I would take a very dim view of any label of ‘anti-vax’ or ‘anti-vaxxer’ being applied to myself personally or to the website, especially after you have just been notified of the above.”
As for not making it clear who the editor of Daily Telegraph is — Malcolm’s explanation went like this:
“I would have gladly put my name to the website from the beginning, and you need to understand a little context as to why that has not happened.
I work for a family business my father has built up over 30 years. The PM’s mandates have, like many others, split our family down the middle. Both my parents are double-jabbed. My brother and I have not been jabbed.
I have owned the domain name “dailytelegraph.co.nz” on and off for many years, and toyed with the idea of starting an independent news website, long before COVID. The appearance of the COVID crisis has brought that idea back into focus.
When Jacinda Ardern mandated the mRNA injection despite promising many times previously that no one would suffer any consequences for refusing to take it, that was the last straw for me.
When I told my father that I wanted to start a news website, after a few days thinking about it, he was supportive but concerned that this would negatively affect his business because about 80% of the work for him is government contracts, with obvious flow-on effects for his post-jab health.
He asked me not to put my name to it at this stage.”
Basically, his daddy told him not to put his name on it.
Malcolm also runs a successful monetised YouTube channel with over two million subscribers:
Malcolm then goes on to gloat a little about his website’s stats — which to be fair, could be very true, going on the thousands of idiots on Telegram channels and Facebook groups figuratively throwing their own shit at the walls before scrawling their name in it:
“I could never have predicted the web site would have got so big so fast. From zero to 60,000 visitors a day in the space of 7 weeks. No one could have predicted that.”
He then seems to get confused about who I am and what I do. This is pretty common, as I often get accused of being part of “Big Media”. While I would see no problem with being part of “Big Media” (I left my last newsroom in 2016), the fact is I am the opposite of Big Media. Apart from the odd guest writer, I write and edit Webworm alone.
But I think it’s interesting, because it shows how people like Malcolm Dreaneen view me, the media landscape, and the world:
“With numbers like that I knew legacy media would start to attack me and the website, so receiving your email was entirely predictable, and ‘on cue’.
[…]
I know that does not sit comfortably with your bosses who want to control all information the public receives, and be paid handsomely for it.”
[…]
No wonder your bosses have ordered a hit job on me.”
LOL! Bosses! Hit job!
He then rants on for quite some length about his definition of “disinformation”, which made about as much sense as you’d expect from someone who runs anti-vax and anti-trans columns:
Malcolm told me:
“Disinformation is a subjective term. What you believe is disinformation may not be what another person believes is disinformation. You could get 100 scientists and doctors to back up Ashley Bloomfield, while I could get 100 that would disagree with him.”
To that… just no. The idea that the same number of medical professionals in New Zealand — or on the entire planet — would disagree with public health guidelines laid down by the likes of public health official Ashley Bloomfield and the WHO is farcical at best.
Oh, I have no doubt there are 100 quack doctors you could round up — but that is a different thing. It’s like saying the same number of scientists agree and disagree that climate change is a real thing. That is blatantly not true.
Dreaneen then bangs on about how the media aren’t holding power to account.
“The media are not holding power to account. They are silencing and ridiculing dissent, even the scientific dissent. They are not being fair or balanced in reporting important issues.”
This is a really common argument we see again and again — and we’ve actually seen it a lot this week in regards to the Ghislane Maxwell trial. This tweet got over 400 RTs over a very short time:
A bunch of journalists and conspiracy theory types alike tweeted this narrative, alleging Twitter had suspended an account tracking Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial.
Under tweets like that, hundreds of horrified replies that “The Media” was still covering up child sex trafficking:
The thing is, the account in question was suspended because it was tweeting a whole bunch of bullshit — including the incorrect assertion that the media wasn’t covering the trial. Believe me: the media is very much covering the trial:
And yet all week on Twitter, I’ve been getting delusional messages like this:
Of course the media defending pedos is something out of the QAnon handbook — and something I’ve written about before in Why #saveourchildren is not about saving our children.
I shouldn’t have to point out that it was a journalist who exposed Epstein’s pedophile ring. Without Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, Epstein would have continued his abuse.
Anyway — The Daily Telegraph plays into this type of thinking, because they know it’ll lead to shares and likes:
“The media are not holding power to account. They are silencing and ridiculing dissent, even the scientific dissent. They are not being fair or balanced in reporting important issues.”
I am not going to bother republishing his allegations about “alleged deaths from the mRNA injection” — not a chance.
Malcolm ends with another vague legal threat:
“I do advise you have your lawyers check any article you write about me or Daily Telegraph, together with this email. Any whiff of a defamatory, unsubstantiated or misleading comment will be actioned. I spent 13 years as a litigator and miss the ‘argey argey’ of the bar from time to time.
Regards,
Malcolm Dreaneen”
I think the term his brain was searching for was “argy bargy”, but at this point who gives a fuck. What is it with men and their love of lawyers and legal threats? It’s so weird to me.
Anyway — I thought you’d enjoy a little breakdown about the person behind a fairly bog-standard “news” aggregating site that also host a bunch of articles and opinion pieces that are like crack to the conspiracy theory crowd on Facebook and Telegram.
I’m sure it does well for Malcolm Dreaneen’s numbers — and for his donations page on his site. Because while the site doesn’t list the owner or editor — of course it has a donations page. It lists a bank account, and also explains how you can pay him in cryptocurrency.
Feel free to share this piece with anyone puzzled about the Daily Telegraph. Or any “bad news” website like it. We’re gonna keep seeing more of this stuff around, and chances are someone you love is going to be sharing it. So let’s push back.
David.
PS: Just to vent, I typed all my defamatory words about Malcolm Dreaneen and his Daily Telegraph NZ into this AI art tool — and got this. Maybe they can hang it in the Daily Telegraph office (ie Malcolm’s lounge):
Thanks for looking into this David, and I hope you're feeling better :)
The thing that gets a wry smile out of me with right-wing bullshit-peddlers, is that they usually have to resort to *tricking* people into believing they're legitimate. This Dreaneen guy and his disinformation site is a great example of how, so often, there's subterfuge about who they really are - the Taxpayer's "Union" also comes to mind. I wish their followers would just pause to think about that for a second. If they have to lie and trick people right from the start, what does that say about them?
What is this wizardry. You wanted to write a story about a disinformation website, you wrote a brief pointedly passive-aggressive e-mail to the founder of the said website... and then old mate decided to write your article for you. Love it. That somehow seems like cheating.
Side-note - that argument about MSM NOT COVERING stuff is so frustrating. You can clearly point out how mainstream media does cover things and it just does nothing to the original accuser. Maybe 3 times, before I got sick of it, when I saw a claim like this I would quickly google and then paste in all the MSM sites which cover a certain topic. Each time, the moronic complainant would just be like... "nah". My rage would erupt and I would feel beaten. Just writing about it now annoys me. This was not a side-note. Thanks for another great read, so glad I subscribed.