By: Andrej Žitnik / Nova24tv
The web portal Oštro is considered to be one of the most trusted informants and distorters of facts by the US billionaire megacorporations that own the social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and until recently, Twitter). This web portal often twists the facts to get the ideological message it wants to convey (a practice invented on the global left by Steven Pinker and Thomas Piketty – rich sources of quotes for the Slovenian left as well). We were recently challenged by the web portal with the question or claim that our web portal publishes links to portals which, according to them, “disseminate xenophobic and racist statements” (they specifically mentioned breitbart.com on Thegatewaypundit.com).
The question was raised as part of a regional project “in cooperation with other media outlets, including Investigace.cz, a Czech non-profit media outlet, and Krik, a Serbian media outlet, where we are working together on a project on disinformation websites in Central and Eastern Europe.”
Of course, we know what their true intention was. They were not bothered by our news. They were bothered by the sources of our information, saying that the portals whose news we sometimes publish “spread xenophobic and racist content.” The information itself is obviously irrelevant. What matters is where we got the information from, even if it is true. By the same logic, then, the Oštro web portal should first investigate the N1 Slovenia web portal, which boasts that it is the official partner of the US television network CNN, which has repeatedly been proven to have spread disinformation since 2016, when Donald Trump took over the White House – perhaps even deliberately.
For years, the TV network in question promoted the popular left-wing theory that the election of Donald Trump was part of a left-wing conspiracy – even with completely fabricated “facts,” as it turned out in the end. In the case of Hunter Biden‘s laptop, their opinion leaders claimed that it was a made-up story, and the story was also censored by social networks. Even before that, their editors actively censored the story in question. In 2020, the broadcaster was sued by Nick Sandman, who was sensationalistically reported to have assaulted a Native American. In doing so, the TV network completely bypassed journalistic standards – which is why Sandman sued them and subsequently won the lawsuit (reported to be worth millions) against them. When popular podcast host Joe Rogan took (among other things) Ivermectin as a cure for covid, it was reported on CNN that the drug was regularly used to remove ringworm for horses, but this was eventually condemned by CNN’s own medical reporter Sanjay Gupta.
But does this mean that all the news that the N1 Slovenia web portal gets from CNN is fake? Absolutely not. Our portal also sometimes gets information about a part of an article from the same web portal and first independently verifies it, then publishes it. Where the news comes from is completely irrelevant. What is important is whether the news is true or not. Therefore, statements such as “news from a portal that spreads xenophobic and racist content” are an attempt to brand a web portal as bad, not to seek the truth.
So, which are the web portals that Oštro works with?
It is interesting to look at the two portals with which Oštro is cooperating in this investigation of web portals that are “spreading disinformation”: Investigace.cz and the Serbian Krik are, like Oštro, part of BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network), a group of web portals and investigative journalists. And who is their sponsor? Among others, the Balkan branch of the Open Society Foundation of George Soros. Yes, the gentleman who funds 253 media organisations around the world and is obsessed with changing the “course of history.” His agendas are generally left-wing and aimed at promoting the ideology of open borders, the acceptance of refugees, and other left-wing objectives. BIRN’s supervisory board is also tailored to ideological objectives. Here are its members:
Per Byman, member of the NRC Fluchtlingshilfe Deutschland – Refugee Aid Germany.
Tim Judah, a journalist for the English newspaper the Economist (a publication known for its increasingly left-wing editorial policy, which is also known in Slovenia for an unbelievable article in 2021 claiming that the then-government refused to fund the national media outlet Radio-Television Slovenia).
Robert Bierman of News Deeply, a media company focusing mainly on refugee issues.
Steve Crawshaw of Freedom from Torture, formerly of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (which has recently been making waves with its Russophile investigations into Ukrainian “war crimes”).
Therefore, it is very clear that this is no network of “investigative journalists” whose sincere purpose is to find journalistic errors, but rather a politically and ideologically defined loosely-knit association of like-minded people with the same agenda. Interestingly, almost all the members of the BIRN board are in some way connected to the refugee issue – of course, from a left-wing point of view, in the sense of how to bring as many refugees as possible into the European Union and the wider European space. At the same time, the same group of people are investigating right-wing portals for “spreading disinformation” or for publishing information from portals that spread “racist and xenophobic news.” It is becoming pretty clear what this is really about, isn’t it? And in doing what they are doing, they are not resorting to any specific stories but are instead just branding the whole portal as hateful.
Who are the members of the Oštro web portal?
It is hard to make judgements about the portals that are producing the report in partnership with the Oštro web portal – with the exception of the fact that they are part of BIRN, which is sponsored by Soros’s Open Society Foundation – but it’s true that, unlike Oštro, we won’t be drawing any definitive conclusions from this fact (like they did with the Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit’s). But there is certainly a lot we can say about the Slovenian web portal, as it is a part of the Slovenian media scene. Oštro is not some politically undefined investigative portal; it operates with a strong political bias, as we have experienced first-hand.
The Oštro Centre for Investigative Journalism, headed by Anuška Delić, unjustifiably flagged one of the news stories on our Facebook portal as untrue – Facebook took the report into account, as the portal is one of their confidential informants. The news that a Boston children’s hospital offers minors the removal of the uterus or the so-called hysterectomy is true, and foreign media have also written about the cover-up.
At the time, Boston Children’s Hospital was facing a wave of backlash over its Centre for Sexual Surgery, which performs mastectomies on teenage girls from the age of 15 – they were so scared of the backlash that they deleted the text on the hospital’s website claiming that teenagers as young as 17 (who are not yet of legal age) can have vaginoplasties. The hospital’s website still stated on the 12th of August that “being over the age of 18 is a prerequisite for gender confirmation surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital; the same applies to phalloplasty or metoidioplasty, and you have to be at least 17 for a vaginoplasty,” according to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which allows the capture, management and search of collections of digital content.
Editor and founder of the Oštro web portal Delić was caught in a blatant lie
We have previously already written about the credibility of Anuška Delić, the editor and founder of the web portal Oštro when she lied to Igor Muževič, the president of Praktikum – a trade union of family doctors. At the time, he asked her for web links to find the research that was mentioned in an article on the Oštro web portal.
Both wearing a mask and maintaining a distance of more than one and a half metres between people prevents the spread of infections to a good extent, Nina Grasselli Kmet, a specialist in infectious medicine and intensive care medicine, told Oštro, explaining that an infected person can unknowingly spread the infection several days before the onset of symptoms. She also mentioned a study carried out by researchers for the World Health Organisation. A scientific paper published in the journal Natura was also mentioned in relation to masks. Anuška Delić replied to Muževič that the journalist who had written the article for the web portal would send him the links. As he did not receive any reply for a few days, he asked her again for the links. Delić replied in a slightly impatient tone that they had a lot of other work to do. She said that although the journalist, Katarina, had already sent her the links, she had not yet been able to forward them to him.
She then said that Mužević is insincere and spiteful and asked him whether he had read the part of the Constitution that refers to the secrecy of writing. She clearly wanted to keep her unprofessional rudeness private. It became more than obvious that they did not have the links at all – perhaps they had made them up, or perhaps the links were not about what they claimed on the web portal.
The whole correspondence went like this:
Muževič: “Dear Ms Delić, I would be very happy to receive the links. We were talking about the links being available in the article published on Oštro, but I checked the ones that were published, and I cannot find the mention of proof that the use of masks outside of enclosed spaces actually prevents the spread of viruses. Could you please tell me where I could find this piece of information? Kind regards, Igor Muževič.”
Delić: “I asked our journalist who worked on this article to post the links in a response on Twitter when she has the time to do so. You’ll get them soon! Kind regards, A”
Four days after receiving her response, Muževič wrote: “I have not gotten anything yet. Could you perhaps tell me which of the links from the article you had in mind? It should not take you more than a couple of minutes.”
Delić responded in a matter of hours and wrote: “You will probably find this hard to believe, but I actually have lots of other work to do. Katarina (the journalist in question) has already sent me the links, I just haven’t managed to send them to you yet. I will check on this tomorrow. Regards.”
A few days later, Muževič wrote: “I would still be very thankful if I could get the links.” And, after a few more days of silence, he wrote: “When can I expect the links or an apology?”
To this, Delić wrote: “I have had Katarina’s links here for a while now, but I keep forgetting about you. Probably because you are insincere and spiteful in your eagerness to discuss this topic and are only looking for conflict. I really do not have the time for that, because of the overwhelming amount of work I have to do. However, I see that you have enough or even too much time for such things.
In any case, my assumptions have now come true, you just needed some time. An apology for what? Lol.”
When reading such feigning of ignorance from the editor and founder of the web portal, who is supposed to be the final arbiter of what is true and what is not, we feel embarrassed on her behalf. That is not the way to find the truth – whether the portal is declaratively on the left, the right, or somewhere in between. However, Oštro has unwittingly exposed an important problem of the so-called fact-checking industry in Eastern Europe. Anyone who goes to look at the list of BIRN donors, which includes Oštro, will have good reason to doubt that such portals will report in accordance with the objective truth, based on empirically proven facts.
It is their investigative journalist Katarina Bulatović who sent our media outlet the journalistic question about our sources, which we mentioned at the beginning of the article, to which the director of Nova24TV, Boris Tomašič, replied as follows:
“Dear Katarina Bulatović,
Based on our analysis, we have found the Oštro web portal to be extremely biased and selective in its reporting.
How do you comment on this? Why do you only acknowledge left-wing, far-left and woke sources as relevant? Is it the truth or the political orientation that matters?
I kindly ask for you to send us a reply no later than 4 p.m. on Friday, the 16th of December.
Nova24TV uses all relevant sources in its work, and we make selections only on the criterion of whether something is true or not. If the story is true, it does not matter whether it is published by a far-left or a far-right media outlet. Sometimes we make a mistake, but we always correct it.
Kind regards,
Boris Tomasič”
The journalist Bulatović replied that the editorial policy of the portal is known and is publicly available on their website.