Redfish, a Berlin-based media collective, launched with a promise to deliver “radical, in-depth grassroots features,” with professional graphics, filed everywhere from Eastern Europe to South America. Its first report, on a fire at a public housing development in England that killed over 70 people, has been praised by Vice, as a “fantastic example of amateur community-produced media.”

But Redfish does not appear to be as independent and community-based as its branding suggests. Its reports are the product of an in-house team of staff correspondents and producers, most of whom last worked for Russian government media. And by the time that documentary on Grenfell Tower was discovered by Vice, it had been airing for weeks as an “exclusive grassroots report” on RT, Moscow’s state-supported television network.

What exactly is Redfish, then? Amateur, community-produced media—or something else, designed to appear as something other than it is?

Redfish, for its part, won’t clarify. In an email, the company said it “is not interested in providing a comment for your story.” RT, meanwhile, did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment, and phone calls to its offices in Moscow went unanswered.

The Redfish website, registered in September 2017, reveals little more than a desire to be perceived as a collective of activist journalists. “We are not driven by chasing clicks or trends—we are journalists who strive to be objective about where things stand,” it says. “But we don’t claim to be neutral: our team has a proven track record of both supporting and covering struggles which challenge the exploitative global system that enslaves humankind and is destroying our planet.”

Elizabeth Cocker, better known by the moniker Lizzie Phelan, is the only name listed on redfish.media. Before Redfish, Cocker spent the previous seven years working for the propaganda arms of Moscow and Tehran, her work closely adhering to the lines pushed by the governments that paid her.

As a reporter for RT, for example, Cocker filed a story suggesting an April 2017 sarin attack in rebel-held Idlib was a false flag; according to the United Nations, that attack was in fact carried out by the Syrian regime, a Russian ally. She also accompanied pro-regime forces into Eastern Aleppo after rebels were pushed out, her report stating that militants had been using bakeries, a frequent target of Russian and Syrian government airstrikes, to build weapons.

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As RT’s correspondent in Libya, Cocker dismissed reports of rebel advances on the capital, Tripoli, as a “massive psychological operation.” The city fell 48 hours later.

Cocker has also worked for the Iranian government’s Press TV. In 2012, she reported that Syrian rebel fire was responsible for the killing of French journalist Gilles Jacquier, who had been touring Homs with regime forces. Jacqueir’s colleagues blamed the Syrian government, with the Committee to Protect Journalists stating that evidence points to “the possibility that government forces may have taken deliberate, hostile action against the press.”

Cocker’s LinkedIn profile says she left RT in April; she’s not the only one at Redfish whose last (and long-term) employer was an arm of the Russian government.

Jelena Milincic, whose Twitter bio identifies her as a correspondent for Redifsh, was a reporter for RT’s Spanish-language network as of October 2017. In 2013, Milincic met Russian President Vladimir Putin when he visited RT’s headquarters in Moscow, engaging in a roundtable discussion in which she lamented the difficulties she faced trying to obtain Russian citizenship. (Milincic is a native of Belgrade whose mother heads Sputnik Serbia, another media outlet established by the Kremlin.)

“We have to welcome professionals like you,” Putin responded, according to an official transcript. “You are a young and beautiful woman. I am sorry, but it is true that you are a woman of childbearing age. Your boss here sets a good example, by the way...” (That boss, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, likens the role of Kremlin-backed media to that of Russia’s Defense Ministry. Information, she has said, is “a weapon like any other.”)

Milincic recently filed a report for Redfish, viewed over 120,000 times on Facebook, about the economic crisis in Venezuela, accompanying Venezuelan soldiers on a trip to the border with Colombia to uncover smuggling rings that the government blames for shortages of basic goods in the struggling oil-rich country.

That report is now available on RT en Español, where it’s described in Spanish as an investigation by “the Redfish project.” (Belal Alwan, a Redfish producer formerly with Ruptly, an on-demand video division of RT, likewise described Redfish as a “new investigative video project” in a post on his Facebook page.)

Another Redfish correspondent, William Whiteman, also worked for RT and, in August and September of 2017, accompanied Cocker on a trip to the Philippines. Until recently, Whiteman’s LinkedIn stated that he “is a host /producer at online news platform, In the NOW”; it also said he had “worked as [a] correspondent at RT International.” It now identifies him as a “reporter at redfish,” omitting that previous experience.

“In the Now” first began as a show on RT but then, according to BuzzFeed News, “transitioned to a standalone project in the spring of 2016.” It has its own website, inthenow.media, but its videos “live on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and nowhere on each platform is there branding or descriptions that connect them to RT.”

Redfish, likewise, makes no mention on any of its platforms of the place where its work has been most widely distributed: RT. Five of the nine employees publicly associated with this new startup last worked at a Russian state media outlet; one of the few who did not is a U.S. journalist, Rania Khalek, frequently hosted as a commentator on Sputnik and RT, the latter identifying her as a contributor. Khalek announced in November 2017 that she had accepted a job as a correspondent for Redfish.

Redfish’s aggressively “grassroots” branding comes amid a more covert and recently exposed Russian effort to infiltrate left-of-center media. As reported by The Washington Post and the left-wing website Counterpunch, this initiative has entailed creating fake web personas, masquerading as independent journalists, that exploit the trappings and platforms of alternative media to push the Russian line on geopolitics.

Russia is not the first country to promote its agenda abroad, nor the only one to use ostensibly independent media to do it.

During the height of the Cold War, Radio Free Europe, for instance, was billed as providing “unbiased news for Eastern Europeans,” historian Kenneth Osgood noted in an October 2017 piece for The New York Times. In reality, the CIA “used it to wage a subversive campaign to weaken Communist governments behind the Iron Curtain.” And it did so surreptitiously, the agency creating a front group, the National Committee for a Free Europe, “that implored Americans to donate ‘freedom dollars’ to combat Kremlin lies,” as if it were a grassroots initiative launched by concerned patriots. The donations, according to Osgood, amounted to about $1 million a year (the outlet’s actual budget was around $30 million).

It’s not that everything RT or Radio Free Europe reports is total fake news; there’s enough injustice, from East to West, that a skillful propagandist’s aims can be achieved simply by fanning the fires of selective outrage over one, somewhere, while studiously ignoring an inconvenient other. But it’s essential to be aware of those aims so as to better catch an embellishment, lie, or manipulative fixation—why sovereignty is an issue for Russia in Syria and Venezuela but not Ukraine and Crimea, and likewise why the U.S. government is concerned about democracy in Venezuela, a center-left foe, but not Honduras, a right-wing friend.

Hypocrisy is universal, which is not a revelation. Sometimes it can even do some good; a corporation or government need not be angelic, and indeed none are, to observe that a rival is a fraud.

“Looking back at the Cold War: Soviet attacks on U.S. sins around civil rights spurred the U.S. government to improve its civil rights stance domestically,” Peter Pomerantsev, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics who has tracked Russian propaganda efforts, told The Daily Beast. “So, in some cases, foreign campaigns can be a good thing.”

States are rarely motivated by principled internationalism, and only sometimes by the spectacle of good public relations; cynical self-interest often better explains why a particular injustice is denounced, defended, or ignored on the part of officialdom. That’s easy to see, and it’s why a state might wish to obscure its cynicism by packaging its line in someone else’s earnest aesthetic.

Russia is also not the USSR, and its use of state-backed media to promote conspiratorial disinformation on behalf of authoritarian clients rather undermines the notion that its right-wing government is today engaged in anything as noble as the fight for civil rights.

All money corrupts, but the degree to which it does, and to what end, can only be assessed if there’s some transparency. That shouldn’t bother independent, grassroots media.

By Matt Villano

To be honest, it’s remarkable that plastic isn’t already covering every square inch of our planet.

Recent research estimates humans have produced 6,300 metric tons of waste since 1950, only 9 percent of which has been recycled. If production and waste management trends continue at this pace, roughly 12,000 metric tons of plastic waste will be in landfills or the natural environment by 2050. Each year, upwards of an estimated 8 million tons of plastic waste enters the ocean from coastal regions, according to researchers. Related modeling suggests some plastics could take up to several hundred years for their compounds to break down into their constituent molecules. Some experts say it’s completely possible that many of these plastic compounds will never break down at all. No matter which data sets you investigate, or how you spin the results, the picture is bleak: Plastic is suffocating Earth.

Single-use plastic bottles are a frequent culprit: They’re the third most common item found in ocean debris and represent 15 percent of marine waste, according to a report by Citi GPS. These are the bottles you see lining refrigerated cases at gas stations, the ones you buy in 24- and 48- and 64-packs at warehouse stores for less than $5. Even when you recycle these bottles–and only 14 percent of all plastic gets recycled, by the way–you’re not eliminating the problem: you’re just postponing the inevitable.

The Problem With Plastics

Humans have been making plastics since the early 1900s. The first synthetic plastics were derived from cellulose, a substance found in plants and trees. Scientists (mostly from the petrochemical industry) heated this cellulose together with different chemicals, and that process created new materials that were extremely durable.

Today, plastics are chains of like molecules linked together. They’re called polymers. These chains often are composed of carbon and hydrogen and also can comprise oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, chlorine, fluorine, phosphorous, or silicon.

While these minerals occur naturally in the world, long chains of them do not. Many plastics also contain synthetics and toxins that act as sponges for other toxins in the environment. For these reasons, plastics don’t biodegrade; they just break down into smaller plastics. This, in turn, exacerbates the negative effect on the environment—some plastics these days are so small they’re practically undetectable to the human eye.

Without question, single-use plastics, which comprise everything from plastic bags and plastic coffee cup lids to plastic bottles and straws, are among the worst of the bunch, according to a report from Earth Day Network, as they frequently don’t make it to a landfill or get recycled. In addition, while roughly a third of the 400 million tons of plastic produced each year is used in packaging, only 14 percent of packaging waste is recycled, according to the Citi GPS report.

While recent pushes to ban plastic bags and straws have raised awareness about the oppressive amount of single-use plastics in the world, neither push has had a large impact to date. What’s more, because we’re creating new, or “virgin,” plastic at a rate that far exceeds the pace with which we’re recycling and removing it, the situation keeps getting worse.

Roland Geyer, professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has had enough. “I think it’s a function of how many of us are here on this planet and the kinds of lifestyles we have,” says Geyer. "Everyone wants to buy everything and have everything and fly around the world and see amazing places and live to 100. You can’t do all of that without creating waste and leaving behind a real footprint on the environment. It’s time we started thinking about some of these bigger pictures. It’s time we started thinking about how we’re going to make this place last.”

Geyer isn’t one to mince words; he’s been studying the impacts of plastics in the environment for the better part of three decades. The bottom line: Plastics are up there with climate change as one of the biggest environmental problems of our time. (And indeed, the two are linked: When exposed to the elements, plastic releases methane and ethylene, two greenhouse gases that can worsen climate change, according to a study from University of Hawaii.)

Unless we take drastic action now, scientists expect that the amount of plastic littering the world’s oceans will triple within a decade. The Pacific garbage patch covers an estimated surface  area of 1.6 million square kilometers--that’s equivalent to twice the size of Texas. Mike Osmond, senior program officer for the World Wildlife Fund, added that whales and turtles regularly wash up on beaches all over the world with stomachs full of plastic.

“In a large albatross colony in the northwest Hawaiian Islands, albatross are seen feeding plastics to their chicks, which obviously die soon after,” Osmond wrote in an email from his San Francisco office. “Microplastics are now making their way into the human food chain, with seafood that’s consumed by humans being contaminated.”

How do even recyclable varieties of plastic end up bobbing around in our seas? While the greatest volume of pollution is created by systemic dumping, around the world, we have large populations living in coastal areas, generating litter that is often mismanaged. Consider how easy it is for a water bottle to get blown out of a garbage receptacle, or carelessly left behind. This is why cleaning up our oceans requires a combination of local and global initiatives.

Potential Paths Forward

Though we likely won’t reverse the current “plastipocalypse,” there are some steps we can take to stem the tide. Perhaps the easiest solution:  Eschew buying single-use plastic bottles and instead invest in a home filter system, like a Brita pitcher with a Longlast system filter. Use it to fill reusable bottles at home and it will filter the equivalent of up to 1,800 single-use water bottles a year.

Recycling reduces the prevalence of plastics in our environment, but only if we commit to it consistently, all the time and all over the world. In a paper published in Science Advances in July 2017, three researchers estimated that 90.5 percent of all plastic waste ever made has never been recycled—a truly staggering number. A broader (and more hard-core) solution: Sever all dependence on plastics completely.

Policy changes might help, too. For instance, Peru banned visitors from carrying single-use plastics into Machu Picchu as a response to tourists leaving literally tons of garbage behind at natural and cultural protected areas.

Then, of course, there are the business solutions. The Plastic Bank, a Vancouver, B.C.-based economic development firm founded by David Katz, seeks to establish in poor communities a monetary system for plastic to be used like cash, so people see it as valuable. Another option: Renewlogy, a Salt Lake City-based startup that has commercialized a strategy for breaking down certain kinds of plastic into its chemical components.

Renewlogy CEO and Founder Priyanka Bakaya, says her company’s process returns plastic to its molecular levels, breaking it down into small carbon chains that can be used to make new products. “Currently we have linear economy—we’re making these virgin plastics, we use them, then they go to the landfill and back into the environment,” she says. “For us the key is creating circular economy so at the end of a plastic’s life we can take it back, break it down, and use to make a virgin plastic again.”

None of these options will work on its own. To even begin easing our plastic waste problem, we will have to embrace many if not all these solutions—and then some. If stemming climate change rests on the shoulders of government and corporations, reducing single-use plastic waste rests on us. We can pledge to buy zero disposable plastic water bottles, choose sustainable alternatives to single-use plastics whenever possible and encourage brands to evolve by making packaging a deciding criteria when we shop. Our individual, daily choices have a profound impact on our planet and its oceans, now more than ever.