Brandy Zadrozny is a Disinfo Dupe

Learn what a “Disinfo Dupe” is here

 

Brandy Zadrozny is an NBC News journalist who seems to be on a mission to protect America from “free speech,” “white nationalists,” and “conspiracy theorists,” as well as populist politicians who go against the establishment narrative. She has contributed to the “Verification Handbook: For Disinformation and Media Manipulation” that ironically (as we often find with Disinfo Dupe reporters) outlines tactics that have been used to increase disinformation in media, rather than decrease it.

Zadrozny has recently reported that “disinformation” in this year’s election poses an “unprecedented threat to democracy” in one of the most partisan pieces one could imagine. She has no problem pointing to Trump’s lies but never once mentions the Russia Hoax, which included the fraudulent Hamilton 68 dashboard that NBC News reporting relied upon which claimed to “track Russian disinformation” but in fact did no such thing.

Honest Media is not the first news outlet to shine a light on Zadrozny’s questionable reporting style. Revolver News attacked her for doxxing private citizens who supported Trump, and Tucker Carlson amplified that reporting, prompting a response from NBC. Revolver’s article had some shocking revelations as well as some partisan sensationalism. Putting aside sensationalism, we want to know what are the real costs of a crusading journalist who substitutes evidence with slurs and truth with bias, while including an underpinning of compromised morals that can ruin the lives of ordinary citizens?

Zadrozny’s fallacies are numerous, but a study of her recent work for NBC reveals a dominant pattern of reporting that helps explain why so many Americans are migrating away from legacy media. Four key attributes mark Zadrozny’s disinformation campaigns:

1. The Ad Hominem fallacy
2. Unnamed sources
3. Doxxing private citizens
4. Binary thinking

1. Ad Hominem Attacks

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his presidential campaign in April 2023, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll had him instantly taking 14% of Joe Biden’s voters. Some nine months later, Kennedy has the highest favorability ratings of any candidate according to a Gallup poll in January. When the Michigan primary closed on February 27, the Wall Street Journal ironically declared the winner to be Kennedy, as “uncommitted” protest votes against Biden and Trump’s under-performance poke to America’s yearning for an independent third option.

Who are his supporters? If you ask Zadrozny, she will flood you with a litany of ad hominem attacks. These Americans, according to Zadrozny, are nothing more than “a hodgepodge of contrarians,” “right-wing provocateurs,” “conspiracy-theorists,” “Camelot nostalgists,” “billionaire tech bros,” and Zadrozny’s favorite pejorative: “anti vaxxers.” Zadrozny, like many mainstream media assets, performs journalism malpractice every time she writes about Kennedy and his supporters by hiding behind these pejorative labels instead of truly investigating who they are and what they believe.

Character assassination is a core feature of disinformation. Journalists like Zadrozny regularly target both Trump and Kennedy with the ad hominem of “conspiracy theorist” when the same slur could be used to describe nearly every American politician during the Global War on Terror. The argument that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 was, after all, the single most destructive conspiracy theory of the 21^st century insofar as it led to a war that killed hundreds of thousands, and dispossessed millions, of people. Doesn’t Biden, therefore, deserve the label, “conspiracy theorist” for his Iraq war vote? Shouldn’t journalists hound the president to the ends of the earth with this question?

Such insults should be for children and bullies rather than journalists. They don’t address the real reportorial problem one finds in Zadrozny’s November 2023 smear, “RFK Jr. Comes ‘Home’ to his Anti-Vaccine Group, Commits to ‘a Break’ for U.S. Infectious Disease Research” or her June 2023 hit piece, “The Conspiracy Candidate: What RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vaccine Crusade Could Look Like in the White House.

The fundamental problem in these two stories is that Zadrozny’s reporting is misleading and creates a trivial and dangerously reductive establishment narrative.

In the more recent article, Zadrozny covers Kennedy’s appearance at a November 2023 Children’s Health Defense conference in Savannah, Georgia. CHD is a non-profit focused on childhood health epidemics. And yet, Zadrozny buries the name of the organization five paragraphs deep. Her first sentence describes the gathering as an “anti-vaccine conference.” This description is not how CHD billed its own event and Kennedy himself does not identify as an “anti-vaxxer.”

This scoffing at populist candidates and setting their diverse constituencies aside as racists, traitors, Russian assets, or “a basket of deplorables” did not work well for Hillary Clinton in 2016. How have mainstream journalists like Zadrozny not learned that disdain for American voters will repudiate them from establishment candidates even more?

2. Unnamed Sources

The story from June 2023 finds Zadrozny and Kennedy on a hike near Mandeville Canyon in Los Angeles. The top issues for American voters, according to a Pew Research study released that same month, were “inflation and partisan cooperation.” In other words, voters are concerned about the economy and social division – not vaccines.

But instead of emphasizing poverty or partisanship, Zadrozny focused on a wedge issue and an anonymous “university researcher who studies anti-vaccine misinformation” – a shadowy figure who offers this new ad hominem for Kennedy supporters: “GAMA: Give America Measles Again.” Zadrozny then goes to yet another unnamed source, an “advocate” from a “local vaccine non-profit,” who asked Zadrozny, “How much damage could Kennedy actually, really do here?”

We’re getting a lot of name-calling and fear mongering from Zadrozny, but why isn’t she giving the names of sources? Where is the journalistic rigor? She is apparently not on the campaign trail to use transparent and value-free language to discuss the veterans, athletes, actors, writers, musicians, mothers, doctors, small business owners, scientists, farmers, and college students who do support Kennedy, and learn why.

And she is certainly not there to talk about inflation, civil unrest, the environment, or Big Pharma’s contributions to the advertising budget of NBC News, as shown by Media Radar. She is there instead to push a divisive institutional obsession under the guise of journalism. But Zadrozny isn’t just pushing the issue of vaccines or the interests of Big Pharma and their corporate media partners. She’s also pushing a way of thinking that is destroying contemporary journalism with this kind of dismissal and divisive logic.

To hike with Zadrozny is to move through a world where Kennedy’s platform to address the real concerns of Americans simply does not exist. A question therefore arises as we emerge from the tunnel vision of Zadrozny’s journalism: her work may please NBC News and its corporate sponsors, but does Brandy Zadrozny’s agenda serve the interests of the American people?

3. Doxxing Private Citizens 

What is shocking about Zadrozny’s protection of the unnamed sources she personally knows is that she has no problems doxxing unnamed social media users she does not know! It seems anonymity is only afforded if you subscribe to politics that Zadrozny approves of.

Zadrozny has literally written a manual on how to use social media to unearth the true identities of individual social media users who wish to remain anonymous. 

In Verification Handbook, edited by Craig Silverton, Zadrozny writes a chapter called “Investigating Social Media Accounts,” where she writes:

“My favorite kind of stories are those that reveal the real people behind influential, anonymous social media accounts. These secret accounts are less reliant on the algorithm, and more carefully crafted to be an escape from public life. They allow someone to keep tabs on and communicate with family and friends apart from their public account, or to communicate the ideas and opinions that for personal or political reasons, they dare not say out loud.”

This identity hunting raises a number of questions.

What should the expectation of privacy be when posting on social media and, more importantly, what is and is not moral for a national mainstream news reporter to expose when it pertains to a private citizen?

If we are dealing with an anonymous account of a politician or public figure, perhaps it is easy to argue that it is fair game to expose their identity behind what they are saying. But what if it is the account of a regular American citizen who Donald Trump chose to retweet? Should that person’s identity be “exposed” by a professional NBC reporter?

Is this kind of doxxing ethical?

For Zadrozny – and NBC News for that matter – it isn’t even a question. Of course it is “ethical.” And whether or not it is ethical, it is a necessity. Zadrozny and her colleagues wrote the Verification Handbook in large part because it was universally recognized by the mainstream media that the internet in 2015 and 2016 had become too important in deciding presidential elections. This handbook has served as a tool and guide for how the so-called reporters like Zadrozny could weaponize social media for a political agenda. Former state department assistant secretary Mike Benz talked at length about this topic recently in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

To Zadrozny, anyone who decides to voice an opinion in favor of Kennedy, Trump, COVID skepticism, parental rights, or even someone who questions censorship and other “current” mainstream media topics, is fair game as a target of NBC News.

4. Binary Thinking

Zadrozny’s dismissal of so many valid topics and viewpoints is a clear example of binary thinking. In her reporting, there are only two ways of seeing the world: you’re either on her side or you’re against “the truth.” There’s no gray zone. It allows no room for independent thinking when it comes to public health, broadly, or vaccines, specifically.

Recently Zadrozny co-wrote a report titled “Some supporters of a far-right convoy headed to the Texas border are calling for civil war,” but provided zero evidence to support this central claim. They reference “social media posters” who made violent and questionable comments, but provide no sources. More importantly, all of the convoy’s organizers interviewed made it abundantly clear that they do not support anything like civil war – nor any violence. So why does the title of the report make such a shocking claim?

Zadrozny’s focus on “anti-vaxxers” is also a revealing example of binary thinking. Should Americans and their leaders have questioned Anthony Fauci’s call for vaccine mandates during the pandemic? Honest Media has already written about how the Associated Press sold the lie that COVID vaccines were “90% effective” – essentially spouting Pfizer’s PR talking points with no journalistic integrity. The entirety of the mainstream media establishment did the same thing, and Zadrozny followed suit by defending the censorship and deplatforming of those who had questions, instead of acknowledging that people who debated this narrative had a point.

Zadrozny has also gone after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the fact that he quotes science showing the MMR vaccine is a “leaky vaccine” which does not provide lifetime immunity. According to Zadrozny, the CDC says that the immunity from the MMR is “usually lifelong.” However, CDC recommends up to two booster shots for adults in their adult vaccine schedule.

Is needing boosters as an adult considered “lifetime” immunity?

Zadrozny even went so far as to push for children to get the COVID shot by discrediting skeptical parents as “anti-vaxxers” in November of 2021, in an article titled “Covid vaccines for children are coming. So is misinformation.” In reality these people were just being good parents who wanted to know the facts regarding an experimental product before giving it to their kids. As Honest Media has already reported, England, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark do not recommend children get the COVID vaccine (yet America still does).

For Zadrozny, however, there’s no time to dignify the people who live between the extremes of virtue and vice. There’s no space to discuss the possibility that our system of government may, in fact, be broken, or to acknowledge the way public health officials can and do make mistakes. All there is time for is tribalism, division, and culture ware chaos. Zadrozny clearly belongs on the list of Disinfo Dupes.