For two residents of Los Angeles’ trendy historic El Royale apartment building in Hancock Park, Sean Adl-Tabatabai, 36, and his husband and business partner, Sinclair Treadway, 24, their commute is rather short by L.A. standards, from their bedroom to the living room to run their three year-old website of “murky fact and slippery spin,” titled, Your News Wire.
Recently profiled by venerable entertainment media outlet The Hollywood Reporter, Adl-Tabatabai and Treadway are used to breaking new ground, albeit maybe not in such a negative fashion. In 2014 they made British history when they were married in London, literally one minute after same-sex marriage became legal in both England and Wales.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, which labeled the pair “alienated liberals,” Adl-Tabatabai and Treadway share a suspicion of established media outlets and their stories and “presumed facts” that border on the radical. Adl-Tabatabai’s views are informed by what he sees as British media’s failures during his formative years — cheerleading the Iraq War, ignoring rumors of BBC host Jimmy Savile’s sexual abuse of children — while Treadway’s are forged by a conviction that Bernie Sanders, whom he ardently supported during the Democratic primary, wasn’t given legitimate consideration by the press.
While they profess to be critical of some of President Donald Trump’s policies including his recent decision to ban transgender military personnel, they seem to regard him as a beneficial populist influence on the American political system.
“He may be a buffoon, and he may make some really bad mistakes during his presidency, but he’s still an anti-establishment figure,” said Adl-Tabatabai. “A vote for him was a vote to smash the system.”
The couple’s website’s coverage, or antics as one media critic had observed, has leveraged itself into an influential player in the era of Trump alt-media along with high-profile Breitbart and Alex Jones’ InfoWars. However such a profile coupled with the content caused Alphabet’s Google’s AdSense division to cut off their ad revenue. Internet fact-checking site Snopes has also put Your News Wire squarely in their sights to debunk its fake news offerings and discredit its incendiary reports. Those efforts have however, done little to discourage the pair. Instead the opposite has occurred as Adl-Tabatabai and his husband seem more energized and focused, or as Treadway said, they would put more effort in “to focus on what people aren’t focusing on — the information that the public isn’t already being told.”
The Reporter also noted that in the months after Trump’s election, several British papers published accounts criticizing YNW as a purveyor of fake news, with one reporting that a European Union task force set up to combat Russian propaganda had classified the outlet as a proxy. While the couple acknowledges that state-sponsored Russia Today (RT) is a favored source (“They have angles,” notes Adl-Tabatabai, “and sometimes their angles vaguely match our angles”), they deny any links to the Kremlin. Such a claim, contends Adl-Tabatabai, is “part of an overall political game that’s being played by big corporate media outlets to purge independents.”
There was a change though for the pair in sourcing RT. The Washington Post and The Hill both reported Wednesday that he Russian government-funded RT announced had that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The Post reported that RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.
For now the two continue to wage their unrelenting campaign to spread their version of news. But the Reporter also noted that Snopes editor David Mikkelson observes the couple also has a history of publishing what he considers defamatory claims about his own operation, and Snopes’ legal counsel has sent them several cease-and-desist notices.
The newspaper writes that given Snopes’ role as one of Facebook’s official partners in efforts to address the spread of misinformation, Adl-Tabatabai says he has been weighing his options for a campaign against what he sees as a competitor with an unfair stranglehold on dictating reality — a move right out of Trump’s anti-press playbook. “We’re all now questioning reality as it’s being handed down, how it’s interpreted, how it’s portrayed,” Adl-Tabatabai said adding, “The audience itself is already questioning the facts.”