User:CaroleHenson/Ben Swann/July 2018 review

Line-by-line review of Ben Swann. See Talk:Ben Swann/Archives/2018/July

This version was moved to the main article on July 28, 2018. --

Benjamin Swann (born July 17, 1978) is an American television news anchor, political commentator and journalist. He has worked as a sports producer, news journalist and producer, and managing editor on network affiliates, FOX, and RT America of the Russian state-owned TV network RT. He received a number of television journalism awards by 2009.

Swann created the series, Reality Check, which he used to espouse conspiracy theories, such as Pizzagate, and those surrounding the Aurora, Colorado and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and the 9/11 attacks. His viewpoints have often mirrored Russian propaganda, including Pizzagate and the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. He has also questioned the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War, whether United States had a role in the development of ISIL, and other prevailing opinions about geopolitics and whether vaccines cause autism.

He was forced by his employer to bring down the internet media channel and most of his social media sites in 2017. He was fired in 2018 from CBS affiliate WGCL-TV in Atlanta, Georgia for pursuing his Reality Check show and alt-right theories, particularly Pizzagate. Since then, he has been a contributor to a Libertarian and Conservative news commentary source and has hosted Reality Check.

Education
Swann was homeschooled with nine brothers and sisters in El Paso, Texas, and earned a bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Brigham Young University in 1993, at the age of 15, and a master's degree in History from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 1994, at the age of 16.

Career
Swann's initial and ongoing interest has been to be a church leader. At the age of 15 he became a youth pastor at his local Baptist Church in Canutillo in El Paso County, Texas. At the age of 19, he began preaching at revivals in Texas. Unable to find a position as a pastor in El Paso, he followed one of his brother's suggestion to get a job in TV news. At that time, four of his brothers worked in television. Three were news cameramen. He worked for a period of time for KDBC-TV. In 1998, he moved to KFOX to work as a news cameraman.

After working in Portland, Oregon, as an assistant pastor, Swann returned to the Fox station KFOX in El Paso as a sports producer. He then filmed, edited, and reported his own news and sports stories. Swan became a morning co-anchor and managing editor at the station. In 2008, he became an evening news anchor for the NBC affiliate KTSM-TV. He received a number of awards beginning in 2002. For instance, he won Lone Star Emmy Awards in 2005 and 2009, as well as a national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2002 for Continuing Coverage of Alexandra Flores. During this period, Swann was an investigative journalist for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN News), writing about Mexico's drug wars on the Texas border.

He left El Paso in December 2010 to become an evening TV news presenter at Cincinnati, Ohio's Fox affiliate WXIX-TV, co-anchoring with Tricia Macke. He produced a series entitled Reality Check that garnered media attention for his advocacy of Ron Paul's positions. While he was at WXIX-TV, he started a Facebook page called "Full Disclosure" where, according to Adweek, he asked "questions about controversial subjects he says are ignored by the national media."

On October 23, 2012, Swann served as a panel member on a third-party presidential candidates debate hosted by Larry King in Chicago, Illinois, and broadcast on C-SPAN, Al Jazeera America, and online through the sponsorship of the Free & Equal Elections Foundation.

In April 2013, Swann announced he would be leaving WXIX-TV Fox 19 at the end of May, and then started a social media channel called "Truth In Media" to continue production of his show Reality Check. Truth in Media was a collaboration with Republican Liberty Caucus and Joshua Cook. His Reality Check show covered controversial stories. The Daily Beast has reported that many of Swann's segments echo talking points from media outlets such as RT and InfoWars that are rarely seen in more mainstream news media. Swann's Reality Check segments were uploaded to his YouTube channel and had garnered 10,376,570 views and over 73,500 subscribers before he took his channel offline. One theme of Swann's Reality Check has been his support of Ron Paul's presidential campaigns, with his goal of providing fairer coverage for Paul than the conservative or liberal national press. However, he provided more misinformation, particularly regarding the authorship and the veracity of questionable content in the newsletters put out by the campaign.

From May 2013 until June 2015, Swann appeared regularly on RT America in Washington, D.C. For three months in 2014 he hosted the Ben Swann Radio Show on the Republic Broadcasting Network, a far-right network that has aired holocaust denial and other antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In 2015, he was hired by CBS affiliate WGCL-TV in Atlanta, Georgia. He was suspended in January 2017 for running a story attempting to revive the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and was reinstated after he took down his Truth in Media and Reality Check sites. He was fired on January 29, 2018, after the station learned that he had been trying to revive Reality Check without their knowledge and permission. The station's general manager said that Swann's Reality Check program had "often veered into alt-right conspiracy theories." According to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, he has lost credibility as an objective journalist due to his interest in furthering conspiracy theories.

Swann relaunched Reality Check in 2018 after he was fired by WGCL-TV. He is also a contributor for the Libertarian and Conservative news commentary site Liberty Nation.

Controversial views and claims
Swann is known for promoting a number of conspiracy theories and false claims, several of which are aligned with narratives pushed by his former employer, the Russian state-run RT.

While working for a Cincinnati-area Fox affiliate WXIX-TV in 2012, Swann suggested on his personal YouTube channel that Adam Lanza did not commit the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting by himself. See Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting conspiracy theories. He also discounted the conclusion that 2012 Aurora shooting was conducted by a lone gunman. There is no evidence that any additional shooters were present at the shootings. The theory of multiple gunmen may have been influenced by early news reports of the events.

While working for CBS affiliate WGCL-TV, Ben Swann dedicated a Reality Check segment to the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory that emerged during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, contended that Pizzagate may have been true, and called for a police investigation of the allegations. Misinformation regarding Pizzagate was spread through social media and websites. The story was discredited by a wide array of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, fact-checking sites, and reputable news organizations. After the Pizzagate segment aired, Swann was briefly suspended from WGCL-TV and he later closed some of his social media accounts, but he left one Facebook account where he continued to post conspiracy theories.

In 2013, Swann questioned whether the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War. In December 2016, Swann aired a segment titled "If (Syrian President Bashar al) Assad is Committing Genocide in Aleppo, Why Are People Celebrating in the Streets?" The piece used language that was similar to Russian propaganda about Syria. In addition, Russian-backed production and distribution of polished videos that were spread on Facebook and websites in the United States. There is overwhelming evidence that Assad's forces were responsible for chemical attacks in Syria according to a fact-finding article that examined information from Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, intelligence gained by world leaders, and an investigative report by Bellingcat. This conclusion is based upon the Assad regime's track record for use of chemical weapons, sightings of helicopters, and footage of gas cylinders. While evidence of chemical use by Assad's forces is clear, use of chemical weapons by rebel forces has not been ruled out.

Swann has also sought crowdfunding for an episode titled, “U.S and partners intentionally created ISIS”. According to national security analyst Peter Bergen, there are four key factors in the development of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. One is the the repressive regime of President Bashar al-Assad that resulted in the Syrian Civil War in 2011, and ISIS forces gaining strength in Syria in 2013. Saddam Hussein's former commanders supporting ISIS in its victories. Incompetent rule of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki which resulted in Sunnis preferring ISIS to the Shia government. Lastly, the Iraqi army did not effectively manage the threat by ISIS in Iraq.

Swann has questioned whether 7 World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, the way authorities said it did. See also 9/11 conspiracy theories. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigated the events of 7 World Trade Center. NIST determined that diesel fuel did not play an important role, nor did the structural damage from the collapse of the Twin Towers. Fires burned out of control during the afternoon, buckling critical columns, and ultimately causing the building to fall downward as a single unit. The fires, which were fueled by office contents and burned for seven hours, along with the lack of water, were the key reasons for the collapse. This made the old 7 WTC the only steel skyscraper at the time to have collapsed from fire. The NIST report found no evidence supporting the conspiracy theories that 7 World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition.

In an appearance in 2015 RT America, Swann said that “any credible evidence does not seem to exist” that Russia shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The plane's crash was investigated by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), who concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine.

Swann has hosted on his personal website posts with headlines about the public image of Vladimir Putin, such as "Putin: Russian military not threatening anybody, we are protecting our borders" and "Putin demonized for thwarting neocon plan for global domination." He started out the latter post, "For it is a rule which invariably holds true – if the Western elites praise the leader of a foreign country it means he is doing something which is good for those elites and bad for his country. If he's demonized, as Putin is, it's the other way round." By western commentators and the Russian opposition, Putin has been described as a dictator. American diplomats said Putin's Russia had become "a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a "virtual mafia state." The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project named Putin as the 2014 Person of the Year, recognizing "the person who does the most to enable and promote organized criminal activity."   The Dalai Lama criticized Putin's foreign policy practices, claiming it to be responsible for isolating Russia from the rest of the world.

Regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, Swann hosted a segment on WGCL-TV titled “5 Problems with CIA Claim That Russia Hacked DNC/Podesta Emails.” It is the consensus of the US and Western intelligence agencies that Russian agents hacked the emails, and in July 2018, 12 Russian military intelligence agents were indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly hacking the email accounts and networks of Democratic Party officials.

Swann is an anti-vaccine activist and, by way of conspiracy theories, has attempted to deny or discredit the scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism. Scientific consensus is that vaccines do not cause autism.

Personal life
He was married in 1999 to his wife, Jasmine. He lived in Portland, Oregon, where he was an assistant pastor at a Presbyterian church. After six or 18 months, he moved back to El Paso. Swann and his wife have five children, who have been home-schooled by Jasmine. He was ordained in 2000 at the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2001, he was hired as the youth minister for the Trinity-First United Methodist Church in El Paso. As of 2014, he has been a youth pastor for 17 years.