Widely-read New York-based news portal Buzzfeed Politics reported yesterday that media outlets from Huffington Post and Washington Times to San Francisco Examiner and National Review carried several articles by right-wing American writers, most notably Joshua Trevino, who had been engaged by global publicity firm APCO Worldwide.
Trevino, who was last year sacked as the US correspondent for British paper The Guardian over a news-fixing scandal linked to Putrajaya, was reported to have declared earning US$389,724.70 (RM1.2 million), in a belated filing to the US Justice Department under its Foreign Agent Registration Act earlier this week, for a contracted campaign that spanned from May 2008 to April 2011.
According to Trevino’s belated federal filing, the interests paying Trevino were in fact the government of Malaysia, “its ruling party or interests closely aligned with either”, Buzzfeed reported.
The news site highlighted the writer telling the influential US website Politico previously in 2011 that “I was never on any ‘Malaysian entity’s payroll,’ and I resent your assumption that I was” following allegations he had hidden his business relationship with Malaysian political interests.
The contract also involved a firm called FBC (short for Fact-Based Communications), whose involvement in covert propaganda prompted a related scandal and forced an executive at The Atlantic to resign from its board, Buzzfeed reported.
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