When Alexander Cockburn died in 2012 at the age of 71, environmental journalist
Joshua Frank became managing editor and Jeffrey St. Clair became editor-in-chief of
CounterPunch.
Former
CounterPunch contributor
Israel Shamir was part of the
WikiLeaks organisation and an associate of its director,
Julian Assange, and in late 2010 and early 2011 wrote a series of articles for
CounterPunch drawing on materials from the
United States diplomatic cables leak. He has also written and co-written articles for
CounterPunch on what he alleges to be a campaign of harassment against Assange. One of these articles, "Assange Betrayed", made allegations against a plaintiff in a Swedish rape case against Assange that were widely circulated in the media. The allegations in
CounterPunch were the topic of controversy in the mainstream media.
Russian disinformation[edit]
During the 2016 presidential election,
CounterPunch published the writings of Alice Donovan who purported to be a freelance writer but was in fact a pseudonymous employee of the Russian government. Donovan was tracked by the
FBI for nine months. According to
The Washington Post, "she seemed to be doing the Kremlin’s bidding by stoking discontent toward Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and touting WikiLeaks, which U.S. officials say was a tool of Russia’s broad influence operation to affect the presidential race." In late November 2017,
The Washington Post contacted
CounterPunch about Donovan; co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair said that Donovan's pitches did not stand out amongst the pitches that
CounterPunch received daily. St. Clair asked Donovan to substantiate her identity by sending a photo of her driving license but Donovan never responded. On the same day
The Washington Post article was published on Donovan, St. Clair and Frank published a piece stating that
CounterPunch only ran one article by Alice Donovan during the 2016 election, which was on cyber-breaches of medical databases. Donovan was also exposed by the newsletter as a serial plagiarizer. In another follow-up article St. Clair and Frank exposed a network of alleged trolls that operated a site called Inside Syria Media Center promoting a pro-
Bashar al-Assad and pro-Russian view of the
Syrian Civil War. St. Clair and Frank speculated that the website was connected to the same network of trolls as Alice Donovan.
