The
Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and
Was Completely False
Glenn Greenwald
29
December, 2016
JULIAN
ASSANGE IS a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many
despise him (into which category one falls in any given year
typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most
recent publication of leaked documents).
But
one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article,
which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report
published this week by The Guardian that recklessly attributed to
Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how
those false claims — fabrications, really — were spread all over
the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people
(if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article
is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly
denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to
suppress content in the name of combating it, are often the most
aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.
One’s
views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article because,
presumably, everyone agrees that publication of false claims by a
media outlet is very bad, even when it’s designed to malign someone
you hate. Journalistic recklessness does not become noble or
tolerable if it serves the right agenda or cause. The only way one’s
views of Assange are relevant to this article is if one finds
journalistic falsehoods and Fake News objectionable only when
deployed against figures one likes.
THE
SHODDY AND misleading Guardian article, written by Ben Jacobs, was
published on December 24. It made two primary claims — both of
which are demonstrably false. The first false claim was hyped in the
article’s headline: “Julian Assange gives guarded praise of Trump
and blasts Clinton in interview.” This claim was repeated in the
first paragraph of the article: “Julian Assange, the founder of
WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump. …”
The
second claim was an even worse assault on basic journalism. Jacobs
set up this claim by asserting that Assange “long had a close
relationship with the Putin regime.” The only “evidence”
offered for this extraordinary claim was that Assange, in 2012,
conducted eight interviews that were broadcast on RT. With the
claimed Assange-Putin alliance implanted, Jacobs then wrote: “In
his interview with la Repubblica, [Assange] said there was no need
for WikiLeaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of
the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there.”
The
reason these two claims are so significant, so certain to attract
massive numbers of clicks and shares, is obvious. They play directly
into the biases of Clinton supporters and flatter their central
narrative about the election: that Clinton lost because the Kremlin
used its agents, such as Assange, to boost Trump and sink Clinton. By
design, the article makes it seem as though Assange is heralding
Russia as such a free, vibrant, and transparent political culture
that — in contrast to the repressive West — no whistleblowing is
needed, all while praising Trump.
But
none of that actually happened. Those claims are made up.
Despite
how much online attention it received, Jacobs’s Guardian article
contained no original reporting. Indeed, it did nothing but purport
to summarize the work of an actually diligent journalist: Stefania
Maurizi of the Italian daily la Repubblica, who traveled to London
and conducted the interview with Assange. Maurizi’s interview was
conducted in English, and la Repubblica published the transcript
online. Jacobs’s “work” consisted of nothing other than
purporting to re-write the parts of that interview he wanted to
highlight, so that he and The Guardian could receive the traffic for
her work.
Ever
since the Guardian article was published and went viral, Maurizi has
repeatedly objected to the false claims being made about what Assange
said in their interview. But while Western journalists keep
re-tweeting and sharing The Guardian’s second-hand summary of this
interview, they completely ignore Maurizi’s protests — for
reasons that are both noxious and revealing.
Since Assange is the Official Devil, anything goes, but if you compare his actual interview to the Guardian's false summary, it's stunning.
.@ggreenwald I am completely furious about how my interview with Julian #Assange has been distorted and strumentalised
To
see how blatantly false The Guardian’s claims are, all one needs to
do is compare the claims about what Assange said in the interview to
the text of what he actually said.
TO
BEGIN WITH, Assange did not praise Trump, guardedly or otherwise. He
was not asked whether he likes Trump, nor did he opine on that.
Rather, he was asked what he thought the consequences would be of
Trump’s victory: “What about Donald Trump? What is going to
happen? … What do you think he means?” Speaking predictively,
Assange neutrally described what he believed would be the outcome:
Hillary
Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the
existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a
D.C. insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United
States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich
people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by
themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure
which is displacing and destabilizing the pre-existing central power
network within D.C. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve
rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are
opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse
and change for the better.
Most
of those facts — “Clinton’s election would have been a
consolidation of power” and Trump is creating “a new patronage
structure” — are barely debatable. They are just observably true.
But whatever one’s views on his statements, they do not remotely
constitute “praise” for Trump.
In
fact, Assange says Trump “is part of the wealthy ruling elite of
the United States” who “is gathering around him a spectrum of
other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities.” The
fact that Assange sees possibility for exploiting the resulting
instability for positive outcomes, along with being fearful about
“change for the worse,” makes him exactly like pretty much every
political and media organization that is opportunistically searching
for ways to convert the Trumpian dark cloud into some silver lining.
Everyone
from the New York Times and ThinkProgress to the ACLU and Democratic
Socialists has sought or touted a massive upsurge in support ushered
in by the Trump victory, with hopes that it will re-embolden support
for critical political values. Immediately after the election,
Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Chuck Schumer
said exactly what Assange said: that they were willing and eager to
exploit the ways that a Trump presidency could create new
opportunities (in the case of the first two, Trump’s abrogation of
the TPP, and in the case of the latter, fortified support for Israel;
as Sanders put it: “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about
pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this
country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him”).
None of that remotely constitutes “praise for Trump.” And if it
were anyone but Assange saying this, nobody would pretend that was so
— indeed, in those other cases, nobody did.
If
one wants to be generous and mitigate that claim as sloppy and
deceitful rather than an outright fraud, one could do so. But that’s
not the case for The Guardian’s second and far more inflammatory
claim: that Assange believes Russia is too free and open to need
whistleblowing.
In
that part of the interview, Assange was asked why most of WikiLeaks’
publications have had their biggest impact in the West rather than in
countries such as Russia or China. To see how wildly deceitful
Jacobs’s claim was about his answer, just read what he said: He did
not say that Russia was too free to need whistleblowing. Instead, he
explains that any Russian whistleblower who wanted to leak
information would have many better options than WikiLeaks given that
Assange’s organization does not speak Russian, is composed of
English-speaking Westerners, and focuses on the West:
In
Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and
Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum.
There are also newspapers like Novaya Gazeta, in which different
parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and
it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that
might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in
Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors
to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong
culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local
player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organization
with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than
800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and President Putin, so
we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our
publications come from Western sources, though not always. For
example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria,
including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication
about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that
country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how
distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far
away.
What
Assange is saying here is so obvious. He is not saying that Russia is
too free and transparent to need whistleblowing; indeed, he points
out that WikiLeaks has published some leaked documents about Russia
and Putin, along with Assad. What he says instead is that Russian
whistleblowers and leakers perceive that they have better options
than WikiLeaks, which does not speak the language and has no place in
the country’s media and cultural ecosystem. He says exactly the
same thing about China (“The real determinant is how distant that
culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away”).
To
convert that into a claim that Assange believes is Russia is too free
and open to need whistleblowing — a way of depicting Assange as a
propagandist for Putin — is not merely a reckless error. It is
journalistic fraud.
BUT,
LIKE SO much online fake news, this was a fraud that had a huge
impact, as The Guardian and Jacobs surely knew would happen. It’s
difficult to quantify exactly how many people consumed these false
claims, but it was definitely in the tens of thousands and almost
certainly in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Here’s just
one tweet, by the Washington Post’s Clinton-supporting blogger (and
Tufts political science professor) Dan Drezner, that spread the claim
about Assange’s purported belief that Russia is too open to need
whistleblowing; as of today, it has been re-tweeted by more than
7,000 people and “liked” by another 7,000:
Daniel W. Drezner
The next time you're inclined to take Julian Assange seriously, remember this. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/24/julian-assange-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-interview …
Nothing
illustrates the damage done by online journalistic deceit better than
this: While Drezner’s spreading of Jacobs’s false claim was
re-tweeted thousands and thousands of times, the objection from the
actual reporter, Maurizi, pointing out that it was false, was almost
completely ignored. At the time this article was published, it had a
grand total of 14 re-tweets:
The next time you're inclined to take Julian Assange seriously, remember this. theguardian.com/media/2016/dec…pic.twitter.com/TUoqHa1KNp
.@dandrezner this is completely false: Julian #Assange never ever declared that in my interview
Worse
still, the most vocal Clinton-supporting pundits, such as The
Atlantic’s David Frum, then began promoting a caveat-free version
of the false claims about what Assange said regarding Trump; he was
now converted into a full-fledged Trump admirer:
Part
of why this happened has to do with The Guardian’s blinding hatred
for WikiLeaks, with whom it partnered to its great benefit, only to
then wage mutual warfare. While the paper regularly produces great
journalism, its deeply emotional and personalized feud with Assange
has often led it to abandon all standards when reporting on
WikiLeaks.
But
here, the problem was deeply exacerbated by the role of this
particular reporter, Ben Jacobs. Having covered the 2016 campaign for
The Guardian U.S., he’s one of those journalists who became beloved
by Clinton’s media supporters for his obviously pro-Clinton
coverage of the campaign. He entrenched himself as a popular member
of the clique of political journalists who shared those sentiments.
He built a following by feeding the internet highly partisan
coverage; watched his social media follower count explode the more he
did it; and generally bathed in the immediate gratification provided
by online praise for churning out pro-Clinton agitprop all year.
But
Jacobs has a particularly ugly history with WikiLeaks. In August
2015, news broke that Chelsea Manning — whose leaks became one of
The Guardian’s most significant stories in its history and whom the
U.N. had found was subjected to “cruel and inhumane” abuse while
in detention — faced indefinite solitary confinement for having
unapproved magazines in her cell as well as expired toothpaste.
Jacobs went to Twitter and mocked her plight: “And the world’s
tiniest violin plays a sad song.” He was forced to delete this
demented tweet when even some of his Guardian colleagues publicly
criticized him, though he never apologized publicly, claiming that he
did so “privately” while blocking huge numbers of people who
objected to his comments (including me).
The
absolute last person anyone should trust to accurately and fairly
report on WikiLeaks is Ben Jacobs, unless the goal is to publish
fabrications that will predictably generate massive traffic for The
Guardian. Whatever the intent, that is exactly what happened here.
THE
PEOPLE WHO should be most upset by this deceit are exactly the ones
who played the leading role in spreading it: namely, those who most
vocally claim that Fake News is a serious menace. Nothing will
discredit that cause faster or more effectively than the perception
that this crusade is really about a selective desire to suppress news
that undermines one’s political agenda, masquerading as concern for
journalistic accuracy and integrity. Yet, as I’ve repeatedly
documented, the very same people most vocal about the need to
suppress Fake News are often those most eager to disseminate it when
doing so advances their agenda.
If
one really wants to battle Fake News and deceitful journalism that
misleads others, one cannot selectively denounce some Fake News
accounts while cheering and spreading those that promote one’s own
political agenda or smear those (such as Assange) whom one most
hates. Doing that will ensure that nobody takes this cause seriously
because its proponents will be seen as dishonest opportunists: much
the way cynically exploiting “anti-Semitism” accusations against
Israel critics has severely weakened the sting of that accusation
when it’s actually warranted.
It
is well-documented that much Fake News was disseminated this year to
undermine Clinton, sometimes from Trump himself. For that reason, a
poll jointly released on Tuesday by The Economist and YouGov found
that 62 percent of Trump voters — and 25 percent of Clinton voters
— believe that “millions of illegal votes were cast in the
election,” an extremely dubious allegation made by Trump with no
evidence.
But
this poll also found that 50 percent of Clinton voters now believe an
absurd and laughable conspiracy theory: that “Russia tampered with
vote tallies to help Trump.” It’s hardly surprising they believe
this: Some of the most beloved Democratic pundits routinely use the
phrase “Russia hacked the U.S. election” to imply not that it
hacked emails but the election itself. And the result is that —
just as is true of many Trump voters — many Clinton voters have
been deceived into embracing a pleasing and self-affirming though
completely baseless conspiracy theory about why their candidate lost.
By
all means: Let’s confront and defeat the menace of Fake News. But
to do so, it’s critical that one not be selective in which type one
denounces, and it is particularly important that one not sanction
Fake News when it promotes one’s own political objectives. Most
important of all is that those who want to lead the cause of
denouncing Fake News not convert themselves into its most prolific
disseminators whenever the claims of a Fake News account are pleasing
or self-affirming.
That’s
exactly what those who spread this disgraceful Guardian article did.
If they want credibility when posing as Fake News opponents in the
future, they ought to acknowledge what they did and retract it —
beginning with The Guardian.
To read what he actually said:
Julian Assange: "Donald? It's a change anyway"
To read what he actually said:
Julian Assange: "Donald? It's a change anyway"
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