This Guardian Fake News Story Proves That The Media Can't Be Trusted
29
November, 2018
In
2015 the British Guardian appointed Katherine
Viner as editor in chief. Under her lead the paper took a new
direction. While it earlier made attempts to balance its shoddier
side with some interesting reporting, it is now solidly main stream
in the worst sense. It promotes neo-liberalism and a delves into
cranky identity grievances stories. It also became an main outlet for
manipulative propaganda peddled by the British secret services.
Its
recent fake news story about Paul Manafort, Wikileaks and
Julian Assange aptly demonstrates this. The documentation of it is a
bit lengthy but provides that it was a willful fake.
On
November 27 the Guardian prepared
to publish a story which asserted that Paula Manafort, Trump's former
campaign manager, had met Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks,
in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on at least three occasions. Some
two hours before the story went public it contacted Manafort and
Assange's lawyers to get their comments.
Assange's Wikileaks responded through
its public Twitter account
which has 5.4 million followers. On of those followers is Katherine
Viner:
WikiLeaks @wikileaks - 13:06 utc - 27 Nov 2018
SCOOP: In letter today to Assange's lawyers, Guardian's Luke Harding, winner of Private Eye's Plagiarist of the Year, falsely claims jailed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had secret meetings with Assange in 2013, 2015 and 2016 in story Guardian are "planning to run".
It
attached the email the Guardian's
Luke Harding had send.
Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.
Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.
It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.
Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.
The
piece did not include the public denial Wikileaks issued to its 5.4
million followers one and a half hour before it was published.
The Guardian piece
came at a critical moment. Currently the U.K.
and Ecuador conspire to deliver Julian Assange to U.S. authorities.
On Monday special counsel Robert Mueller said Manafort lied to
investigators, violating his recent plea deal.
The
new sensational claim was immediately picked up by prominent
reporters and
major main
stream outlets.
They distributed is as a factual account. It is likely that millions
of people took note of its claim.
But several
people who
had followed the Russiagate fairytale and the Mueller investigation
were immediately
suspicious of
the Guardian claim.
The
story was weakly sourced and included some details that seemed
unlikely to be true. Glenn Greenwald noted that
the Ecuadorian embassy is under heavy CCTV surveillance. There are
several guards, and visitors have to provide their identity to enter
it. Every visit is logged. If Manafort had really visited Assange, it
would have long been known:
In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly sketchy aspects to the story.
Moreover,
the main author of the story, Luke Harding, is known to be a
notorious fraud, a russo-phobe intelligence asset with a personal
grievance towards Assange and Wikileaks.
A year ago an important Moon
of Alabama piece
- From
Snowden To Russia-gate - The CIA And The Media -
mentioned Harding:
The people who promote the "Russian influence" nonsense are political operatives or hacks. Take for example Luke Harding of the Guardian who just published a book titled Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. He was taken apart in a Real News interview (vid) about the book. The interviewer pointed out that there is absolutely no evidence in the book to support its claims. When asked for any proof for his assertion Harding defensively says that he is just "storytelling" - in other words: it is fiction. Harding earlier wrote a book about Edward Snowden which was a similar sham. Julian Assange called it "a hack job in the purest sense of the term". Harding is also known as plagiarizer. When he worked in Moscow he copied stories and passages from the now defunct Exile, run by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames. The Guardian had to publish an apology.
The
new Guardian story
looked like another weak attempt to connect the alleged Russian
malfeasance with Assange and the Wikileaks publishing of the DNC
emails. Assange and other involved people deny that such a relation
existed. There is no public evidence that support such claims.
Shortly
after the Guardian's
fake news story went public Paul Manafort issued an unequivocal
denial:
“I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him,” the statement said. “I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter. We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.”
At
16:05 utc the Guardian silently
edited the story.
Caveats
(here in italic and underlined) were
added to
the headline and within several paragraphs. No editorial note was
attached to inform the readers of the changes:
Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say
...
It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
...
Why Manafort might have sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear.
...
Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers initially declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.
One
paragraph was added to included Wikileaks'
denial:
In a series of tweets WikiLeaks said Assange and Manafort had not met. Assange described the story as a hoax.
This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange's representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.
This
defensive Guardian claim
is, like its story, evidently completely false. Wikileaks publicly
denied the Guardian's
claims 90 minutes before the story was first published. Manafort
asserts that his lawyers had notified the Guardian that
the story was false before the Guardian'proceeded
with the story'.
Half
an hour later Julian Assange instructed
his lawyers to
sue the Guardian for
libel. Wikileaks opened a
fund to
support the lawsuit.
A
day after the Guardian smear
piece the Washington
Times reported that
Manafort's passports, entered into evidence by the Mueller
prosecution, show that he did not visit London in any of the years
the Guardian claimed
he was there to visit Assange.
The
story was completely false and the Guardian knew
it was. It disregarded and left out the denials the subjects of the
story had issued before it was published.
The Guardian has become a main outlet for British government disinformation operationsaimed at defaming Russia. It smeared Assange and Snowden as Russian collaborators. It uncritically peddled the Russiagate story and the nonsensical Skripal claims which are both obviously concocted by British intelligence services. That seems to have become its main purpose.
While most readers with functional critical thinking capacity may readily dismiss the Guardian’s smear on its face, the fact that the Guardian published this piece, and that Luke Harding is still operating with even the tiniest modicum of respect as a journalist despite his history of deceit, tells us something bone-chilling about journalism.
It is no accident that Luke Harding is still employed: in fact, it is because of Harding’s consistent loyalty to establishment, specifically the UK intelligence apparatus, over the truth that determines his “success” amongst legacy press outlets. Harding is not a defacement or a departure from the norm, but the personification of it.
The truth is that the Guardian has not erred in this latest story attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake – it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.
Its job is to shore up a consensus on the left for attacks on leading threats to the existing, neoliberal order: ...
The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.
We
have previously shown that the Guardian even
uses fascist
propaganda tropes to
smear the Russian people. It is openly publishing Goebbels' cartoons
and rhetoric against Europes biggest state. There is no longer any
line that it does not dare to cross. Unfortunately other 'western'
media are not much better.
Within
hours of being published the Guardian piece
was debunked as fake news. That did not hinder other outlets to add
to its smear. Politico allowed
"a former CIA officer," writing under a pen name, to
suggest - without any evidence - that the Guardian has
been duped - not by its MI5/6 and Ecuadorian spy sources, but
by Russian
disinformation:
Rather than being the bombshell smoking gun that directly connects the Trump campaign to WikiLeaks, perhaps the report is something else entirely: a disinformation campaign. Is it possible someone planted this story as a means to discredit the journalists?
...
Harding is likely a major target for anyone wrapped up in Russia’s intelligence operation against the West’s democratic institutions.
...
If this latest story about Manafort and Assange is false—that is, if, for example, the sources lied to Harding and Collyns (or if the sources themselves were lied to and thus thought they were being truthful in their statements to the journalists), or if the Ecuadorian intelligence document is a fake, the most logical explanation is that it is an attempt to make Harding look bad.
The
is zero evidence in the Politico screed
that supports its suggestions and claims. It is fake news about a
fake news story. It also included the false claim that Glenn
Greenwald worked with Wikileaks on the Snowden papers. That claim was
later removed.
We
have seen a similar pattern in the Skripal affair. When 'western'
intelligence get caught in spreading disinformation, they accuse
Russia of being the source of the fake.
Unfortunately
no western main stream media can any longer be trusted to publish the
truth. The Guardian is
only one of many which peddle smears and disinformation about the
'enemies' of the ruling 'western interests'. It is on all of us to
debunk them and to educate the public about their scheme.
Jonathan
Cook was once a first-class journalist writing for the Guardian; now
he is one of the paper’s biggest critics.
Guardian ups its vilification of Julian Assange
28
November 2018
It
is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including
from leading journalists, to the Guardian’s long-running
vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.
Reporter
Luke Harding’s latest article, claiming that
Donald Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort
secretly visited Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London on three
occasions, is so full of holes that even hardened opponents of
Assange in the corporate media are struggling to stand by it.
Faced
with the backlash, the Guardian quickly – and very quietly – rowed
back its
initial certainty that its story was based on verified facts.
Instead, it amended the text, without acknowledging it had done so,
to attribute the claims to unnamed, and uncheckable, “sources”.
The
propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide
evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with
Trump, and Trump’s supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage
Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.
The
Guardian’s latest story provides a supposedly stronger foundation
for an existing narrative: that Assange and Wikileaks knowingly
published emails hacked by Russia from the Democratic party’s
servers. In truth, there is no
public evidence that
the emails were hacked, or that Russia was involved. Central actors
have suggested instead that the emails were leaked from within the
Democratic party.
Nonetheless,
this unverified allegation has been aggressively exploited by the
Democratic leadership because it shifts attention away both from its
failure to mount an effective electoral challenge to Trump and from
the damaging contents of the emails. These show that party
bureaucrats sought to rig
the primaries to
make sure Clinton’s challenger for the Democratic nomination,
Bernie Sanders, lost.
To
underscore the intended effect of the Guardian’s new claims,
Harding even throws in a casual and unsubstantiated reference to
“Russians” joining Manafort in supposedly meeting Assange.
Manafort
has denied the
Guardian’s claims, while Assange has threatened
to sue the
Guardian for libel.
‘Responsible for Trump’
The
emotional impact of the Guardian story is to suggest that Assange is
responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more
significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible
claim that
Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the
protections of a free press, as enjoyed by the Guardian or the New
York Times – but the head of an organisation engaged in espionage
for a foreign power.
The
intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the
Wikileaks organisation, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That,
in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital
cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old,
corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far
greater transparency.
The
Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when
Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces
Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his
rights to use digital media.
It
will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange
on self-serving
bail violation charges and
extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal
system to lock Assange up for a very long time.
For
the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange’s supporters that
avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in
the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the
Guardian.
Even
when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in
2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily – and unlawfully –
detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN
report. See here and here.
Now
Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An
administrative error this month revealed that the US justice
department had secretly
filed criminal charges against
Assange.
Heavy surveillance
The
problem for the Guardian, which should have been obvious to its
editors from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be
easily verifiable without relying on unnamed “sources”.
Glenn
Greenwald is far from alone in noting that
London is possibly the most surveilled city in the world, with CCTV
cameras everywhere. The environs of the Ecuadorian embassy are
monitored especially heavily, with continuous filming by the UK and
Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and other actors
with an interest in Assange’s fate.
The
idea that Manafort or “Russians” could have wandered into the
embassy to meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and
meeting being intimately scrutinised and recorded is simply
preposterous.
According
to Greenwald: “If Paul Manafort … visited Assange at the Embassy,
there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof
demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none
of that.”
Former
British ambassador Craig Murray also points
out the
extensive security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any
visitor to Assange must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have
been logged.
In
fact, the Guardian obtained the
embassy’s logs in May, and has never made any mention of either
Manafort or “Russians” being identified in them. It did not refer
to the logs in its latest story.
Murray:
The problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuador’s President] Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these “Russians” are in the visitor logs … What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged “Russians”.
No fact-checking
It
is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious
publication like the Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably
true – both because Assange’s personal fate rests on their
veracity, and because, even more importantly, a fundamental right,
the freedom of the press, is at stake.
Given
this, one would have expected the Guardian’s editors to have
insisted on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to
press with Harding’s story. At a very minimum, they should have
sought out a response from Assange and Manafort before publication.
Neither precaution was taken.
I
worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the
layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through
before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of
commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor
herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that
could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.
And
yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a
green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a
range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.
That
at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had
“insurance” on this story. And the only people who could have
promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence
services – presumably of Britain, the United States and / or
Ecuador.
It
appears the Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks,
at face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit
Assange, the Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its
claims when it published them. That is profoundly irresponsible
journalism – fake news – that should be of the gravest concern to
readers.
A pattern, not an aberration
Despite
all this, even analysts critical of the Guardian’s behaviour have
shown a glaring failure to understand that its latest coverage
represents not an aberration by the paper but decisively fits with a
pattern.
Glenn
Greenwald, who once had an influential column in the Guardian until
an apparent, though unacknowledged, falling out with his employer
over the Edward Snowden revelations, wrote a series of baffling
observations about the Guardian’s latest story.
First,
he suggested it
was simply evidence of the Guardian’s long-standing (and
well-documented) hostility towards Assange.
“The
Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive
and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has
frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to
malign him.”
It
was also apparently evidence of the paper’s clickbait tendencies:
“They
[Guardian editors] knew that publishing this story would cause
partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news
outlets would hyperventilate over it, and that they’d reap the
rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or
false.”
And
finally, in a bizarre tweet, Greenwald opined, “I hope the story
[maligning Assange] turns out true” – apparently because
maintenance of the Guardian’s reputation is more important than
Assange’s fate and the right of journalists to dig up embarrassing
secrets without fear of being imprisoned.
I
think the Guardian is an important paper with great journalists. I
hope the story turns out true. But the skepticism over this story is
very widespread, including among Assange's most devoted haters,
because it's so sketchy. If Manafort went there, there's video.
Let's see it.
I think the Guardian is an important paper with great journalists. I hope the story turns out true. But the skepticism over this story is very widespread, including among Assange's most devoted haters, because it's so sketchy. If Manafort went there, there's video. Let's see it.
Deeper malaise
What
this misses is that the Guardian’s attacks on Assange are not
exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are
entirely predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason for
the Guardian violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the
paper’s hatred of Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the
Guardian and the wider corporate media.
Even
aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange, the Guardian is
far from “solid and reliable”, as Greenwald claims. It has been
at the forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn for prioritising the rights of Palestinians over
Israel’s right to continue its belligerent occupation. Over the
past three years, the Guardian has injected credibility into the
Israel lobby’s desperate efforts to tar Corbyn as an anti-semite.
Similarly,
the Guardian worked tirelessly to promote Clinton and undermine
Sanders in the 2016 Democratic nomination process – another reason
the paper has been so assiduous in promoting the idea that Assange,
aided by Russia, was determined to promote Trump over Clinton for the
presidency.
The
Guardian’s coverage of Latin America, especially of populist
leftwing governments that have rebelled against traditional and
oppressive US hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts
and experts. Its especial venom has been reserved for leftwing
figures like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, democratically elected but
official enemies of the US, rather than the region’s rightwing
authoritarians beloved of Washington.
The
Guardian has been vocal in the so-called “fake news” hysteria,
decrying the influence of social media, the only place where leftwing
dissidents have managed to find a small foothold to promote their
politics and counter the corporate media narrative.
The
Guardian has painted social media chiefly as a platform overrun by
Russian trolls, arguing that this should justify ever-tighter
restrictions that have so far curbed critical voices of the dissident
left more than the right.
Heroes of the neoliberal order
Equally,
the Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not
Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal
order that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic
collapse.
Its
pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up
the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false
pretences, into the largest crime against humanity in living memory –
the attack on Iraq.
That
“humanitarian intervention” cost the lives of many hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilised much of
the Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS,
and contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fuelled the
resurgence of the far-right. None of that is discussed in the
Guardian or considered grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter
of what is good for Britain and the world’s future.
The
Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins,
who, aided by the Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a
self-styled “weapons expert”. Like Luke Harding, Higgins
invariably seems ready to echo whatever the British and American
security services need verifying “independently”.
Higgins
and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves
the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking
a prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote US and
NATO hegemony while demonising Russia, especially in highly contested
arenas such as Syria.
That
clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now
enjoys an “academic” position at, and funding from, the Atlantic
Council, a high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up
support for NATO and justify its imperialist agenda.
Improbably,
the Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a supposed
citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as “fake news”
whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of
state-backed organisations.
The
truth is that the Guardian has not erred in this latest story
attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify
him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when
supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake – it
simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.
Its
job is to shore up a consensus on
the left for
attacks on leading threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether
they are a platform like Wikileaks promoting whistle-blowing against
a corrupt western elite; or a politician like Jeremy Corbyn seeking
to break apart the status quo on the rapacious financial industries
or Israel-Palestine; or a radical leader like Hugo Chavez who
threatened to overturn a damaging and exploitative US dominance of
“America’s backyard”; or social media dissidents who have
started to chip away at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate
media, including the Guardian.
The
Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred
of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.
UPDATE:
Excellent background from investigative journalist Gareth
Porter, published shortly before Harding’s story, explains why the
Guardian’s hit-piece is so important for those who want Assange out
of the embassy and behind bars. Read Porter’s article here.
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one pays me to write these blog posts. If you appreciated it, or any
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Unity4J's
Elizabeth Vos has penned this article on the question.
The
Guardian’s latest attack on Julian Assange was not only a
fallacious smear, it represented a desperate attempt on behalf of the
British intelligence community to conflate the pending US charges
against the journalist with Russiagate. The Guardian’s article
seeks to deflect from the reality that the prosecution of Assange
will focus
on Chelsea Manning-Era releases and
Vault 7, not the DNC or Podesta emails.
We
assert this claim based on the timing of the publication, the
Guardian’s history of subservience to British intelligence
agencies, animosity between The Guardian and WikiLeaks, and the
longstanding personal feud between Guardian journalist Luke Harding
and Assange. This conclusion is also supported by Harding’s
financial and career interest in propping up the Russiagate
narrative.
All
eyes were on WikiLeaks this week, as lawyers argued for US charges
against Assange to be unsealed. Hours before the (Clinton-appointed)
judge in the case delaying
their ruling for
seven days, The
Guardian lobbed
an unexpected shot across the bow, claiming that: “Donald
Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks
with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and
visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign.”
Disobedient
Media recently
reported on evidence indicating that charges against Assange do not
relate to Russiagate. In light of this, one can immediately interpret
the Guardian’s hit-piece as a distraction intended to tie public
perception of Assange’s prosecution to the Russiagate narrative by
any means necessary. Honesty be damned.
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