The Grauniad, AKA Pravda, AKA Völkischer Beobachter is not merely a dull newspaper, it's a propaganda vehicle, “Assange’s principal media tormentor" and a "collaborator with the secret state."
Part 1 of 3
The night of Assange’s arrest, BBC Newsnight presenter Katie Razzell began in standard ‘impartial’ manner in describing his status: “Out of his hiding place and under arrest”.
‘Hiding place’ is BBC newspeak for ‘political asylum’. The implication was that Julian Assange had hidden in an attempt to evade justice. This was fake news, repeated on the airwaves and across the BBC website.
One of the most notorious examples of Assange-related fake news was the front-page accusation in the Guardian last November that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaigns manager, had met Assange in the embassy three times. No shred of evidence has ever been produced for this claim, which WikiLeaks and Manafort have both vehemently denied, and the story has been widely regarded as fake from virtually the hour of its publication. Luke Harding, the lead journalist on the story, and his editors Paul Johnson and Katharine Viner, have never apologised or retracted the story; nor have they responded to the many challenges about it. As we have previously noted, the Guardianhas a disreputable record in publishing nasty, abusive and derogatory pieces about Assange.
A Guardian editorial on the eve of Assange’s expulsion at least stated that Assange should not be extradited to the US: “[He] has shone a light on things that should never have been hidden”. However, John Pilger was scathing of the paper he called “Assange’s principal media tormentor [and] a collaborator with the secret state”, noting that its editorial had “scaled new weasel heights”. He continued: “The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called ‘the greatest scoop of the last 30 years’. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
“With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.”.
The editorial misled its readers on why Assange had sought refuge: “When he first entered the Ecuadorian embassy he was trying to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and molestation. That was wrong”.
As we saw above, this is a grotesque twisting of the facts. Indeed, the Guardian editorial was steeped in sophistry: “the Assange case is a morally tangled web. He believes in publishing things that should not always be published – this has long been a difficult divide between the Guardian and him”.
Pilger demolished the Guardian’s obfuscation: “These ‘things’ are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.”
“I have made a small donation to The Guardian because it’s worth it.”—-greywarshark, 28 April 2019
