The Guardian – Successful Propaganda, Failed Journalism

Ex-Guardian columnist, now fully independent, award-winning journalist Jonathan Cook wrote a piece two weeks ago about The Guardian, MI6 and the vilification of Julian Assange. That piece focused on the propaganda campaign that Guardian journalist Luke Harding, widely regarded as an MI6 stooge, had cooked up in his continued smear campaign to get Julian Assange arrested and sent back to the USA to face a life sentence in a small dark room.

“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”.

 

Ex British ambassador Craig Murray feels very much the same way as Jonathan Cook with his article entitled “Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies.”

“The right-wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange and channel them straight to MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding of the Guardian.

Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian, this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified “Russians” to the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that Manafort’s plea deal was over.

The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these “Russians” are in the visitor logs.”

 

Then from Elizabeth Vos at Disobedient Media comes the next piece in the jigsaw with her article that leaves no doubt as to the content – “The Guardian’s Reputation In Tatters After Forger Revealed To Have Co-Authored Assange Smear.”

In part, Vos writes:

“Harding seems worse than an MI6 stooge: He’s a wannabe-spook, hanging from the coat-tails of anonymous intelligence officers and publishing their drivel as fact without so much as a skeptical blink. His lack of self-awareness and conflation of anecdote with evidence sets him apart as either one of the most blatant, fumbling propagandists of our era, or the most hapless hack journalist to stain the pages of printed news.

To provide important context on Harding’s previous journalistic irresponsibility, we again recall that he co-authored the infamous book containing the encryption password of the entire Cablegate archive, leading to a leak of the unredacted State Department Cables across the internet. Although the guilty Guardian journalists tried to blame Assange for the debacle, it was they themselves who ended up on the receiving end of some well-deserved scorn.

In addition to continuing the Guardian’s and Villavicencio’s vendetta against Assange and WikiLeaks, it is clearly in Harding’s financial interests to conflate the pending prosecution of Assange with Russiagate. As this writer previously noted, Harding penned a book on the subject, titled: “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” Tying Assange to Russiagate is good for business, as it stokes public interest in the self-evidently faulty narrative his book supports.

Even more concerning is the claim amongst publishing circles, fueled by recent events, that Harding may be writing another book on Assange, with publication presumably timed for his pending arrest and extradition and designed to cash in on the trial. If that is in fact the case, the specter arises that Harding is working to push for Assange’s arrest, not just on behalf of US, UK or Ecuadorian intelligence interests, but also to increase his own book sales.

That Harding and Collyns worked intensively with Villavicencio for “months” on the “Assange story,” the fact that Villavicencio was initially listed as a co-author on the original version of the Guardian’s article, and the recent denial by Fidel Narvaez, raises the likelihood that Harding and the Guardian were not simply the victims of bad sources who duped them, as claimed by some.

It indicates that the fake story was constructed deliberately on behalf of the very same intelligence establishment that the Guardian is nowadays only too happy to take the knee for.

In summary, one of the most visible establishment media outlets published a fake story on its front page, in an attempt to manufacture a crucial cross-over between the pending prosecution of Assange and the Russiagate saga. This represents the latest example in an onslaught of fake news directed at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ever since they published the largest CIA leak in history in the form of Vault 7, an onslaught which appears to be building in both intensity and absurdity as time goes on.”

You can read Vos’s full article here – but you get the idea. And as Vos says The Guardian is destroying its reputation, and in the process, reveals the desperation of the establishment when it comes to Assange.

From here you can read another piece about Luke Harding, MI6 and more – only in this, Harding is exposed by those in the know.

Fake News And Propaganda – Is The Guardian In Bed With The Deep State?

 

 

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