The Fake News War

The Guardian is a highly respected broadsheet newspaper in the UK. For generations it has been trusted as a fiercely independent voice for the centre-left and liberal viewpoints in the UK.
In the opinion of the writer this has changed relatively recently. Apparently the newspaper has been left in a difficult financial situation after the departure of its last long serving Editor in chief, and that may have influenced its ability to be truly independent.
The Guardian boosted its credibility (and probably its sales) with the relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange at the time of the Snowden revelations. Since then relationships appear to have soured.
Glenn Greenwald, in The Intercept (who also brokered and published Snowden's findings, writes a powerful piece demonstrating, he says, that the Guardian, through the voice of Ben Jacobs, their Washington Correspondent, has published Fake news, that has since gone viral, as it plays into the prejudices of those dismayed that Trump is now the US President elect.

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Greenwald writes:

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.

.@ggreenwald I am completely furious about how my interview with Julian #Assange has been distorted and strumentalised

— stefania maurizi (@SMaurizi) December 28, 2016

Greenwald provides detailed testimony to demonstrate that the Guardian article is simply erroneous. You can read the full article here (and are encouraged to do so). The original interview with Stefania Maurizi has been misrepresented, and she has tweeted that she is furious about this.
This propaganda battle over what is and is not fake news is of crucial importance at the moment - and it is essential to step outside the media bubble of only following the main stream media, to gain a perspective, resting on facts and not just opinion.

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