The
Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred
of evidence. It did what it is designed to do, says Jonathan Cook.
by
Jonathan Cook
Part
4 - 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.
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