How about fake headlines?

I still check the news from the UK Guardian, but I'm careful about what I'm reading.  The Guardian has been more slanted toward the right wing for the last several years.  They're not alone in printing very misleading headlines, but this one is way over the top:




News outlets know that a lot of people only read the headlines of stories.  This is not just a slant on the news, however.  It's completely false.  Nowhere in the article itself does it even say that.  I've been particularly watchful of what happens in Venezuela, because I went there in 2004 when Hugo Chávez was in office to participate in a week-long session of seminars and meetings with press, opposition leaders and various government officials.  I had great hopes for the country and a concern for the future of its government.  A strong leader can tend to dictatorship after some years in power, especially where there's a strong (and US backed) opposition.  Chávez was full of himself, and some of the National Assembly seemed to me to be turning to typical political power plays, but Chávez himself was a great force for the majority of Venezuelans, permitting all to benefit from the country's rich oil fields, establishing education and arts for those who had been shut out of privilege.

I've been concerned that Maduro is no Chávez and he might more easily tend to dictator type action, but it's almost impossible to get any fair news about Venezuela out of western news outlets.  I had let go of Venezuelan sources several years ago (and that may prove to be a mistake).  Amid all the reports of economic downturn and loss of support for Marduro in western reports,  I was not surprised, but rather saddened, to read this Guardian headline.  I wondered, however, how one bans rivals from elections.  Wouldn't that mean one banned elections?  So I read the article. And here's what it actually says:

Hundreds of supporters shouted “Go Home, Donald Trump” to interrupt Maduro at a rally late on Sunday in the colonial centre of Caracas, where he announced that pro-government candidates had won more than 300 of the 335 mayoral offices.

Sunday’s voting marked the last nationwide elections before next year’s presidential race, when Maduro is expected to seek another term despite his unpopularity.

  Guardian

Okay. I'm already feeling a bit skeptical. If he's unpopular, why are the pro-government candidates doing so overwhelmingly well?  The Guardian isn't claiming that voting is rigged.  Just acknowledging that pro-government candidates are winning elections in the lion's share of the country.

(I'm not a bit surprised at the crowd chants.  When I was there, they were saying "Go home, Bush."  They know full well what the US is doing in their country.)

“The imperialists have tried to set fire to Venezuela to take our riches,” Maduro told the crowd. “We’ve defeated the American imperialists with our votes, our ideas, truths, reason and popular will.”

No threat of a ban yet.

The elections played out as Venezuelans struggle with triple-digit inflation, shortages of food and medicine, and charges that Maduro’s government has undermined democracy by imprisoning dissidents and usurping the powers of the opposition-controlled national assembly.

Something I'd read before, and thought was sufficiently backed with evidence. But no threat of banning opposition there either.  They control the National Assembly, it says.

Three of the four biggest opposition parties refused to take part in Sunday’s contests, protesting against what they called an electoral system rigged by a “dictator”. The last time the opposition refused to compete in congressional elections in 2005 it strengthened the government’s hand for years.

So that seems to put the blame on the opposition - where it seems to belong, does it not? There's no ban. Just a voluntary refusal to participate.

After dropping his vote into the cardboard ballot box earlier in the day, Maduro responded to the boycott. “A party that has not participated today cannot participate any more,” he said. “They will disappear from the political map.”

There it is. That's it. Apparently, that's what makes the Guardian headline writer think that headline is justified. And this is a translation from Spanish, so we can't even be sure it's correct.   But let's assume it is.  He's just said that the opposition is destroying itself. That is very much NOT a ban.

The struggles have caused the president’s approval rating to plunge, although the opposition has been largely unable to capitalise on Maduro’s unpopularity.

[...]

The mayoral elections follow a crushing defeat of opposition candidates in October’s gubernatorial elections, where anti-Maduro candidates won only five of 23 races amid allegations of official vote-buying and other irregularities.

For the love of Pete. "Nobody likes the man, but the opposition can't win any votes." WTF?  If that's true, it's a dmaned poor opposition.

Given the opposition’s disarray, political analysts said they doubted Maduro’s opponents would be able to rally behind a single candidate in next year’s presidential election.

“These were absolutely predictable results,” local pollster Luis Vicente Leon said on Twitter. “It’s absurd to think that an abstaining political force can win the majority of mayorships.”

Maybe even more absurd than the headline for this article.

The Guardian used to be better than this. I'd check out my old Venezuelan news sources if I had any energy left after reading the shit we've got going on here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There Are Very Few "Real" News Outlets These Days

I've been asking myself that for the last couple of years.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Guardian Corrects Its "Fake News" Regarding Julian Assange

Guardian retracts false claims linking Assange to Russia. #FakeNewshttps://t.co/8vQlgkbjYo pic.twitter.com/WcdhrL7mu9

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 29, 2016

This is good. But it's also a cautionary tale. Had it not been for the wide audience Glenn Greenwald has, it's very unlikely that the Guardian would have corrected its article. Propaganda is important. Journalism is important.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Guardian vs. Julian Assange

Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him.This article, instead, is about a report published this week by the Guardian which 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 combatting it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.

  

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  The Guardian has corrected its article.

The Guardian Has Sunk to New Depths

Did someone new take over the helm at the Guardian? I used to be able to count on its US edition for actual news. And not only that, but actual non-partisan news. For quite a while now, it's pretty much like US media. WTF?

 

The first story in your headline news is who the father of the Orlando shooter endorses for president??!  And the second is about an activist in India having a bit of honey?

I shall switch to the International edition for a while and see if that's any better.

And, to answer my own question, I am suspicious that this may be the cause:

The Guardian is edited by Katharine Viner, who succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015.

  Wikipedia

In March 2016, Viner and Guardian News and Media chief executive David Pemsel announced cost-cutting measures, leading to the projected loss of 250 jobs, to reduce unsustainable losses in order to break even within three years. The following month, The Times reported internal tensions within the organisation as Rusbridger prepared to become Chairman of the Scott Trust, the ultimate overseer to ensure The Guardian survives "in perpetuity". Rusbridger's expansion of the company's operations was reportedly seen by staff as responsible for the decisions which Viner and Pemsel have made.[28] Viner and David Pemsel successfully opposed Rusbridger becoming Chair of the Scott Trust and he dropped plans to take up the post.

[...]

It has been suggested by former Guardian columnist Michael Wolff that another of Viner's rivals to succeed Rusbridger, Janine Gibson, suffered because of internal disquiet over the internal impact on The Guardian of the Edward Snowden revelations which Gibson edited in New York.[26] Peter Wilby, writing in the New Statesman, preferred a different explanation: "Viner is a more charming, more inclusive and less threatening figure than Janine Gibson, who started as the bookies’ and Rusbridger’s favourite."[

[...]

Viner was appointed editor-in-chief on 20 March 2015, the first woman to be the editor of The Guardian in its 194-year history,[3] and assumed her new post on 1 June 2015.[2][24] She intends to make the "media organisation" a "home for the most ambitious journalism, ideas and events" which is able to reach "out to readers all around the world."

  Wikipedia

Losing some others, I'm guessing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Understanding Edward Snowden

How Edward Snowden went from conservative proponent of US global policing to US most wanted whistleblower:  Very interesting article*, new details.

  Guardian

*"Edited extract from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World's Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding, published in the UK on Monday by Guardian Faber at £12.99; and in the US on 11 February by Vintage Books."

 

At Amazon

Journalism = Terrorism

British police have launched an investigation into whether the Guardian committed “potential” terrorism offenses by publishing the incriminating NSA and GCHQ documents leaked earlier this year by Edward Snowden.

[...]

UK officials claim that Snowden’s trove of data included information about British spies and that the information’s publication puts lives in direct danger. Rusbridger said his paper would not publish any such information and that Guardian editors have not even looked at some of the information Snowden provided regarding the Iraq war.

Lawmakers also threatened Rusbridger by implying Guardian staff had violated Section 58A of the Terrorism Act, which stipulates that it is against the law to publish or even transmit any information regarding members of the armed forces or intelligence employees.

  RT

This is actually what is very chilling, at least it certainly can be on newspapers and it is. If lawyers are worried that newspapers will be given massive fines for telling the truth about these matters then this really ties up the paper and they will actually avoid doing those stories. The interest here is making sure the public realize just what an enormous intelligence gathering operation is being created here. Let’s remember what they’re doing. They’re collecting our passwords for example, our bank passwords, and what I’d like to see in front of this committee is the people from GCHQ, the nameless anonymous spooks who have actually been breaking the law by hacking into our personal lives.

  Tony Gosling

Well, if it were only a laughingstock, that wouldn't be so worrisome.

The Guardian Incident

[S]ince this is 2013, not 1958, destroying one set of a newspaper's documents doesn't destroy them all, and since the Guardian has multiple people around the world with copies, they achieved nothing but making themselves look incompetently oppressive.

But conveying a thuggish message of intimidation is exactly what the UK and their superiors in the US national security state are attempting to accomplish with virtually everything they are now doing in this matter.

[...]

[T]he US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement. They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses." And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade.

  Glenn Greenwald

Including an attack on a hotel in Iraq where journalists were staying, resulting in the deaths of several journalists, and a direct attack on an al Jazeera office resulting in the death of a cameraman.

If the goal of the UK in detaining my partner was - as it now claims - to protect the public from terrorism by taking documents they suspected he had (and why would they have suspected that?), that would have taken 9 minutes, not 9 hours. Identically, the UK knew full well that forcing the Guardian UK to destroy its hard drives would accomplish nothing in terms of stopping the reporting: as the Guardian told them, there are multiple other copies around the world. The sole purpose of all of that, manifestly, is to intimidate.

And just so you know, don’t discuss your secrets in a room with windows or plastic cups.

The same two senior officials who had visited the Guardian the previous month returned with the message that patience with the newspaper's reporting was wearing out.

They expressed fears that foreign governments, in particular Russia or China, could hack into the Guardian's IT network. But the Guardian explained the security surrounding the documents, which were held in isolation and not stored on any Guardian system.

However, in a subsequent meeting, an intelligence agency expert argued that the material was still vulnerable. He said by way of example that if there was a plastic cup in the room where the work was being carried out foreign agents could train a laser on it to pick up the vibrations of what was being said. Vibrations on windows could similarly be monitored remotely by laser.

[...]

The Guardian's lawyers believed the government might either seek an injunction under the law of confidence, a catch-all statute that covers any unauthorised possession of confidential material, or start criminal proceedings under the Official Secrets Act.

Either brought with it the risk that the Guardian's reporting would be frozen everywhere and that the newspaper would be forced to hand over material.

"I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they wouldn't be achieving anything," Rusbridger said. "But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting."

Any such surrender would have represented a betrayal of the source, Edward Snowden, Rusbridger believed. The files could ultimately have been used in the American whistleblower's prosecution.

[...]

Furthermore the computer records could be analysed forensically to yield information on which journalists had seen and worked with which files.

Rusbridger took the decision that if the government was determined to stop UK-based reporting on the Snowden files, the best option was destroy the London copy and to continue to edit and report from America and Brazil. Journalists in America are protected by the first amendment, guaranteeing free speech.

  Guardian

We still have the First Amendment? It’s on its deathbed if we do. We knew it was in bad shape when the country adopted “Free Speech Zones” during the reign of George the W.

Interview with Guardian Editor on Miranda and Destruction of Documents

If the video below doesn't work for you, go directly to the Guardian link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/aug/20/alan-rusbridger-miranda-snowden-nsa-gchq-video

Make no mistake: essentially forcing a newspaper’s editor into exile over a report it doesn’t like sounds like a story from the 18th century reign of King George III, not of a supposed 21st century democracy.

While this episode exposes despicable and ignorant actions taken by the UK government—again, actions that are normally reserved for the worst of authoritarian regimes—we should also take notice of journalistic bravery on the part of Rusbridger and his Guardian staff.

Rusbridger has had the courage to keep publishing in the face of government pressure, prior restraint, and possibly the financial stability of his newspaper. He is commendably putting his newspaper at risk to get the truth to the world’s citizens. We need more editors like him.

  Freedom of the Press Foundation

Alan Grayson Proposes Amendment to Defense Appropriations Bill

If you will recall: US Air Force has blocked the Guardian website from computers on bases.

The Edward Snowden Leaks

Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson clearly show why the Guardian was the right place for Snowden to entrust the documents he took from the NSA.