The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.
This is easy to show. Read through Hill’s “report”. Then zip to 20 minutes and 55 seconds of the recording of Assange speaking at the event Hill misreports, and simply listen to the applause from the Oxford Union after Assange stops speaking.
Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.
Much of what Hill wrote is not journalism at all. What does this actually mean?
“His critics were reasoned, those who queued for over an hour in the snow to hear him speak were thoughtful. It was Julian Assange – the man at the centre of controversy – who refused to be gracious.”
Hill manages to quote five full sentences of the organiser of the anti-Assange demonstration (which I counted at 37 people) while giving us not one single sentence of Assange’s twenty minute address. Nor a single sentence of Tom Fingar, the senior US security official who was receiving the Sam Adams award. Even more remarkably, all three students Hill could find to interview were hostile to Assange. In a hall of 450 students who applauded Assange enthusiastically and many of whom crowded round to shake my hand after the event, Hill was apparently unable to find a single person who did not share the Rusbridger line on Julian Assange.
Hill is not a journalist – she is a pathetic grovelling lickspittle who should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
Here is the answer to the question about cyber-terrorism of which Amelia Hill writes:
“A question about cyber-terrorism was greeted with verbose warmth”
As you can see, Assange’s answer is serious, detailed, thoughtful and not patronising to the student. Hill’s characterisation – again without giving a word of Assange’s actual answer – is not one that could genuinely be maintained. Can anybody – and I mean this as a real question – can anybody look at that answer and believe that “Verbose warmth” is a fair and reasonable way to communicate what had been said to an audience who had not seen it? Or is it just an appalling piece of hostile propaganda by Hill?
The night before Assange’s contribution at the union, John Bolton had been there as guest speaker. John Bolton is a war criminal whose actions deliberately and directly contributed to the launching of an illegal war which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Yet there had not been one single Oxford student picketing the hosting of John Bolton, and Amelia Hill did not turn up to vilify him. My main contribution to the Sam Adams event was to point to this as an example of the way people are manipulated by the mainstream media into adopting seriously warped moral values.
Amelia Hill is one of the warpers, the distorters of reality. The Guardian calls her a “Special Investigative Correspondent.” She is actually a degraded purveyor of lies on behalf of the establishment. Sickening.
Hey guano, stop playing your islamofascist role, you’ll freak out resident dissident. I know you had a dog once, and his ears smelled like warm honey; you told me right on this blog. You’re as soft as warm butter really. I also know that your morals are good, and that you can reason people’s socks off when you’re in the mood.
resident dissident, 8:48 pm; yes, I knew when I wrote it that “trust” wasn’t quite right, but I decided to keep my comment reasonably short. My point is, people accept the way the corporate media frame the debate, and they don’t hold the corporate media to account when the truth emerges.
Look at the Iraq “Weapons of Mass Destruction” debacle. How many people stopped buying and/or reading their paper, how many decided to stop watching the mainstream news? That is what it would really take; that people would decided, “they lied to me, they mislead me, and I’m not absorbing any more of their misleading messages”.
The corporate media is not “the messenger”. It shapes people’s viewpoints to its own ends. The matter of Assange and the Guardian exposes that very well, if you follow the evidence trail, but of course, you won’t find that in The Guardian very much, nor, funnily enough, in its “competitors”. These institutions like their power over public perception, and don’t want to yield it to the Internet and the likes of Wikileaks.
“Media Lens – Correcting for the Distorted Vision of the Corporate Media”
http://medialens.org/
@Clark, “Macky, to be fair, resident dissident claims that the contradiction that lead to my comment “you’re a disgrace” was a typing error.”
Your being far too generous yet again; it was more the general “Hypocrisy, dishonesty, and a load of hot air”, laced with ample snide misrepresentations, that lead me to think that RD is quite troll-like.
@Resident Dissident, on the strength of your reply I’m coming around to thinking that perhaps you are more blinkered than agent provocateur ; although like real troll Habbabkuk, you insult us all by asking us to condemn the” abuse”s committed by “Islamofascists”, as if the regular Posters to this blog would actually condone any atrocities, no matter who committed them; to ask for this is highly offensive, however your Islamophobia prevents you from realizing this, but try badgering people on the street tomorrow, to condemn 9/11, and if you don’t end-up with black eyes & a broken nose, consider yourself very lucky.
Your mixing in the Syrian & Iranian Oppositions, with lack of public support here for Israel/UK/US is also quite revealing, in that you inadvertently acknowledge that these “Oppositions” are fundamentally just pawns of the West, and in decrying public support for Israel/UK/US you also reveal your expectation that we should all subscribe to the chauvinistic “My country, right or wrong” mentality that you obviously possess. In fact your entire post, the “black & white”, “no shades of grey “ & “no dialectical argument”, is manifestly an embarrassing projection of yourself.
Despite my highlighting the troll-like giveaway of “whatabouteries”, you miss/demiss/misrepresent (hard to say which is more damning), the point that I made about the very real prospect of Assange ending up incarcerated for life in the American prison system; instead you jump on the “Gulag” word to avoid the point and go charging along on your whataboutery horse, hurling “ Sozhenitsyn” & “20 million political prisoners” smoke bombs. Do I really have to draw your attention that ;
“More than 7.1 million Americans are in prison, on parole or under correctional supervision. Private prisons are one of the fastest growing businesses in the United States, as seen in the phenomenal growth of public enterprises, such as the GEO Group, G4S, and CCA all of which have established sexual harassment, torture and rape cases in privatized prisons. In fact, privatized prisons are becoming one of the best investments of the 21st century, as more and more people are locked up in prison.”
And that this description of US prisons of 40 years ago, “”It was the closest thing to hell this side of hell,”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21084323
must surely be infinitely even worse now due to the standard practice of putting tens of thousands of prisoners in extreme isolation in “supermax” State prisons; inhuman treatment which means that prisoners are held in their cells for 23 hours a day, with many suffering irreversible mental deterioration, a terrible form of torture, condemned by many organizations such as the UN Committee Against Torture & Amnesty International. In fact death would probably be a blessing, rather than years of torture that eventually turns you mad.
I didn’t want to debate with you, because your initial reply has already confirmed that you have nothing really to offer beyond troll-like nonsense, and I don’t expect this sad fact to change, unless of course you really want to prove me wrong…
Macky, brilliant response to Res Diss. Particularly that insight into US prisons.
Feb 18, Bradley Manning will complete 1,000 days in prison without trial.
We’ll talk more on our earlier conversation of a couple of days ago soon.
I see the worm has turned and Ms Khan has knifed Julian in the back.
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/02/jemima-khan-inside-story-how-julian-assange-alienated-his-allies
The Guardian’s Esther Addley reports it with some glee.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/06/jemima-khan-julian-assange-wikileaks
“Your mixing in the Syrian & Iranian Oppositions, with lack of public support here for Israel/UK/US is also quite revealing, in that you inadvertently acknowledge that these “Oppositions” are fundamentally just pawns of the West, and in decrying public support for Israel/UK/US you also reveal your expectation that we should all subscribe to the chauvinistic “My country, right or wrong” mentality that you obviously possess. In fact your entire post, the “black & white”, “no shades of grey “ & “no dialectical argument”, is manifestly an embarrassing projection of yourself.”
You have entirely misunderstood what I have said but in the process have demonstrated my point – it is not I that draws the divide between the “saints” and “devils” and cannot seen that both sides have both good and bad features but yourself. I have never subscribed to “my country right or wrong” or “(insert name of another country) right or wrong” – live is never that simple. I detest nationalism for that matter – and have made the point on other threads many times.
On US prisons there is no denying that there is a awful lot wrong there – and it is pretty clear that the ideology of strict penalties acting as a deterrence to crime really doesn’t work – otherwise why doesn’t the numbers going to prison fall after time. That said it is nowhere near the Soviet GULAG as I suspect you know. You forget that practically every Russian family has someone who was “lost” in the GULAG – and the Russians have a Head of State who steadfastly refuses to acknowledge and condemn the evil which then occurred and still maintains much of the surveillance machine that sent so many people to a hell which I can confidently state is much worse than the current US Prison system. Just try and develop some perspective and judgement when you make such statements.
@Mary
“I see the worm has turned and Ms Khan has knifed Julian in the back.”
Does anyone perhaps wish to ask why this keeps happening with St Julian’s friends? Surely they cannot all be CIA stooges?
Interesting that she also refers to the cult in the article – I’m sure the conspiracy theories will follow.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/06/jemima-khan-julian-assange-wikileaks
Another former support has seen the light and is also quite rightly questioning the ‘blinkered cultish devotion’ of JA’s more rabid ‘ followers’.
I knew that you would probably be the first to jump in on that but actually I was not addressing you.
A dangerous devotion that some readers of this blog are all too aware of.
Khan writes; ” the title was derived from a comment in the film by Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, ”
Hmm. An objective pov which sets up the objectivity with the title “Wikileaks, We steal secrets” Much apologia is found in the prose of reviewers like Variety and Hollywood Reporter, as they lament Assange’s lack of transparency for walking out of an interview when it turned to the Swedish charges. ‘No need for the paranoia’ of saying something which could be used against him later. Sweden, Sweden, and more Sweden. I’m sure the film is not pushing an agenda any more than Zero Dark Thirty seems to have successfully done.
Further, he is derided for becoming the face of Wikileaks with some sort of demented ‘star’ status. What do you suppose he would give to have his anonymity returned to him? As to Manning; what should he do hire some thugs from Blackwater to rappel into the stockade and vault him off to Ecuador?
The Media has never like Julian because he made them look bad. Fortunately, this is not difficult.
Of course, Res Diss, Ms Khan is a conspiracy unto herself. Very naive, a bit like you or, perhaps a lot? You’re entitled to her very-cultured cult.
So you want Assange to be naive too? While you want to hide under a rock? BUT Fact is stranger than Fiction.
I can totally imagine JA referring to himself in the third person. 🙄
Normally a dead give away that someone is detached from reality and has zero self-awareness.
CE, tell us more about this “danger”?
And while you’re at it, about your self-awareness, Enlightened One.
Res Diss in case it escaped your attention, you are yet to respond:
Villager
6 Feb, 2013 – 9:04 pm
Res Diss, was it you who made that point about there being a ‘cult’ lurking here? If so, it is you that needs to grow…a few inches taller. And if you want to discuss Assange–go back, carefully, through the Assange threads on this blog, then come back and talk. Not many of us have the time, you apparently have, to feed into your ignorance.
Btw which part of my comment was ad hom to you?
Mary, thanks for bring ing that last bit to one’s attention.
I’ve stopped reading the MSM completely, choosing to live on a need-to-know principle. You are an invaluable filter in that process. Thank you.
Macky and Villager, are you signed up to Media Lens e-mail alerts? I recommend them highly. They illustrate the insidious nature of propaganda, pointing out the language, which is universal across our corporate media, and which frames the debate, particularly about foreign policy and military intervention, in terms of “us” and “them”, without ever putting it so blatantly; a set of assumptions and a way of expression so familiar that most people never even notice it, including the journalists who write it and the editors who choose it for publication.
Please re-read this comment from resident dissident:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/01/amelia-hill-is-a-dirty-liar/comment-page-4/#comment-392451
Our first reaction to propaganda is to fail to notice it. The second stage is to still not notice it, but to “distrust” the corporate media. Our third stage is to react against the propaganda, and to take some opposing standpoints to it on some issues; at this stage we tend to feel justified in exaggerating in the opposite direction. Our fourth stage is to actually see the propaganda and to know how it operates. If there are subsequent stages, I don’t know what they are because I haven’t ever progressed past stage four.
Note that polarisation of arguments is likely between stages two and three. Stage four is a position which I cannot yet maintain, and on certain issues I often find myself back in an internal conflict between stages two and three.
Please try to de-polarise this debate, because the polarisation forms a blockage that inhibits further progress. I got upset with resident dissident, but it was mostly driven by a misunderstanding centred upon a typing error. I slipped back to stage three and indulged in exaggeration. I regret that, and I feel that I have inhibited progress in this debate by permitting myself to react so strongly. Please help me to fix this.
CE, I have never met a Hacker who was easy to get along with. And I’ve had dealings with quite a few.
It’s the mindset. Code either runs, or it freezes. There is no partly-right in hackerdom.
@ Ben,
Yes, I think the genesis of this article by Jemima Khan is two-fold. She says in her article that her initial doubts were raised by that article by David Allen Green in the New Stateman, of which she is an editor, Legal Myths of the Assange Case. She was obviously quite affected by DAG’s theories (I remember when he first went into the embassy she tweeted that she wanted him to “face the allegations”, which was picked up and trumpeted at the time by the UK MSM). She says she wanted Assange to answer her questions on DAG’s article and he told her he was busy but invited herself to the Ecuadorian embassy. She declined because she felt he might also use it as a photo op. A pity, because she obviously thereby lost the opportunity to hear a good debunking of DAG’s theories (he’s a solicitor specialising in media, btw, with no expertise in either extradition or Swedish law).
Then she got involved – as executive producer – with Alex Gibney’s Universal Studios commissioned and funded documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks”. (She’s surprised Assange has denounced it without viewing it, with a title like that?) I don’t know what’s happened to either her or Gibney while they were in Sweden researching that part of their doc, but they seem to have swallowed wholesale the Swedish state’s version of events. To be honest, I thought Jemima Khan’s article did try to give a balanced account of Wikileaks, and she clearly believes the documentary is balanced and fair. It may well be, I don’t know, but it doesn’t sit well to my mind to distribute globally a documentary containing an interview with one of the women making sexual allegations against Assange, when he is legally barred from discussing those same allegations publicly. The only contribution that woman interviewee can give is her own viewpoint about her own allegations – she can’t speak to “The Story of Wikileaks” because she was never a Wikileaks employee. She’s the Political Secretary of the Swedish Democrats Christian Brotherhood, the organisation who hosted the seminar Assange was invited to speak at.
@Resident Dissident: “You have entirely misunderstood what I have said”
Yes of course, your point was so subtle that it pass far over my little pea-brain head, or is it actually the usual case of projectionists not being able to realize their own projections ?
“I have never subscribed to “my country right or wrong”
Would never has guess by the contents of your posts; do you mean it’s more “the West Good, Islam Bad” ?
“I detest nationalism for that matter”
More than Islam ? Funny how the only loathing that saturates your posts seems only to be directed at Muslims.
“On US prisons there is no denying that there is a awful lot wrong there”
Enough to make you seek sanctuary if there was a real possibility of spending decades in there ?
“That said it is nowhere near the Soviet GULAG”
Still galloping about on your whataboutery horse I see; any chance of addressing the point I was making (see question just above).
“Just try and develop some perspective and judgement when you make such statements.”
LOL ! As I expected you really cannot raise your game for serious debating, but at least you inadvertently provided some humour, albeit at your own expense.
@Clark, you really are a dreamer ! You cannot blame yourself not being able to reason with the handful of contrarians that attack this blog, either they are deliberating sabotaging threads, or they are frankly too blinkered for any light of reason to penetrate the dark recessions of their tiny minds.
So I will respond as I see fit when I have to grapple with them, and in a way that they get the message that I want them to get.
(I’ve been active follower/poster of Medialens for years now, but thanks anyway)
@Villager, it so frustrating that I’m spending time dealing with the likes of RD, instead of continuing our previous discussion, but we will carry on where we left off very shortly, hopefully !
So it’s OK to condemn a film solely on the basis of it’s title, without having ever seen it? Well it is if you’re Julian Assange. Mary Whitehouse would approve I’m sure.
It goes without saying that Assange would try to “debunk” DAG’s interpretation of the law but then he would, wouldn’t he? Whether he, with no legal qualifications at all in British or Swedish law, could provide a good debunking is of course another matter.
I’m pleased that the scales have at last fallen from Jemima’s eyes and she can see Assange for what he is. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for the others to overcome their embarrassment and admit that they were fooled too.
Clark, thanks for that very interesting framework. However, the underlying assumption is that you’re dealing with supple minds. Sometimes one gets the feeling, one is dealing with people who are ‘over the hill’. Where does one fit them into this framework? Or entrapped in ideologies, belief systems etc and therefore eyes shut widely. As Macky alludes, you cannot argue with them rationally. You can’t hope to describe an elephant to a blind person and then expect him to draw you one Sir.
People like you and some others are thinking with their brain AND heart, but I have met many people much older than me whose heart is cold–loads of intellect but no intelligence. These good followers need leaders who are in the main products of dog-eat-dog competition. No slight to the doggy world meant.
Yet, Macky will do a better job than me in helping you.
“It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for the others to overcome their embarrassment and admit that they were fooled too.”
Is that interest of yours your contribution to man’s consciousness. Sorry i don’t really want to awaken you, despite your house being on fire.
resident dissident, 6 Feb, 10:50 pm
And further ask, is this anything to do with various events in Sweden, like why a request for a STD test was turned by police into sex crime allegations, why it was leaked to the gutter press so very fast, and why a prosecutor might resurrect a case that could only ever come down one person’s word against another’s?
It might not have taken much “CIA stooge” involvement to tip the balance, eh? And what does that say for the possibility of a fair trial, in the system where the Thomas Quick case occurred, with Claes “the accused is always guilty” Borgström involved?
http://rixstep.com/1/20120830,01.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/20/thomas-quick-bergwall-sweden-murder?INTCMP=SRCH
Whatever. Assange has said that he’s prepared to face all this, so long as the Swedish government promise not to send him on to the US. That makes him braver then me.
Hacker joke:
There are 10 sorts of people,
those who know binary, and those who don’t.
“Assange has said that he’s prepared to face all this, so long as the Swedish government promise not to send him on to the US.”
A promise You, I, and JA all know that they cannot make Clark. This really is tired old ground.
http://theintelhub.com/2013/02/06/pirate-bay-founder-helped-wikileaks-on-several-fronts/
CE, why can that promise not be made?