As if we needed another reason to want the legacy media to die screaming all alone in an ill-reputed nursing home, National Public Radio has just added one more to the planet-sized pile.
NPR, which just Wednesday released an anti-WikiLeaks attack editorial disguised as a movie review, has made a deliberate attempt to tarnish WikiLeaks’ 100% perfect record of authentic and accurately-vetted releases by going out of its way to report that the publishing organization had posted nine gigabytes of partially inauthentic documents.
Wikileaks posted 9 gigabytes of Macron's campaign data, which is said to include both real and fake documents.https://t.co/ib5V8qfsKs
— NPR (@NPR) May 6, 2017
In reality, WikiLeaks did not post 9 gigabytes of anything, but only tweeted a link to a pre-existing cache of documents allegedly from French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron on a site that very plainly does not have the WikiLeaks URL, with a very clear disclaimer that it didn’t know who was responsible for posting them.
Alleged multi-GB team Macron email archives. Could be a 4chan practical joke. We are examining https://t.co/wLemQiYHT2
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 5, 2017
Obviously, there is a massive difference between the notorious transparency advocacy site wikileaks.org and the things that its Twitter account tweets about; attributing the 9 gigabytes of documents to WikiLeaks just because the organization’s social media account made a tweet about them is like attributing the authorship of a Guardian article to J.K. Rowling just because she shared it on Twitter.
This establishment media tactic of deliberately conflating WikiLeaks’ Twitter account with the actual organization in order to smear its reputation is not a new tactic. In March MSNBC’s infinitely recursive self-parody Rachel Maddow deceived America in exactly the same way by telling her audience that WikiLeaks’ drops were the same as its social media posts about those drops, digging up a tweet from October and citing its timestamp as evidence that Russia Today knew about the WikiLeaks drop before it happened.
RT had already defended itself back when this baseless conspiracy theory first popped up, pointing out that it tweeted about the drop before WikiLeaks did because it had been watching the actual website and not its Twitter account, and WikiLeaks pointed out this moronic plot hole as well. That didn’t stop Maddow from dredging it back up and pretending she didn’t know she was repeating a long-debunked lie that a ten-second google search would disprove, though:
WikiLeaks was quick to fire back at NPR’s obnoxious allegation.
@NPR NPR is not a credible news organization.
1) WikiLeaks did not publish #MacronLeaks2) So far only Macron claims "fake docs"–but names none
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 6, 2017
After keeping its deliberately deceitful headline on the internet for hours, influencing god knows how many of its seven million followers on Twitter and god knows how many others who viewed it elsewhere, the Maddow muppets behind NPR’s Twitter account thanked WikiLeaks for “clarifying”, and said they’d corrected the “implication”.
@wikileaks Thank you for clarifying. We have updated our post to correct the implication. https://t.co/b7DilgG7dB
— NPR (@NPR) May 6, 2017
Uhh, it’s not an “implication”, shitbags — you didn’t “imply” anything, you fucking said it. Plainly. In words. You reported as fact that WikiLeaks had posted nine gigabytes of partly inauthentic documents. You told your massive audience that WikiLeaks did something they did not do and never would do, and then you pretended it was a mistake and called it an “implication”, which is like punching someone in the face and then apologizing for accidentally bumping into them.
NPR then had the gall to completely ignore universal journalistic convention and label their retraction a “clarification”.
@NPR That's "retraction" or "correction" NPR–not "clarification"–and normally followed by an apology for misleading 7M people.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 6, 2017
As if that weren’t enough of a blatant, despicable attack completely bereft of journalistic integrity, after running their reprehensible psyop NPR still left a quote from a “cyber-attacks specialist” in the article they’d tweeted asserting, based on precisely zero evidence, “It seems that all this hacking was directed on Macron by Russia’s propaganda teams, and we all know that WikiLeaks actively is working for Russia.”
Gaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!!
Can you believe this shit? These are the same lying sleaze spittoons who have publicized the unforgivable Bana Alabed psyop on more than one occasion, who have displayed highly suspicious loyalties to the CIA and other deep state entities, and who have consistently been spouting the same exact oligarchic lies about Russia and Syria as their corporate media brothers and sisters.
These deep state propaganda networks have got to go. America’s entire oppressive system is held together by mass media psyops and establishment propaganda narratives; if we can sufficiently disrupt public trust in these heinous institutions there may yet be the possibility of democracy and freedom in America someday. Here is an article I wrote recently about some strategies I’ve come up with for making this happen. Here is another. I welcome your additional thoughts and creativity on actualizing this agenda as well, and encourage you to create your own media to help replace these geriatric parasites once and for all.
This editorial first appeared at the Medium page, of Caitlin Johnstone. You can follow Johnstone’s work here.
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