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by k1m 2560 days ago
Agree, the Guardian has been one of the most vocal papers in attacking and ridiculing Assange. We collected some of this output here https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/

Especially damning now with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture describing his treatment as psychological torture: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

2 comments

"Support non-corporate media"? Are you suggesting The Guardian is a corporation? (They are a trust.) Ah, your comment history shows you are waging a vendetta.
You perhaps don't understand that the Articles and Memorandum of a Limited Company can define a very different model to what you are thinking. They are a trust, the Scott Trust.
> Are you suggesting The Guardian is a corporation?

The Guardian has been incorporated for hundreds of years. Yes they're a corporation.

https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/32/Guardian-Me...

PLC stands for Public Limited Company. A company is not a corporation.
I'm sorry, but your web site seems like a bit of nonsense veiled in a guise that it's out to present "the truth".

Many of the linked tweets don't resolve, and the rest of the web site appears to be purely a Greenwald support group in his seeming vendetta against his former employer.

The site also proclaims [paraphrasing] "do not trust the Guardian—read our write-ups of the same subjects instead".

I can't take that any more seriously than "corporate-state media".

I should add, if corporate-sponsored journalism outlets is a problem for your group, then I suggest you also drop The Intercept:

Financial backing for The Intercept was provided by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

> Many of the linked tweets don't resolve

Two of the three linked tweets don't resolve because the accounts appear to have removed older tweets. Having followed the two accounts for a while (Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard), I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with a change of heart about the Guardian (a look at their recent tweets will confirm this).

Mark Curtis's tweet is captured by the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190411174950/https://twitter.c...

Matt Kennard's new Twitter account has plenty of interesting findings on the Guardian's deputy editor:

https://twitter.com/dckennard

> the rest of the web site appears to be purely a Greenwald support group in his seeming vendetta against his former employer.

Our suggested reading page - https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/better-media.htm... - contains only one link to a Greenwald article, but considering Greenwald led the reporting at the Guardian on the NSA revelations which won the Guardian a Pulitzer, I think his comments on this matter shouldn't be so easily dismissed.

> I should add, if corporate-sponsored journalism outlets is a problem for your group, then I suggest you also drop The Intercept: "Financial backing for The Intercept was provided by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder."

Personally not a fan of The Intercept. I like Glenn Greenwald's work though.

I would argue that the only good journalism done by The Intercept is by Glenn Greenwald.

As for the rest of your comment, the general thrust of the page is accurate -- it is incredibly well-known that the Guardian has had a bone to pick with Julian Assange for years. Pretending that is not the case is an example of being intentionally misleading or deciding to ignore facts which disagree with your views.

I'm not picking on Greenwald, to be clear.

I also didn't say that they were inaccurate about their pointing out of the Guardian's treatment of Assange.

I'd argue that the Guardian never hid it. Also, that media literacy matters and you shouldn't treat every outlet as a single voice. It's terribly inaccurate and, I'd say, in bad faith to do so—as long as said outlet has a general track record for accuracy. Or, even more common, many outlets may have an injected column by interests, but they do not operate so unified as the page presumes.

I didn't read into the articles they've pointed out in any detail, but I'd pay more attention to who is writing them than painting an entire organization with one brush. That's a fools game. And likely to end up in reciprocal treatment.

Also to note—I wasn't just commenting on the page, but on the rest of the web site which maintains a theme of celebrating the Intercept above all other outlets.

It also comes across to me that GP's comment is derailing the nascent subject.

Editors have a lot of control over what is (and is not) published by a newspaper, so "the Guardian has a bone to pick with Julian Assange" could be translated to "the Guardian's editors have a bone to pick with Julian Assange". In addition, accuracy is not the only factor -- tone and angle are also incredibly important because they shape the conversation on a topic. And the tone of an article is definitely shaped by editors.

If there is a consistent record by a newspaper of negative (or in some cases outright false) articles about someone, I think it's fair to say that they have a bias against that person. I'm sure you'd agree with me the Fox News has a strong bias against AOC and Ilhan Omar -- it is sometimes reasonable to make a generalisation like that if the general trend is in a particular direction.

I don't think you can generalize editors so easily, either. They don't all operate on the same principles. Some exact more authority over tone than others. I don't know the Guardian's editors, so I can't speak to them.

I also can't speak to Fox News or American politics in that kind of detail.

Anyway this is going off of the main context of the thread, which was my original complaint. So if there's another one that comes up on this subject I think it would be more suitable to explore it there.