The story was picked up across the US, including by  USA Today (11/27/18), the Washington Post (11/27/18), Bloomberg (11/27/18), Yahoo! News (27/11/18), The Hill (11/27/18) and Rolling Stone (11/27/18). One CNN analyst (11/27/18) analyst excitedly commented that the news was “hugely significant” and “could be one of the two missing links to show real interference and knowledge of Russian involvement” in the election.

However, there were serious problems with the report. Firstly, the entire story was based upon anonymous intelligence sources, sources that could not tell the newspaper exactly when the meetings took place.

Furthermore, the Ecuadorian embassy is one of the most surveilled buildings in the most surveilled city in the world, and was under 24-hour police guard and monitoring, costing the UK government over £11 million between 2012 and 2015. The embassy also had very tight internal security, with all visitors thoroughly vetted, required to sign in and leave all their electronic devices with security. Is it really possible any figure, let alone Donald Trump’s campaign manager, could walk in for a series of secret meetings without leaving record with Ecuador, or being seen by the media or police?

The Guardian immediately started to walk back its claims, editing the article a number of times, changing its headline from “Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy” to “Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy, Sources Say.” It inserted qualifiers, denials and words like “hoax” into the text, quietly changing much of the tense of the report to the conditional. Thus, the passage “It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny” was changed to (emphasis added) “It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny.” Thus a piece that started as a factual news report was transformed into an allegation—after it went viral and was picked up across international media.

Harding also has an ongoing and bitter feud with Assange. (He wrote a highly critical biography of the WikiLeaks editor that was subsequently turned into the movie, The Fifth Estate, which Assange described as a “massive propaganda attack” on him.)

Therefore, Occam’s razor suggests the most logical explanation is likely that the Guardian published anonymous official sources without checking their claims’ validity.

‘Sources Say’

It is standard journalistic practice to name and check sources. Without a name to match to a quote, its credibility (and therefore that of the story) immediately drops, as there are no repercussions for that individual if they are untruthful. Sources (or journalists themselves) could simply make up anything they wanted with no consequences. Therefore, using anonymous sources is strongly discouraged, except in rare circumstances, generally when sources would face retaliation for revealing information of vital public interest. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics insists journalists “identify sources whenever feasible” and that journalists must “always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity.”

Unfortunately, the use of anonymous officials in reporting is increasing, and is a worrying trend in modern journalism, as the veteran reporter Robert Fisk once explained:

I’m just looking at a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail. It’s a story about Al Qaeda in Algeria. And what is the sourcing? “US intelligence officials said,” “a senior US intelligence official said,” “US officials said,” ‘the intelligence official said,” “Algerian officials say,” “national security sources considered,” “European security sources said”…. We might as well name our newspapers “Officials Say.” This is the cancer at the bottom of modern journalism, that we do not challenge power anymore. Why are Americans tolerating these garbage stories with no real sourcing except for very dodgy characters indeed, who won’t give their names?

Furthermore, as FAIR (8/22/18, 9/25/18) has already cataloged, media giants such as Facebook are already working with governmental organizations like the Atlantic Council to control what we see online, under the guise of battling Russian-sponsored fake news. The Atlantic Council is a NATO offshoot whose board of directors includes neo-conservative hawks like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; as well as retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus.

Leave alone that much of the most sensational reporting and claims about Russian influence comes from the Atlantic Council’s reports in the first place, thus creating a perfect feedback loop justifying more active measures. Therefore, much of the coverage of Russian state propaganda is itself state propaganda!

The Utility of Misreporting

Why was a highly questionable report from a foreign media outlet based upon anonymous sources picked up far and wide, sometimes without even a basic follow-up, such as asking for comment from the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange or Manafort (again, standard journalistic practice)?

Finally, for the political establishment, the Russian fake news story gives them a convenient excuse as to why Trump was able to win the Republican nomination and defeat Hillary Clinton and to why new movements, from the alt-right to Black Lives Matter and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon on the left, have occurred. They are not responses to the decay of the political and economic system, but examples of foreign interference.

Adam Johnson’s “North Korea Law of Journalism” states that journalistic standards “are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status,” meaning that the more antagonistic the US is to a country, the more lackadaisical journalists can be with the truth while reporting on said state. FAIR has consistently cataloged misreporting of enemy states, such as Iran (9/9/15; 7/25/17) North Korea (5/9/17; 3/22/17) Venezuela ( 5/16/17; 3/2/07), Cuba or Syria (10/21/15), where their supposed threat to the world or their human rights violations are ramped up, while downplaying crimes of friendly states (2/1/09).

The same can equally be said of enemy political figures like Assange, Sanders or Jill Stein. When it serves a political function, stories about official enemies too good to be true are also too good not to publish.