By Caitlin Johnstone
February 01, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Senior Huffington Post UK editor
Chris York has published what is
by my count his twelfth smear
piece against a small group of academics and
independent journalists who’ve expressed skepticism
of establishment Syria narratives.
York’s
obsessive deluge of hit pieces revolve around
British academics Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson, as
well as independent journalist Vanessa Beeley. Every
word
in
this
sentence
hyperlinks
to
a
different
article
smearing
them.
York’s twelfth such hit piece is much like the
preceding eleven: it
omits fundamentally
crucial facts, it
hides the
shady nature of its sourcing, it makes
outright false claims, and will only be believed
by individuals who either don’t research this
subject very deeply or whose paychecks depend on
their not thinking about it too hard. But, more
importantly, it’s his twelfth such hit
piece.
A dozen smear articles. A dozen. Not against
politicians. Not against powerful government leaders
or massive celebrities. York’s smears focus on two
professors with some 22,000 Twitter followers
between them both, and Beeley, whom York himself
refers to as an “obscure blogger” while
authoring
smear piece after
smear piece after
smear piece about her.
Now Beeley, Hayward and Robinson all do great
work asking the important questions that no one else
is asking about the
many,
many glaring
plot holes in the narratives we’re being fed
about what’s happening in Syria by the western
political/media class. I am a fan. But only a
relatively tiny number of people have ever heard of
them. I don’t want to minimize the importance of
what they do, but they are generally unheard of
outside of small esoteric internet circles which
focus on deep dives into questionable government
narratives about Syria.
We can take it as a given, then, that
Huffington Post UK‘s goal with these relentless
smear pieces is not to generate clicks or organic
virality. No normal person is scrolling through
their social media feed and going “Oh I do hope
there’s some fresh gossip about Piers Robinson
today!”
