This is a small example but noteworthy because it is on a significant story of the day and serves to completely invert the truth.
The piece is about Roger Stone, one-time Trump adviser, who was jailed by the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Stone was jailed for obstructing and lying to the inquiry, and getting a witness to lie for him, (crimes which were therefore a concoction of the inquiry). [1]
We read: “The long-time Republican strategist and dirty trickster, who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, lied about contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election regarding emails hacked from Democratic party accounts.”
This is true in effect. But anyone reading will take it as meaning that Stone had contacts with Wikileaks and lied in saying that he didn’t. In fact the truth is much more complex. It seems that Stone did tell lies around his contacts with Wikileaks – for example naming someone as an intermediary who wasn’t and saying he hadn’t discussed Wikileaks in writing when he had. But he was not convicted of having talked to Wikileaks and then saying he hadn’t. [2][3] But this is what the Guardian (and indeed the corporate press as a whole) wants to you to believe – because it fits their wider campaign against Trump and the democracy (sorry “populism”) which he stands for. So they’ll just mislead you.
Notes
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/us/politics/roger-stone-trial-guilty.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/us/politics/roger-stone-trump-campaign-mueller-wikileaks.html
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47002918