Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Caitlin Johnstone — ‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

See that full stop at the end of the last sentence there [in The Atlantic quote of Wikileaks]? That’s journalistic malpractice.
Selective editing in one way spin and disinformation get created. Another is selective reporting that omits relevant facts. This is how propaganda works to create faked news.
The author of the Atlantic article, Julia Ioffe, put a period rather than a comma at the end of the text about not wanting to appear pro-Trump or pro-Russia, and completely omitted WikiLeaks’ statement following the comma that it considers those allegations slanderous. This completely changes the way the interaction is perceived.
This is malpractice. Putting an ellipsis (…) and then omitting the rest of the sentence would have been sleazy and disingenuous enough, because you’re leaving out crucial information but at least communicating to the reader that there is more to the sentence you’ve left out, but replacing the comma with a period obviously communicates to the reader that there is no more to the sentence. If you exclude important information while communicating that you have not, you are blatantly lying to your readers....
Medium
‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks
Caitlin Johnstone

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