Left-wing corporate media types know the name of Luke Harding.
He’s The Guardian ‘reporter’ who claimed that then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, held talks with Julian Assange during the 2016 election cycle. After it was published in November 2018, the story quickly spread throughout the mainstream media ecosystem, with every Tom, Dick, and Jane Journalist on the left pouncing on the accusation as a “See? See? We toldja!” moment regarding their previous oft-repeated lie of “Trump/Russia collusion.”
“That the Guardian story would be seen as an earth-shattering revelation — one that would bring massive amounts of traffic, attention, glory, and revenue to the paper — was obvious. And that’s precisely how it was treated, as it instantly ricocheted around the media ecosystem with predictable viral speed,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept roughly two months later.
By then, Harding’s ‘story’ had been debunked several different ways to Sunday, but it didn’t matter: The Guardian never retracted the story, never even corrected it, and it remains on the paper’s website to this day.
Fast-forward to this day: Harding wrote another story, published in The Guardian, that claims he obtained “secret” Russian documents showing Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered his spy agencies to help Trump win the 2016 election, that Trump was adjudged to be “mentally unstable” by Russian security services, and that yes, indeed, the Kremlin leader had compromising information on Trump (recall the “pee-pee tapes” from the Steele Dossier…that Hillary Clinton paid for…that the FBI knew was fake).
Does that sound like Putin dropping a big, fat disinformation bomb on our weakened, fragile, distrustful civil society? Yeah, it does. And it doesn’t take a first-year intelligence analyst to figure that out.
But The Guardian — Harding — dutifully ran with it anyway and now this new ‘bombshell’ is making its way around the left-wing media ecosystem once again as gospel.
Greenwald had some commentary about it that he posted on Twitter.
“The part of the media that feigns anger at misinformation is uncritically promoting a story today by Luke Harding that Russia was blackmailing Trump — the same Harding who has published many false stories, championed the Steele Dossier and claimed Trump was long a Russian agent,” he began.
“It was Harding who published was one of the most sensationalized stories of the Trump era: that Manafort repeatedly met Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. It was utterly fabricated. Everyone knows it’s bulls**t, never happened. Yet the Guardian has never corrected or retracted it,” he added.
“Now suddenly, Harding claims he obtained leaked, highly sensitive Kremlin documents that just so happen to prove all the lies he’s been peddling for years, that not even Mueller’s huge team found. Because it advances liberals’ interests, journalists are uncritically spreading it.,” he said.
“I will once use this shabby behavior to against [sic] highlight 2 points: 1) The contempt and loss of trust people harbor for the corporate media is completely justified and well-earned. 2) These outlets are by far the most prolific and destructive disseminators of disinformation,” Greenwald said.
So there you have it: As always, judge for yourself, but just know who Harding is and what he’s done in the past to contribute to the overall environment of media mistrust.
