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Comment by paulrd | Hacker News Reader

Actually that quote is incorrect. It has been widely misquoted by the main stream media for their own propagandistic reasons.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-atlantic-commits-malp...

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/930237935680618496

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To summarize, various sources have quoted wikileaks as saying "because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source". The message is actually "because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with".

I'll be honest, that doesn't really change my interpretation of the sentence, they already had "pro-Trump" and "pro-Russia" in quotes, which made it clear to me they didn't believe them to be as such.

It's not the semantics of the sentence that bother me, it's that they went to great lengths to get DNC and Clinton emails but just go ahead and ask the Trump campaign for information. Clearly they are treating the Trump campaign with softer gloves than the Clinton campaign.

This may seem pedantic, but I think your quote of the misquote is wrong. The media have been putting the period / 'full stop' within the quotation marks (not just outside which you have above) which Caitlin Johnstone rightfully calls out as journalistic malpractice. That very few people know the actual quote is testament to the mainstream media's ability to sell a false narrative.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

I seriously don't see how transposing the period and end quote characters changes the meaning of the sentence. And I don't see how removing those few words at the end changes the meaning of the sentence.

Fair enough. You may not see the difference, but one is false and the other is true. My point is that many would disagree with your assessment if only they knew that there was a misquote to begin with. Many who want to put forth a false narrative use these kind of disinformation tactics. If only the mainstream media did not have to resort to such slimy tactics. Wikileaks has a far better record of journalistic integrity. You can rely on a quote as being true at least. How many false stories have been printed by Wikileaks as opposed to the Atlantic? How many retractions?

I did not know this. I agree that it was very misleading of The Atlantic to publish the quote in this fashion.

It doesn't seem to fully reverse my opinion of WikiLeaks although I wonder if I can really be objective now.

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