“The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.”
“The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.”
““This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee] before publishing the first tranche of information,” state minutes of a 7 November 2013 meeting at the MOD.”
“It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.”
“Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations [and] The Guardian continued to publish some stories critical of the security services.”
“But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services.”
“In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented “exclusive” with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. The article noted that this was the “first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service’s 107-year history”.”
“Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian published another unprecedented “exclusive”, this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian’s investigations editor, Nick Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.”
“In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues, notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state.”
“The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.”
“Another major focus of The Guardian’s energies under Viner’s editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.”
“The Guardian’s coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically.”
“The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further.”
Read more: How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper
2021-week18
