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  • 2016-10-12 (xsd:date)
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  • Newsweek Proves That WikiLeaks Is Leaking Phony 'Hillary Clinton Emails' (en)
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  • On 10 October 2016, the Hillary Clinton shill site Daily News Bin published an article claiming that Newsweek magazine had uncovered absolut[e] proof WikiLeaks had published fabricated e-mails in their October 2016 Podesta Emails archive, maintaining that journalist Kurt Eichenwald had determined many of those documents were phony: The article was based on a 10 October 2016 piece penned by Eichenwald which went viral and has since been significantly edited. Daily News Bin asserted that Eichenwald proved the inauthenticity of Podesta Emails in his article, but what his piece actually claimed was that the Russian news outlet Sputnik had (deliberately) misreported the content of a leaked e-mail, and that Donald Trump's repetition of that misreportingproved he was sourcing information fed to him by Russian propaganda outlets attempting to manipulate the 2016 election in Trumps' favor. What Eichenwald wrote was that a leaked e-mail showed that Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal had forwarded to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta a lengthy article he (i.e., Eichenwald) had written, but the Russian news outlet Sputnik misreported the nature of that e-mail and claimed that Blumenthal himself had penned the material he forwarded to Podesta: In other words, Sputnik falsely made it sound as if a Hillary Clinton insider, rather than a Newsweek reporter, had opined that the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi was preventable, and that it was legitimate for Congress to investigate Hillary Clinton's role in the tragedy. Unfortunately, some of Eichenwald's phrasing made it sound as though he were claiming that Russians had altered or fabricated the content of e-mails published by WikiLeaks, rather than that a Russian news outlet had simply (and perhaps deliberately) misrepresented what a real leaked e-mail actually contained: Eichenwald explained at length that he believed the altered document purportedly used by Sputnik was part of a disinformation campaign being waged by Russia against Hillary Clinton. But what Eichenwald did not say any point in his article (or its updates) was that he suspected WikiLeaks of altering the documents they published, or of publishing fake documents. Adding to the confusion was that Eichenwald's account was itself not without potential error, particularly his claim that events proved the Trump campaign was picking up disinformation from Russian sources for the GOP candidate to use against Clinton. BuzzFeed's John Passantino was able to quickly point out some cracks in Eichenwald's claims, primarily that Sputnik had not published their story until hours after a viral tweet containing the same information had been circulated among Trump supporters: NYMag's Jesse Singal also pointed out that a likely scenario was that Trump had merely repeated then-popular Internet rumors without checking their provenance rather than being propagandized by Russia: Daily News Bin's misrepresentation of Eichenwald's (likely) misinterpretation of events functioned like an online version of the telephone game, generating a misunderstanding that Eichenwald had proved WikiLeaks published forged documents. (en)
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