A Guardian editor is accused of launching an offensive and ‘defamatory’ attack on independent media

A tweet from Aaron Bastani and the Guardian and Novara Media logos


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A Guardian commissioning editor has been accused of ‘defaming’ independent outlet Novara Media and one of its staff. In a series of tweets, the editor made baseless antisemitism slurs against Novara – and even attacked one of its Jewish team members.

Guardianista defames Novara

Siam Goorwich is a commissioning editor for Guardian Labs. This is the paid-partnership/branded content part of the Guardian‘s output. Goorwich currently has her Twitter account locked. Despite this, Novara Media has discovered that she tweeted some deeply unpleasant things about it back in March 2022.

As Novara co-founder Aaron Bastani tweeted:

 

But there was more from Goorwich. As Another Angry Voice tweeted:

Novara commissioning editor and reporter Rivkah Brown accused Goorwich of tweeting “defamatory” content:

As of 2pm on Tuesday 26 July, Novara has not said if the Guardian has responded to Brown’s complaint.

The Forde Report

It’s likely that Goorwich’s comment stems from her stance on Jeremy Corbyn. She wrote for both Grazia and Metro about her unhappiness with his leadership of Labour. For Metro, she wrote:

don’t you think it’s terrifying that in Britain in 2018, Jews feel that they can’t vote for a major political party because they believe there’s overwhelming evidence that the party’s leader is an anti-Semite? I certainly do.

Left-wing sites like Novara were supportive of Corbyn – and therefore, got caught up in these accusations too. But as we now know from the Forde Report, allegations like this about Corbyn and his leadership team are untrue. As Justin Schlosberg wrote for Novara:

For all the nuanced language of the long-awaited Forde report, there is one key finding that lays bare a carefully constructed lie. It was a lie that implicated not just the right of the Labour party but a great swathe of Britain’s political and media class. And it was a lie that underpinned much of the dominant narrative leading up to, during and since Labour’s disastrous performance in the 2019 general election.

Schlosberg points out that:

This lie was not that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had a real and serious problem with antisemitism. The Forde Report is right to call out those on the left who sought to deny or downplay the existence of anti-Jewish prejudice within the party.

But crucially:

The Forde report is equally clear that the antisemitism issue was indeed weaponised by Corbyn’s ideological opponents.

Perpetuating the “lie”

Schlosberg continued by describing this actual “lie”:

In order to fatally undermine the Corbyn project, it had to be shown that Corbyn himself, or at least his office, was somehow complicit in the problem: that the leadership was the problem.

The Forde Report explicitly proves this was not the case. Yet, by attacking Novara, Goorwich was part of perpetuating this lie by continuing to implicate independent media outlets like Novara. As Brown said, this is potentially defamatory – and Novara would be right to take further action.

Featured image via Aaron Bastani – screengrab, Wikimedia and Wikipedia 

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  • Show Comments

    1. So glad I haven’t bought or subscribed to the Guardian in any way for over 10 years or more now, if that’s an example of the utter drivel their employees come out with on Twitter. How old is she, 5 ?

      One more nail in the coffin for what appears to have become an utter rag run by tin pot amateurs.

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        1. I am sure people have learnt, since September 2015, exactly how the Far Right Zionist Agenda works. I truly hope no-one gives them as much as a breath’s worth of their energy.
          One thing is for sure, whenever The Luntzspeak, Global Language Dictionary diatribe starts, that there’s an election on the way.
          Just leave it, walk away! Speak one truth if you must, my advice is walk away.
          Don’t trust anyone not the Gaslighter nor the Gaslit! Walk away, the Sayanim work in mysterious ways and the Zionists need a scapegoat, ‘the left’, don’t be it!
          They know The PEOPLE have a score to settle, at the Polling Stations, with their Zionist and Saboteur Neoliberal Neo-Labour Party TORIES, namely GE2017 & GE2019. They will attempt to pull in the TORY votes, which shouldn’t be hard with CheesyTruss in the driving seat!
          Destroy the Neo-Labour Party TORIES, just as all/any Neo-Labour Party TORY Saboteurs Destroyed and Killed The UK Labour Party.
          Whichever TORY Party you vote for, we will have a continuation of Thatcher/Reagan’s flavour of Globalist Neoliberal TORY HELL, but by voting for BlueKeef’s Neo-Labour Party TORIES, you WILL only prolong our suffering, just as it did BLiar’s TORY years.

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    2. “….and I want them to print a retraction! That’s a lie! Guardian? I wouldn’t trust them to guard a kid’s piggy bank!”
      – Harry Perkins (Ray McAnally), the best Prime Minister we never had.
      – “A Very British Coup”.
      Says it all really, in my opinion anyway….

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    4. Ethically challenged journalism has become so systematic thus normalized — i.e. the ethical (and maybe sometimes even the moral) standard has been further lowered — that those who are aware of it, notably politicians and political writers, typically don’t bother publicly discussing it.

      And whatever happened to the honorable journalistic role of ‘afflicting the comfortable’ (which went along with ‘comforting the afflicted’)? Meantime, there still are reporters and editors who will (as though with big innocent fawn-like eyes) reply to such critiques as this with, ‘Who, me? I’m just the messenger.’

      Whatever the news media may be, they are not ‘just the messenger’; nor are they but a reflection of the community — or their consumership, for that matter — in which they circulate.

      Maybe mainstream journalism has largely become a profession that’s motivated more by a buck and a byline — i.e. a regular company paycheck and a frequently published name with stories — than a genuine strive to challenge the powers-that-be in order to truly comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable in an increasingly unjust global existence.

      Maybe there is an informal/unspoken agreement between the largest mainstream news-media editors and reporters: ‘Don’t dump on me, and I won’t dump on you.’

      Meantime, newspaper and other current-affairs websites are increasingly converting to (what I call) pay-to-say formats, where the reader must buy a subscription in order to be permitted to comment on the articles.

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