Talk:Paul Mason (journalist)

Republican?

The Category:English republicans has been added to the article, but where is the source to verify this fact? -- TrottieTrue (talk) 02:00, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Anti-Catholic removal

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with that statement but I am removing it as it seems like a rather partisan thing to include in the intro, let alone first line.The issue is discussed later in the article.Llewee (talk) 13:36, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Note

is anyone going to write up Mason's recently uncovered hawkish spreading of disinformation and Mason's fake news-smear attacks on left wing anti-war activists Grayzone, and his attack on pro Palestine Jews and Jewish anti-zionist groups? I would do it, but I don't know how to add reference tags.

Completeness demands that we cover this story, but note WP:NOTNEWS and WP:BLP: it is wise for us to be cautious and err on the side of waiting with this story. I see that an anon IP removed all the relevant content, which is hewing to our BLP rules in the absence of sourcing. I note that Paul Mason issued a non-denial denial of Grayzone's recent allegations claiming to be hacked: that, at least, is a usable source, although what to make of it is unclear. — Charles Stewart (talk) 04:02, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Masongate: the leaked Paul Mason - Amil Khan correspondence

I noticed the following on the edit history page and I quote,

curprev 07:14, 9 June 2022‎ Philip Cross talk contribs‎ 2,157 bytes −609‎ rvt, WP:FORUM, also note WP:GRAYZONE is a deprecated source & cannot be used on Wikipedia undo Tag: Undo

That is curious -- it sounds very 'big brother' and repressive -- just out of interest - who is it that decides that GRAYZONE can't be used on Wiki? Just curious... who decides that Grayzone are 'a deprecated source' -- it all sounds like a censor-state, very NKVD, very Stalinist.

I did look into this edit prior to your complaint, and I have to say the editor who said the edit you refer to is forbidden due to WP:GRAYZONE is using inadequate rationale for their revert. The main reason that edit is improper is because it is a WP:PRIMARY source. In order for the issue Grayzone refers to to be includable, we'd need something besides a primary source connected to the event. What we'd need is a different reliable source referring to Grayzone's allegations. No reliable source is talking about Grayzone's accusations yet, and therefore, it does not have the WP:WEIGHT for inclusion. Le Marteau (talk) 03:02, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Striking out my confusion. I assumed IP was referring to this edit on the article itself, which was actually not an issue of bad sourcing, but it was not sourced at all. There was nothing "inadequate" about Philip Cross's talk page revert. My apologies. Le Marteau (talk) 17:28, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

And to answer your question, "who is it that decides that GRAYZONE can't be used on Wiki"... that was done by the community in a "Request for Comment" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_287#RfC:_Grayzone. But as I pointed out, this point is moot, because even if we considered Grayzone reliable, it is still a primary source in this instance. Even if it was the NY Times saying it, and not Grayzone, it could not be included if no one else is talking about it. Le Marteau (talk) 03:07, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Such an addition drawing solely on The Grayzone source, like The Skwawkbox citation I removed 15 minutes ago, is effectively vandalism. At the head of the page it states: "This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. (bold as in the original)" Philip Cross (talk) 12:09, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

• For the sake of clarity with respect to 221.158.183.157's original query, this part of BLP policy and the guidance not to use deprecated sources only applies to articlespace: we are free to discuss such sources on the talk page. Philip Cross's revert of the talk page comment was justified with respect to WP:FORUM, which requires that discussions on article talk pages serves Wikipedia's goals rather than devolving into yet another place where people who have not internalised WP's goals can promote their opinions. Anonymous IP addresses and WP:SPA editors run a high risk of having their talk page contributions reverted on WP:BATTLEGROUND topics; editors who have a good track record are far more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt. — Charles Stewart (talk) 07:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Below is a copy of parts of a discussion that is being conducted on the Grayzone talk page about the leaked Paul Mason - Amil Khan correspondence. It includes a list of sources which mention the leak. Thought it might assist the discussion at this page.

Let’s start with the primary sources for the leak, which are the articles by Grayzone and Consortium News and Mason’s blog response.

So, briefly, Grayzone obtained leaked emails and documents from Paul Mason and Amil Khan, who were discussing how to deplatform Grayzone. Amil Khan is a former Reuters Middle East correspondent who runs a counter-disinformation firm called Valent Projects. They suggested a financial blockade involving Paypal and a sting operation to embarrass Grayzone a la the operation by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability against Paul McKeigue.

They also decided to set up a group to debunk "all [The Grayzone’s] allegetions[sic] and ‘facts’ ". The suggested participants included a disproportionate number of BBC employees. In the emails, Mason described Bellingcat as a channel for "intel service input by proxy" and said that Bellingcat received "a steady stream of intel from Western agencies". Khan, who has apparently been associated with Bellingcat for a while, did not challenge Mason’s description.

Consortium News was dragged into the story through one of Khan and Mason’s contacts, Andy Pryce from the Counter Disinformation and Media Development unit at the UK Foreign Office. Pryce asked Nina Jankowicz, the Mary Poppins of disinformation, for advice about Consortium News. She said CN was not being funded by Russia, but were just being "useful idiots".

The leak has been covered by a number of secondary sources as detailed below.

1. Private Eye magazine mentioned the story in Issue 1575 17 - 30 June 2022 under the title "Grayzone Layer". Of course the magazine put its pro-establishment spin onto the story: "After journalist Paul Mason said someone had tried to hack his email, pro-Kremlin site the Grayzone used "anonymously leaked emails" to attack him".

2. Yanis Varoufakis and Owen Jones discussed the leaks on Owen's show (Starting at 56:20).

3. Counterfire wrote about it but Mason threatened legal action and the site took the story down.

4. The Hill's Rising discussed the leaks. The discussion is hosted by Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave. Their guest is Katie Halper.

5. The WSWS covered the story.

6. George Galloway discusses the leaks in his show, starting around 11:20.

7. Caitlin Johnstone wrote an article which has appeared in numerous places.

8. Other sources are The Disinformation Chronicle. and In Defence of Marxism.

Burrobert (talk) 16:27, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Here is the talk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Grayzone#Masongate:_the_leaked_Paul_Mason_-_Amil_Khan_correspondence.

Here is a reply to the above from Mhawk10:

:Thank you for providing the list above. I've looked through the sources and I'm not quite sure that they're all up-to-par, though some might be:

Primary Sources:

1. The primary sources of the article itself and Pushback with Aaron Maté (a The Grayzone-published podcast) are (general reliability issues aside) not independent sources. They don't contribute any weight.
2. The source in Consortium News (RSP Entry) is tagged with "analysis" and "commentary" in its tags. The source, besides appearing to be a labeled opinion piece published at a WP:GUNREL outlet, is also plainly non-independent given the content of the allegations. I don't see why this would add any weight, even if it were reliable, owing to independence issues.
3. Mason's blog responses are plainly non-independent here and don't contribute towards establishing weight.

Clearly WP:QUESTIONABLE secondary sources:

1. Self-published YouTube video by Owen Jones that features Yanis Varoufakis is a self-published YouTube video. We can't use this except WP:ABOUTSELF when it involves claims of living people.
2. CounterFire's (soft-)retracted opinion piece from a group that does not claim to be a news organization doesn't seem like it would be useful in any case. If a website takes a story down due to a legal threat relating to libel, that's quite indicative that they can't support the facts of the original story. It's been touched upon once at RSN; I agree with Buidhe's statement that it's clearly a partisan activist website that is not reliable for third-party claims.
3. George Galloway's self-published stream is a self-published video that can't be used except in an WP:ABOUTSELF manner when the claims involve living people.
4. Of the four links provided where Caitlin Johnstone talks about this, one is a self-published podcast, one is a self-published blogpost on her website, one is a post on a hyperpartisan blog that doesn't appear to be an established WP:NEWSORG with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, and the final one is a of the blog post on her website by Consortium News. None of these are something that can be used to describe the alleged actions of a living person.
5. The Disinformation Chronicle is a self-published substack blog. I hate to keep repeating myself, but this ain't an WP:ABOUTSELF sort of thing.
6. In Defence of Marxism is plainly not a WP:NEWSORG; it's a Trotskyist analysis blog. This is the sort of WP:QUESTIONABLE source that should not be used when determining weight.

Other secondary sources:

1. I'm generally unfamiliar with Private Eye and, while it looks like it's been published for quite a long time, the discussions on RSN are not extensive. The link you've pointed to indicates that there's a print story in the publication itself that goes more in-depth. I presume this is not exactly something available online, but the content of the underlying story might matter here in how we frame things. If the story is a satire piece, then it's not going to be good for establishing weight, though its investigative journalism might be weighed differently.
2. The coverage in Rising from The Hill (RSP entry) seems to be substantial coverage, though I'm not super familiar with its format: is this something of an opinion/analysis talk show or is the show doing original reporting?
3. The World Socialist Web Site story provides substantial coverage of this. While this appears to be a Trotskyist advocacy website rather than an established and reputable NEWSORG, last RSN discussion did not really come to a consensus on the site's reliability. It might be worth having an RfC on the site's general reliability, but that is a separate topic.

Overall, I'm not convinced that this is really being covered by the news side of any newsorg that's ordinarily reliable for claims about living people. That a bunch of opinion articles and blog posts exist about something wouldn't be enough to make content WP:DUE, but if these are three instances of news coverage from RS it would probably be. I'm just not convinced that this is what we have here. — Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 18:47, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

In short, almost all of these are red flag sources which we shouldn't go anywhere near in a BLP. My view, expressed on the above talk page, is that only Private Eye is close to usable. Unlike the others, that focuses more on Grayzone than on Mason, whereas the ones which focus on Mason are really bad sources. Some are really, really bad (MB/FC, which I know is not reliable but gives a flavour, says "The Greanville Post also reports favorably about Russia, often accusing the USA of conspiracies against them. When it comes to science they sometimes publish anti-vaccine pseudoscience as well as anti-GMO conspiracies." Let's wait and see if any RSs cover this. BobFromBrockley (talk) 17:40, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Of the sources listed, The Hill is a green tick source and the three participants in the discussion are well-known journalists. Wikipedia contains over 300 references to articles on the website In Defence of Marxism, although there appears to have been no prior discussion about its reliability. Wikipedia contains 140 links to articles in Private Eye but the only discussion about reliability was in 2011. The Private Eye piece seems to be from the print edition.

When considering the reliability of a source, it is important to take into account the text it is being used to support. So far, no suggested wording has been put forward.

The reliable sources noticeboard is the appropriate place to discuss reliability of sources when there is disagreement. I'll wait a little while to see what other editors think then take the discussion there. The noticeboard can be used to ask for more opinions about the suitability of The Hill's Rising, Private Eye, WSWS and In Defence of Marxism for a basic statement of the facts in relation to Mason's and Amil Khan's email correspondence. Burrobert (talk) 18:16, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

• Just a heads up here, the notability of Mason's hacked correspondence is pretty clear, given the Grayzone article was reprinted in Monthly Review, which is an impeccable source, and was confirmed as such at the RS noticeboard. I would phrase it "In June 2022, a Grayzone article, late reprinted in the Monthly Review, reported that..." Boynamedsue (talk) 08:45, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

  Can you link me to the discussion where we've established that Monthly Review is WP:GREL? I've looked through the archives and not found it, while we have GREL sources describing how Monthly Review has republished to egregiously erroneous and outright denialist histories of, for example, the XUAR. That an otherwise unreliable piece was republished by Monthly Review does not mean that all of a sudden the stuff is reliable. And fwiw I've looked at Private Eye's reporting on this and it denigrates the blog's reporting by placing "factual reporting" in scarequotes—quite a big red flag in my view. As Dr.Swag Lord, Ph.d noted in the concurrent RSN discussion (which for some reason hasn't been linked here yet), The Monthly Review reprinting the Grayzone, which is a deprecated source, does not make it "RS." — Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 19:13, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

- The proposal was to use Private Eye for its coverage of the Grayzone’s report. Private Eye reported (without scare quotes) that the Mason reported the hack of his emails and that the hack surfaced on the Grayzone. It also quotes from the Grayzone article to say,

From “anonymously leaked emails and documents” Blumenthal and Klarenberg learned that Mason wanted a “relentless deplatforming” of the Grayzone and “a kind of relentless rebuttal operation” to discredit it.

The Private Eye article is therefore a good secondary source for the content of the Grayzone’s article.

- The October 2020 issue of Monthly Review (Vol. 72, No. 5) is dedicated to China. It contains articles by John Bellamy Foster and others. In October 2020, MR also republished an article by the Qiao Collective entitled "Xinjiang: A report and resource compilation". In response, Critical China Scholars (CCS) published an open letter to their "friends at Monthly Review" entitled “OPEN LETTER TO MONTHLY REVIEW ON XINJIANG AND THE QIAO COLLECTIVE”. The letter acknowledged the need for a critique of America’s cynical and self-interested attacks on China’s domestic policies and stated that problematic links do exist between activists and organisations and the American security state. The letter was also critical of the Qiao Collective report. The Nation and Coda articles were also published in October 2020. Both sources rely on the CCS letter for their assessments of the Qiao Collective article. The Nation article only mentions MR once, in the sentence "the socialist magazine Monthly Review republished an egregious revisionist defense of China’s policies in the region". It links to the CCS open letter. The Coda story is largely about the content of the CCS letter.

- The Monthly Review has republished two articles about the Mason-Khan-Pryce-Briant discussion. Among other things the second article mentions that

"Emma Briant advised Mason on his leftist target list, proposing adding independent outlet Declassified UK".

"Mason proposed astroturfed “black and Asian voices” project to push back on Black and brown critics of Ukraine proxy war".

"Mason revealed his participation in upcoming BBC assault on Stop The War Coalition".

Burrobert (talk) 15:20, 2 July 2022 (UTC)

Important to distinguish between the monthly semi-academic journal Monthly Review, and the website MRonline which reposts other content, in this case from the deprecated Grayzone (which is the subject of the discussion and so not an independent source). BobFromBrockley (talk) 15:26, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

Just passing through and I have zero interest in any of this (was googling for a different Paul Mason) but this whole discussion exemplifies really well why Wikipedia is, frankly, such a piece of shit. It is clear that someone is trying to add something to the article because they don't like the guy while someone else is trying to prevent it with every flimsy, changing excuse possible because they don't like someone else. Looking at it from the outside the whole thing is a joke, I just hope that whoever is wasting his time here is actually getting paid at least, otherwise… seriously, you guys need to get a life. Just my 2¢. :) 37.188.153.218 (talk) 11:40, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Boynamedsue. We can take two approaches here. The first is to be bold and include a sentence or two along the lines you suggest. The alternative is to run an RfC. If we go down the latter route a few issues arise:

- the same question is being discussed at the Grayzone 's talk page. Would one RfC cover both or are separate RfC's needed, one for each talk page?

- Should the RfC include a proposed wording or would it be better to merely ask whether we should include a mention of the leak and that it involved Mason, Amil Khan from Valent Projects and Andy Pryce from the UK Foreign Office discussing ways to deplatform the Grayzone? The exact wording could be discussed if consensus was reached to include a mention. Burrobert (talk) 14:02, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

I think it is very difficult to cover both with one RfC. I think the sourcing is good enough that both discussions might come down to weight, and different weight concerns affect each article.--Boynamedsue (talk) 07:09, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Rightho. In that case I will start separate RfC's at this page and at the Grayzone 's page, after waiting a few days to see if a consensus develops. Burrobert (talk) 07:32, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity: is Private Eye now pro- establishment?--Ralfdetlef (talk) 07:53, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

References