This is Pilger’s response:
 ‘I have only just seen a post by Owen Jones on Ethical Journalism that accuses me of quoting him out of context. For this, he says, I am dishonest. I had quoted Jones describing Obama as “funny, charming with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician.” I pointed out that Obama was also a cool killer of people. Jones says he was merely quoting Obama devotees and that in the same piece he criticised Obama’s deadly drones campaign. The context is revealing. Far from contradicting Obama’s “coolness”, Jones has it both ways by using the quoted swoon to mitigate Obama’s shocking record of state violence. “And yet it is difficult not to conclude,” he wrote, “as Obama delivers his final State of the Union address, the US remains a chronically unequal and unjust society, its proud democracy ….”. Crimes are described as “the president’s own foreign calamity”. In balancing an idolatry with more-in-sorrow criticism, Jones is an echo of the Guardian — as he has demonstrated in his mostly fact-free distortions about Julian Assange, a man charged with no crime. Extending his abuse to me, he refers inexplicably to the “privately educated Pilger with [an] epic grudge …” I was educated at state schools. The Oxford-groomed Guardian man protests too much.’

John Pilger