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Thread: Glenn Greenwald on Corporate Media
I no longer regularly browse Twitter, but a recent thread by Glenn Greenwald caught my attention. It accords with Power Line’s The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Election Schadenfreude Edition. There, Steve Hayward and “Lucretia” called on a 2023 Republican congressional majority to hold aggressive hearings, hauling all the major media bosses in front of them to make them squirm over the past five years of lies and deep deception. They took as their touchstone Big Story, the important history of our media (deliberately?) grossly misreporting the Tet Offensive, thereby turning the American public against the war for the first time, to the advantage of the Vietnamese communists, Mao, and the USSR.
In that context, consider Glenn Greenwald‘s story in several tweets.
Good morning. I’d like to make 3 points: 1) The vast majority of disinformation, propaganda and lies that flooded the country over the last 5 years did not come from MAGA boomers on Facebook or 4Chan teenagers but the largest and most influential liberal corporate media outlets.
6:15 AM · Nov 7, 20212) These are not cases where media outlets erred. They deliberately lied. The way to know that is they refuse to acknowledge evidence proving they lied. Remember they just *ignored* @SchreckReports book proving the Biden emails were real. Now this:
6:17 AM · Nov 7, 2021
3) By far the best and most accurate reporting on all matters relating to Russiagate came not from the liberal corporate outlets that want to censor the internet in the name of disinformation or which shower themselves with Pulitzers for lies, but from the right-wing press.
The reporters who know most about Russiagate and did distinguished facts from lies — @ChuckRossDC, @MZHemingway, @JerryDunleavy, along with a few young journalists who risked their careers in left-wing media: @aaronjmate
& @mtracey — are the ones you’ve been told to ignore.A few people objected to my statement yesterday that hatred of them is just. Think about this: they spent weeks before the 2020 election spreading the CIA lie that the Biden emails were “Russian disinformation,” but when a POLITICO reporter disproved that, they ignored his book.
These are the world’s most pompous, smug, self-righteous people. They never stop telling they’re the guardians of democracy and truth. But then when they get *caught lying* — when irrefutable evidence emerges debunking their lies — they ignore it. How is that not contemptible?
I’ve been a vocal critic of liberal corporate media since I began writing 15 years ago – it’s why I started – and especially so the last 5 years. But that escalated when they just *ignored* @SchreckReports ‘ book proving they lied about the Biden emails.
New Proof Emerges About the Hunter Biden Laptop: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media Fraud
We all know exactly which outlets and media personalities spent the weeks before the 2020 election spreading the CIA’s lie: the Biden emails were “Russian disinformation.” They know who they are. How do they sleep knowing they lied about this, then ignoring this book proving it??
And now that the real facts about the [REDACTED] Russiagate fraud are finally emerging — the people who concocted it are getting arrested and the media propagandists they used are exposed — this is the only acknowledgment and self-critique we’re going to get. Just: “whoops”:
6:39 AM · Nov 7, 2021
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1457354950057529347?s=20
Glenn Greenwald has the receipts,* in popular jargon. Add this now to the 2023 Republican agenda. Look for “leaders” who sign onto aggressive hearings now. If the Democrats can conduct January 6 hearings, there is some colorable “legislative purpose” to investigation of media corporations’ willful or somehow disastrously (for the republic) yet fortuitously (for the left) wrong, all in the same direction for five years, with extensive coordination with one political party and federal executive agencies.
I note that much of the same gang benefited as in 1968: the Chinese communists and the Russian regime.
* Evidence or proof. Often in the form of screenshots or saved snaps.
Published in Journalism
Has the GOP ever held any entity accountable? Serious question. I cannot recall anyone under Clinton or Obama held to account for their crimes in office. I can’t think of any DNC/Commie/Marxist organization or financier going to jail. The GOP leadership is corrupt and complicit, so until there is a leadership upgrade, don’t expect anything more than soundbites from the GOP.
But don’t worry. When they tell us the election was ok, we can still trust them.
This all well and good— and accurate. But I’m comfortable saying that the day will come when Greenwald proves himself to be less than an ally.
He is a cobelligerent.
Yes. And I’m hoping that he isn’t. just belligerent. His association with The Guardian is worrisome.
Great post, Clifford. I continue to be sickened at the audacity and outrageous behavior of these people.
LOL, No.
The GOP enjoys the theater of hearings … on Benghazi, on Fast and Furious, on IRS targeting conservative groups, on the VA letting 300,000 vets die on waiting lists. But no one was ever held accountable for any of it.
Besides which, the GOP will have their hands full staging Failure Theater on repealing Build Back Better, which they helped pass last week.
I figure that’s true of everyone, including everyone here. I might not even be an ally of myself at some point.
But who are our allies currently?
I’ll take the truth now from wherever I can get it. There aren’t any coherent battle lines anymore.
Our supposed allies are failing so badly it looks deliberate.
I do recall a line from Elisha to Gehazi about that.
It’s a relief to remember it.
Sure. However let’s be clear that Greenwald is no conservative. He may have a different “truth” at a different time that is less palatable.
He is Stalin to our Churchill and FDR fighting Hitler. Alas, our side is more Mickey Mouse than Churchill and Goofy than FDR.
Greenwald is not our “friend”, but he is right in this case, and, perhaps more importantly, he has a level of cachet with those who decry any center-right journalism as invalid prima facia. My wife is an example, if Fox reports it, it’s automatically not just suspect, but a lie designed to twist the truth to serve the GOP. If some of them will listen to Greenwald and hear him point out that the corporate media is irretrievably corrupt then progress is made.
Heck, even Hugh Hewitt, the mna I never thought would say a bad word about the MSM has finally come to this conclusion. He has said on the air that MSNBC has corrupted NBC news and that debates need to have conservative moderators not just in the GOP primary, but in the general as well.
I expect NOTHING from the GOP and thus I am not disappointed when they fail to deliver. The GOP isn’t about accomplishing their goals, they are about delivering the Democrat agenda, just slower. The GOP doesn’t really want to stop say illegal immigration because a big groups of them want the cheap labor, and the rest don’t want to be branded as racists. They don’t want to build a wall because the media (that corrupt group) will call them bad names. They don’t want to reduce spending because then they won’t get re-elected. They don’t want to reign in the bureaucracy because then, they would have to actually pass legislation that governs and be held accountable. By letting the bureaucracy make the rules, they can campaign on policies that the bureaucracy will never enforce. Thus get re-elected but never actually solve the problem…nice gig, if you can get it.
At some point we, and I mean all Americans but especially the Right have to understand who actually is running this country and what their goals are.
Number 1 is the bureaucracy, and if you hadn’t noticed, they don’t like conservative policies very much.
Number 2 is the Media, not just the news, but the entertainment industry as a whole. They tell the stories that people watch and they shape our culture. People think with nostalgia on the 50s in part because they think of Leave it the Beaver and My Three Sons as examples of what life was like. It wasn’t, but we remember it that way.
Number 3 is the education industry because the left so dominates it that even conservative teachers tend to teach progressive topics.
When I hear a candidate speak about those three enemies and how they will address them, I will listen, but I’ve never heard one, Tom Cotton sometimes comes close, but he doesn’t articulate how he will deal with any of these groups.
Of course he’s no conservative. But I’m not sure conservatives are my allies either. Is Romney a conservative? Or McConnell? Is Rob Long a conservative?
I no longer see this as a bi-polar battle. Or if it is one, then it’s truth versus lies, and freedom versus slavery. The conservatives are not my allies on these two very crucial polarities. They just aren’t. So the other things we agree upon become almost moot. If they buy into lies and conspiracy theories spun from the Democrats, and ignore very real threats – because Trump – and sell us down the river in legislative actions and playing resistance theater in their speeches, they aren’t worth anything.
Greenwald is a journalist. A true journalist unlike most of these other hacks. I don’t expect him to be an ally.
Which line do you have in mind?
A true journalist shouldn’t be any party or ideology’s ally. Their mission is to tell the truth regardless of who it helps or hurts. When they lost that mission, they stopped being journalists and started being propagandists. Those serve a purpose as well, but we shouldn’t lionize them, or even protect them too much because a propagandist will lie in furtherance of their mission either personal or assigned to them.
The founding of “PJMedia” was in the wake of the Dan Rather Bush-National-Guard fiasco. Bloggers studied the technology of typefaces, bloggers knew the numbers and substance of the regs, recognized a dozen other facets of the forged documents that Rather tried to pawn off. Major media ignored that and showed the world that their “research” consisted of reading each other’s reports.
Rather than address their defective professionalism, they seem to have instead hardened the bubble and also have Dorsey, Bezos and Zuckerberg to help keep inconvenient truths from penetrating.
Number one is the Intelligence Community (spec. the CIA) serving the desires of those above them.
Well, in fairness, the IC is part of the bureaucracy, every stinking one of them.
https://biblehub.com/2_kings/6-16.htm
Greenwald is a lefty and has always* been honest about that, as part of his prioritzation of truth and accuracy. I do not consider him an ally of anything but the truth — certainly not of the right. This makes him, as you point out, not an ally of ours, but simply a good man. Such people we should have more of, ally or not. So I agree with you, but at the same time do not find it worrying.
* as far as I can tell
Zackly. Not a problem.
I’m not prepared to argue this. And I have no problem with the truth. But Greenwald has a strong ideology if his past is any indication. His take happens to coincide with “ours” now, but I’m reasonably certain he believes in some “truths” that we would not regard as such. Caveat Emptor.
Greenwald seems like a throwback. It seems like a hundred years ago that there were journalists and pundits with a clear bias/slant/point of view who did not stoop to defending and repeating fabrications or tribal support of horsesh*t narratives like Trump-Russia.
I don’t think you’re giving us enough credit for being able to separate good reporting from ideology.
He gains more credibility for me as he is going directly against the Democratic Party and is taking hits from them – and he knows he’s not acceptable to the right. This is gutsy. He has no allies.
He is someone who is wary of government power, that he understands propaganda and sees through the artifice from another angle is interesting.
He is deploring censorship. There are leftists who don’t want authoritarianism. ( They are misguided because collectivism requires force, as I see it) But they are welcome allies in this vital issue.
We can’t have a debate – or a democracy – without free speech.
I have never followed any journalist. And through the years there have been many who I abandoned. The world changed, they stayed the same.
I draw a line between diagnosing the problem and providing the solution. My first requirement is freedom to be an individual with one’s own aspirations and thoughts- and I want everyone else to have the same! What a great society that created.
The common thread of the pundits I viscerally rejected was Bush neo-cons. I voted for Bush, twice. But by 2006 other forces were affecting the world.
The growth, technology and economic connection is very new in societal, cultural development. The digital age is overwhelming us.
I’m not questioning Greenwald in the present, nor the assessment of his reporting. My opinion is rather simple–I don’t trust him and our concurrence with his viewpoints may pose difficulty if and when his socialist associations come to the fore. I trust “us,” but it becomes more difficult to distrust someone when there is a track record of trusting him. I think that I’m repeating myself.
You think when the time comes it may be difficult for some people to distrust him, because they got used to trusting him?
Not really. I think a track record of “trusting” him makes it more difficult to call him out if and when it appears necessary.
That may never happen, and, as we’ve read here, “truth is truth.” Still, I’m not going all in for anyone who wrote for The Guardian.
Do you think he would lie, coverup, and engage in a smear campaign in order to oppose us?
So more like, the left will yell “Why don’t you believe him now? You believed him when he agreed with you!”
?