From Glenn Greenwald:

In 2018, I compiled many of those personality-driven and mental health smears that had been weaponized back then against Chomsky because, at the time, other liberal outlets — such as The New Yorker and New York Magazine — were already using the same mental health and personality-based themes to expel me from the precincts of liberal decency due to my rejection of their Russiagate conspiracy theories, which had turned into a virtual religion, including at The Intercept. Both of those long profiles were devoted to a central theme: I refused to accept what everyone who is sane and mentally healthy could see — that Trump had colluded with Russia and Putin exercised some sort of clandestine control over Trump — because I had rage-based trauma from childhood that I never resolved. 

In 2012 and in the years after I frequently described how the same mental health themes were weaponized by liberal establishmentarians against Julian Assange: an incessant focus on the WikiLeaks founder's personality and alleged mental health pathologies to discredit his pioneering work. I've often noted that the reason the Nixon administration ordered a break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst as a response to his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers was because depicting someone as psychologically unwell is the preferred method of power centers to distract attention away from valid critiques and to expel dissidents from their salons. The script which The Intercept and their liberal allies are using against me is an old, stale, and trite one.

All of this, quite obviously, is an attempt to distract attention away from The Intercept’s serious journalistic sins. It is also designed to personalize the anger which their behavior validly provoked onto me, to conceal the fact that numerous journalists across the political spectrum — not just me — reacted with disgust at what they did and what they are still doing.

One of the Intercept stories to which I (and many others) objected involved a fund-raising email sent by The Intercept to the public on May 4, in which they proudly boasted that they had obtained the full archive of private data on all users of the social media platform Gab. The Intercept vowed that they would use the data archive to target ordinary citizens, including QAnon conspiracy theorists and those who believe that the election was defrauded. Based on that promise, the email solicited donations from the public (why an outlet lavishly funded by the world's 73rd richest billionaire and which provides their largely unread writers and editors enormous, above-market salaries has to beg for donations from the public in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis is, as I understand it, the subject of an imminent investigative exposé on their finances). Because I am not on their email list, I became aware of that Gab email only when a former senior Intercept editor forwarded it to me, furious that The Interceptwas now doing the work of the NSA and FBI by infringing privacy rights rather than protecting them: a core mission of the organization's founding.

The other Intercept story I criticized was an expensive, highly produced 20-minute video, narrated by former New York Times live-blogging reporter Robert Mackey, designed to vilify numerous journalists with small right-leaning news outlets who do the work that The Interceptwould never get near: namely, they report on what actually happens at Antifa protests. Why would a news outlet that has a $15 million/year budget, which works from a $3 million/year penthouse office on the 18th floor of a Park Avenue tower offering panoramic views of Manhattan, and which pays their senior employees annual salaries between $350,000 and $450,000, devote their vast resources to villainizing obscure, poorly paid video journalists who — unlike most Intercept reporters — do actually dangerous, on-the-ground reporting? Who is the "bully” in this situation?

The primary grievance which The Intercept is voicing in response to my criticisms of their work is the same one which liberal outlets now constantly try to weaponize in order to place themselves off-limits from criticism: namely, that by criticizing Intercept writers, I have “endangered” them — a dangerous and shabby standard which, like their liberal media brethren, they obviously do not apply to themselves. Why can The Intercept use a billionaire’s money to expose ordinary people’s Gab activities and produce a video smearing multiple journalists such as Townhall’s Julio Rosas and The Daily Caller's Jorge Ventura, but I and others cannot criticize them? Numerous other journalists and commentators, including Matt Taibbi and Jimmy Dore along with Fox News and the other news outlets whose journalists were smeared by The Intercept, along with the targeted journalists themselves, voiced the same criticisms I did. 

Despite the widespread criticism The Intercept has been receiving, I was contacted on Wednesday by The Daily Beast’s media reporter Lloyd Grove, who asked me to respond to a long list of accusations, smears and other attacks furnished to him by various Intercept reporters and editors — in order, again, to pretend that I was their only critic, driven by mental problems. These accusations conveyed by Grove were similar to the ones they fed to The Post. Now that The Post article is published, and knowing that one’s own views are never fully represented in articles written by other journalists, I’m posting below the full written exchange I had with Grove: his questions based on The Intercept’s accusations, followed by my answers. 

I do so not only to ensure that the full context of my answers is known, but also because this double standard which liberal outlets like The Intercept are trying to impose — they can attack, expose, smear or vilify anyone they want, but you can never criticize them without being accused of “endangering” their journalists — is an unsustainable and unethical double standard that is now pervasive in liberal journalism culture:

(screenshot)

As I told Grove, much of what is motivating The Intercept's rage is their institutional failures. They lost an enormous chunk of their membership base when I resigned last October, which they have not come close to replacing. They have repeatedly sent out emails pleading for donations on the ground that their fund-raising efforts are falling woefully short. And despite their enormous budget and exorbitant salaries, virtually nobody reads that site outside of a couple of writers:

The Intercept’s audience size is humiliatingly small. I’ll bet any amount of money that the Intercept spends more dollars per reader than any media outlet in the west. Outside of my articles and those of a couple others, their traffic is and always has been vanishingly small. They think they do such great journalism but nobody reads it, because it’s nothing more than the same partisan tripe one finds at the New York Times, Vox, MSNBC or any other liberal/DNC-loyal /AOC-loving outlet. . . . 

The Intercept Brasil, which I founded in 2016, has 1/9 the budget that the Intercept US does and ⅛ the size of its staff, yet for many months, the Intercept Brasil produces more in raw traffic numbers than the entire Intercept US in raw numbers. That’s how few people read their work. It’s embarrassing.

Just to provide one illustrative example, the extremely expensive video they produced that attacked and endangered two working-class journalists of color who do the dangerous work of covering Antifa protests was one of their most-discussed pieces of journalism of the year, mostly due to how many people found it repellent. And yet even with that, the YouTube video — which has as many people who disliked it as liked it — did not even attract 10,000 views a full week after its initial publication. Most unpaid random YouTubers have a larger audience than that:

(youtube warning)

In sum, The Intercept is an outlet that is as lavishly funded as it is widely ignored. But their journalistic breaches still matter because of how much billionaire funding they receive and, more so, because the tactics they are using to render it inherently illegitimate to criticize them — lest you be accused of “endangering” them — have become commonplace among other liberal outlets. That is the tactic that merits the most attention.

Questions from The Daily Beast’s media reporter Lloyd Grove and my answers (links and tweets have been added and my answers were very lightly edited for clarity):

People at the Intercept are especially upset about your attacks on Micah Lee, which they say have resulted in doxxing and death threats on him and his wife. Here’s a quote from Micah: “Glenn and I have always disagreed on some things, but at least he used to have consistent principles and respect for basic facts. It’s disappointing and tragic that he’s gone so far off the deep end, from what seemed to be an honest and fearless journalist into a conspiracy-peddling pundit that spends all his time misleading people.”

Precisely because of my long work relationship and friendship with Micah -- which includes my reporting on the NSA archives, the Brazil archive and our work at the Freedom of the Press Foundation -- I would never have criticized him personally or even by name under any circumstances. When I co-founded the Intercept back in 2013, Micah was one of the first if not the first people we hired. That’s why I was so disappointed when he decided to start publicly criticizing me by name. After having chosen to do that to great applause from his liberal following, he -- like the Intercept generally -- wants to play the victim and whine about how he’s being persecuted for something that he himself did. 

Why did you target Micah, who by most accounts has been essential in your journalistic success, especially your reporting on Snowden and Brazil corruption?

See the answer above. I will also add that my original criticisms about the Intercept’s abuse of the Gab archive to target private citizens were based on the Intercept’s own description of how they intended to use the archive, set forth in a fund-raising email they sent to their entire email list. Because I’m not on their email list, I did not see that email until a former highly respected Intercept editor forwarded it to me, indignant that the Intercept was doing the work of the NSA/FBI and infringing rather than protecting the digital privacy rights of ordinary people: one of our original missions.

Read more:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-medias-double-standard

assange2

THE SOUND OF glass breaking, on Inauguration Day in Portland, Oregon, was music to the ears of Julio Rosas, a young video journalist.

That’s because Rosas, who works for the right-wing website Townhall, specializes in shooting viral video of mayhem at left-wing protests. On this day, black-clad, anti-capitalist protesters were attacking a Democratic Party office, and Rosas managed to record them from close range without being spotted.

Within minutes of the vandalism, by a handful of activists who broke off from a small #J20 march, Rosas posted his video on Twitter, where it racked up over 1 million views.

Read more:

 https://theintercept.com/2021/05/13/riot-squad-right-wing-video-journalists-black-lives-matter-antifa/

The story above is what Glenn Greenwald objects to. It sanitises the really bad side of the "woke" while piling dirt and fake stories on the "stormers" of the Capitol. There won't be any inquiries on the BLM ransacks and burning of cars because it was "not the intent"... while blah blah blah... Read from top.

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In her first TV interview, we speak with Emily Wilder, the young reporter fired by the Associated Press after she was targeted in a Republican smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism in college. Wilder is Jewish and was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace at Stanford University before she graduated in 2020. She was two weeks into her new job with the AP when the Stanford College Republicans singled out some of her past social media posts, triggering a conservative frenzy. The AP announced Wilder’s firing shortly thereafter, citing unspecified violations of its social media policy. “Less than 48 hours after Stanford College Republicans began to post about me, I was fired,” says Wilder. “I was not given an explanation for what social media policy I had violated.” Over 100 AP journalists have signed an open letter to management protesting the decision to fire Wilder, which came just days after Israel demolished the building housing AP offices and other media organizations in Gaza. Journalism professor Janine Zacharia, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post who taught Wilder at Stanford, says the episode is an example of how much pressure news organizations face on Middle East coverage. “I am very aware, perhaps more than most, to the sensitivities around the questions of bias and reporting on the conflict,” says Zacharia. “In this case it wasn’t about bias.”

Read more:

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/25/journalist_emily_wilder_ap_firing

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From Glenn Greenwald:

While I used my social media platforms to denounce the false accusations voiced by Uygur and Kasparian against Maté, none of this would merit an article or stand-alone commentary if not for the fact that the two weapons they chose — false accusations that someone is a paid Russian agent and exploited sexual harassment accusations — have become extremely commonplace in Democratic Party politics, liberal circles and U.S. politics more broadly. It is long past time — way past time — that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.

I decided to analyze and dissect this conflict not in order to narrate everything that happened here or to arbitrate who is right and wrong with respect to every disagreement these parties are having. Instead, it is worth examining because the way this nasty exchange unfolded provides such a vivid and illuminating case study of two metastasizing cancers at the heart of liberal discourse. Both of these weapons are ethically repugnant and corrupt — obviously so — yet somehow have become as common and accepted among Democratic Party followers as they are toxic and reprehensible.

See his video:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/an-ugly-war-among-leftist-youtubers

Yes when a show called "The Young Turks" (TYT) start to look like "The Young Turds" (same logo) while claiming to be "of the left" ("liberal and progressive"), you should discover the world is in trouble. Your honourable left-wing ethics have been thrashed in the bin of non-recyclable garbage.

We are told: "The Young Turks" was the first daily streaming online talk show, having begun airing in that format in 2006, with an official website on the internet and a channel hosted on YouTube. So far so good... Then the rubbish comes out: "The show provides in-depth coverage on politics regarding topics, events and other issues."... in depth? sure it sinks to a million fathoms not to surface again except in bubbles of insults and the occasional "fuck you!" to a decent left wing journalist who does not subscribe to the fake Young Turds conspiracies...

So Glenn Greenwald exposes the con that "whoever disagrees with the Pelosis, the Bidens, the Young Turds and anything that the Blinkens profess, IS A PAID EMPLOYEE OF THE Russians or an apologist for dictators. Of course the biggest dictators on the planet are the Saudis, but we won't mention them because the left in America needs them to fight the Russians and the Iranians... not mentioning fighting the Chinese in the north-east...

Go Glenn, go and fight the TYT bastards!

and please visit: 

BY GLENN GREENWALD

That is when the saga of life unexpectedly intervened. On Sunday, August 7, my husband David Miranda was at a campaign event for his re-election to the Brazilian Congress. He began experiencing intense pain, went to the Emergency Room later that day, and was quickly diagnosed with a severe gastro-intestinal disorder that required him to be immediately admitted to the ICU. He has remained there ever since, in critical condition, and several complications caused by his original condition have made his situation quite dire. Our family remains very hopeful for his full recovery, but suffice to say, the ordeal has been extremely difficult. All of my energy and attention are devoted to his hospitalization and to the need to support our children and myself as we await improvements in his condition.

READ MORE:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/note-to-readers-468

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The behavior of The New York Times and Washington Post in the current case involving secret documents is truly shocking. In contrast to 10 years ago, they now see their mission as to serve the security state, not public knowledge.

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

Ten years ago, WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden to escape and publish his revelations by The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times and others. 

In 2023 Jack Teixeira is tracked down by U.K. secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with The New York Times and, in parallel with The Washington Post, not to help him escape or help him publish or tell people his motives, but to help the state arrest him. 

Those outlets have accessed a cache of at least 300 additional secret documents in doing so — and have kept them secret, with the exception of a couple of snippets that mainly forward the official state narrative.

The contrast with 10 years ago tells a very real and glaring truth. The idea that the legacy media in any way serves the truth or the public interest is now completely buried. The legacy media serves the state, and the state serves the billionaires.

WikiLeaks is now so hamstrung by attacks on its finances, personnel and logistics as to be almost inoperable. Propaganda outfit Bellingcat was conceived as a way to counter it, by producing material with the frisson of secret access but actually as an outlet for the security services. An astonishing amount of “liberal opinion” falls for it.

Ten years ago, WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden to escape and publish his revelations by The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times and others. 

In 2023 Jack Teixeira is tracked down by U.K. secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with The New York Times and, in parallel with The Washington Post, not to help him escape or help him publish or tell people his motives, but to help the state arrest him. 

Those outlets have accessed a cache of at least 300 additional secret documents in doing so — and have kept them secret, with the exception of a couple of snippets that mainly forward the official state narrative.

The contrast with 10 years ago tells a very real and glaring truth. The idea that the legacy media in any way serves the truth or the public interest is now completely buried. The legacy media serves the state, and the state serves the billionaires.

WikiLeaks is now so hamstrung by attacks on its finances, personnel and logistics as to be almost inoperable. Propaganda outfit Bellingcat was conceived as a way to counter it, by producing material with the frisson of secret access but actually as an outlet for the security services. An astonishing amount of “liberal opinion” falls for it.

The initial reaction to the leaked documents was to rubbish them with the memes routinely applied to all information embarrassing to the state nowadays — they were either “Russian hacks” or “faked or amended disinformation.”

These attacks were particularly important as the message that came over clearly from these Teixeira leaks was precisely the same as that which came over from Daniel Ellsberg’s original Pentagon Papers leak 50 years ago — that the public is being lied to about how the war is going. 

[Related: Leaks Spelling the End for Ukraine]

(It is worth reflecting that in today’s world The New York Times and Washington Post would have condemned Ellsberg and emphasised those bits of the Pentagon Papers which reflect badly on the VietCong).

Ukraine was particularly concerned about U.S. official figures showing Ukrainian casualties much higher, and Russian casualties much lower, than the Ukrainian official figures the U.S. ostensibly endorsed.

Revealing the Obvious 

I have to say I always find both Ukrainian and Russian casualty figures laughably false. The idea that either side is telling the truth appears to me one that no half-sensible person could entertain. I had presumed that was the general view.

Revelations about the fragility of Ukrainian air defences and supply lines similarly seemed to me a statement of the blindingly obvious. 

It is also unhelpful for the U.S. to have revealed that it is actively spying on President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as allies such as South Korea and Israel. But again, this is embarrassing in the sense it is embarrassing if somebody publishes pictures of you on the toilet; it is not that nobody thought you used the toilet. 

There is not a diplomat alive who did not know the U.S. does this stuff.

Eventually the media and security services, with Bellingcat in the vanguard, decided the best way forward was to admit the papers are genuine, but only tell us about very selected ones, and then with a positive spin. 

So we have stories about how brilliant the U.S. secret services are at penetrating Russian power structures and communications, and how the real danger from the leaks is revealing to the Russians the extent of American success. 

That line has been splashed all over legacy and social media. As the public is being denied the original documents this conclusion is extrapolated from, it is difficult to assess. The journalists of course have not assessed it; they have just copied and pasted the line.

Other helpful snippets for the security services are published, such as an assessment that the U.N. secretary general is pro-Russian, or standard stuff on North Korean nuclear ambitions. In the last week it is noticeable that, since original documents stopped surfacing into public view, nothing has been published that does not serve U.S. propaganda narratives.

There remains the mystery that the sources of these documents seem particularly diverse – in particular some being apparently internal C.I.A. – for an intelligence officer in the Air National Guard to access, but it is not impossible.

Jack Teixeira is at the centre of this puzzle but remains the missing piece. We have heard nothing from him. A rather unconvincing interview with a suspiciously fluent, pixeled out acquaintance grassing him up to The Washington Post stated that he was a right-wing patriot.

Teixeira has been portrayed both as some kind of rampant supporter of former President Donald Trump who is incensed at the state, and as an inadequate jock revealing documents just to boast to fellow gaming nerds. We should remain suspicious of attempts to characterise him: I am acutely aware of media portrayals of Julian Assange which are entirely untrue.

It is a shame The Washington Post, New York Times, Guardian and Bellingcat each had no interest whatsoever in the journalistic pursuit of the truth behind this extraordinary episode. We live entirely in security states: there is no doubt about it.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/04/19/craig-murray-snowden-teixeira/

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