FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

Greenwald continues destroying Left Biased Fake News...


https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-attack-the-powerless

Greenwald: Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Play Victim When Called Out
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via TK News,

The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print
newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more
than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has
higher circulation numbers.

On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent
article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan.
6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors
and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown
by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these
private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S.
Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in
“a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to
another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately
needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous
defense.

In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined:
“Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters
raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech
companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being
able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech
companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants
are using to raise money online.
An unidentified man walks through the lobby of the Gannett-USA Today
headquarters building August 20, 2013 on a 30-acre site in McLean,
Virginia. (AFP/PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images)

The USA Today reporters went far beyond merely reporting how this
fundraising was being conducted. They went so far as to tattle to
PayPal and other funding sites on two of those defendants, Joe Biggs
and Dominic Pezzola, and then boasted of their success in having their
accounts terminated:

    As of Wednesday afternoon, the Biggs fundraiser was listed as
having received $52,201. Pezzola had received $730. Biggs' campaign
disappeared from the site shortly after USA TODAY inquired about it….

    Friday, a USA TODAY reporter donated to Pezzola's fundraiser using
Stripe. Stripe told USA TODAY it does not comment on individual users.
A USA TODAY reporter was able to make a $1 donation to Pezzola's
fundraiser using Venmo, a payment app owned by PayPal. After being
alerted by USA TODAY, Venmo removed the account.

    Soon a PayPal account took its place. PayPal caught that and
removed it, too.

Wow, what brave and intrepid journalistic work: speaking truth to
power and standing up to major power centers by . . . working as
little police officers for tech giants to prevent private citizens
from being able to afford criminal lawyers. Clear the shelves for the
imminent Pulitzer. Whatever you think about the Capitol riot, everyone
has the right to a legal defense and to do what they can to ensure
they have the best legal defense possible — especially when the full
weight of the Justice Department is crashing down on your head even
for non-violent offenses, which is what many of these defendants are
charged with due to the politically charged nature of the
investigation.

The right to a vigorous defense has always been a central cause of
mine as a lawyer and a journalist (it also used to be a central cause
of left-wing groups like the ACLU, years ago; it was that same
principle that caused then-candidate Kamala Harris to solicit
donations last summer that went to protesters charged with violent
rioting). A federal prosecutor was recently referred for disciplinary
procedures for publicly threatening to charge some of these Capitol
protesters with sedition, one of the gravest crimes in the U.S. Code.
That is how grave the legal jeopardy is faced by these people trying
to raise money for lawyers.

What makes all of this extra grotesque is that, as The Washington Post
reported, most of those charged with various crimes in connection with
the January 6 Capitol riot, including many whose charges stem just
from their presence inside the Capitol, not the use of any violence,
are people with serious financial difficulties: not surprising for a
country in the middle of a major economic and joblessness crisis,
where neoliberalism and global trade deals have destroyed entire
industries and communities for decades:

    Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the
Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including
bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid
taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post
analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient
information to detail their financial histories. . . . The group’s
bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the
American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for
money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home
at one point, according to court filings.

This USA Today article is thus yet another example of journalists at
major media outlets abusing their platforms to attack and expose
anything other than the real power centers which compose the ruling
class and govern the U.S.: the CIA, the FBI, security state agencies,
Wall Street, Silicon Valley oligarchs. To the extent these journalists
pay attention to those entities at all — and they barely ever do — it
is to venerate them and mindlessly disseminate their messaging like
stenographers, not investigate them. Investigating people who actually
wield real power is hard.
The Washington Post, Feb. 10, 2021

Instead, the primary target of the Trump-era media has become private
citizens and people who wield no power, yet who these media outlets
believe must have their lives ruined because they have adopted the
wrong political ideology. So many corporate journalists now use their
huge megaphones to humiliate and wreck the lives of ordinary private
citizens who they judge to have bad political opinions (meaning:
opinions that deviate from establishment liberalism orthodoxies which
these media outlets exist to enforce).

We have seen this over and over. CNN confronted an old woman on the
front lawn of her Florida home for the crime of having used her little
Facebook page to promote a pro-Trump event they claimed was engineered
by Russians. The same network threatened to expose the identity of
another private citizen who created an anti-CNN meme unless he begged
and promised not to do it again. HuffPost doxed the real-life name of
an anonymous critic of Islam (whose spouted views I find repellent)
and ruined her business.

    A Florida woman who ran a Trump supporters page that unwittingly
promoted a Russian-coordinated event on Facebook says she doesn’t
believe that she was influenced by Kremlin-linked trolls
https://t.co/DmgDRFRwyn pic.twitter.com/OAz5julCyA
    — CNN (@CNN) February 21, 2018

Just last week, The Daily Beast decided to expose the identity of a
private citizen at Spring Break in Miami and detail his marital and
legal problems because a video of him went viral due to his being
dressed as the Joker and uttering “COVID truther” phrases. The same
outlet congratulated itself for unearthing and exposing the real name
of an African-American Facebook user whose crime was posting videos
mocking Nancy Pelosi.

My principal critique of the contemporary media posture — and my
governing view of the real purpose of journalism — is summarized by
this:

    If you think the real power centers in the US are the Proud Boys,
4Chan & Boogaloos rather than the CIA, FBI, NSA, Wall Street and
Silicon Valley, and spend most of your time battling the former while
serving the latter as stenographers, your journalism is definitionally
shit.
    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 16, 2021

ut increasingly, the largest corporate media platforms are used to
punish ideological dissent and thought crimes by powerless, private
citizens. They do not criticize or investigate real power centers, but
serve them. And what makes it worse — so, so much worse — is that, as
they assault, dox and harass private citizens, these journalistic
bullies depict themselves as the real marginalized people, as those
who are so fragile, voiceless, powerless, and vulnerable that
criticizing them is tantamount to bullying, harassment, and violence.

This new journalistic tactic of weaponizing and misappropriating the
language of marginalization, abuse, harassment and oppression and
applying it to themselves — all to render any criticism of their work
a form of assault and abuse — is one I have written about several
times before. The last time was when a major front-page reporter at
the most influential paper in the country, The New York Times’ Taylor
Lorenz, got caught lying twice in six weeks, and those (such as
myself) who criticized her for it — who criticized her journalism for
the Paper of Record — were branded toxic, misogynistic bullies who
were inciting dangerous hate mobs against her. And thus was criticism
of this powerful journalist somehow manipulatively converted into an
act of morally reprehensible harassment.

What these journalists are doing is as transparent as it is tawdry.
They insist that you not treat them as what they are: people who wield
extreme power and influence to shape political discourse, widely
disseminate disinformation, wreck people’s reputations, expose the
identity of private citizens, and propagandize the public. No,
increasingly they are demanding that you treat them as exactly the
opposite: the most marginalized, vulnerable, endangered and fragile
members of society whose standing is so tenuous that publicly
criticizing them should be barred as an act of violence, and those
expressing critiques of their work must be consequently shunned as
harassers and abusers.

This is the demented framework that allowed CNN’s coddled, blow-dried,
manicured and pedicured millionaire TV personality Jim Acosta, with a
straight face, to write an entire book casting himself on the cover as
someone in danger. What enabled Jim Acosta of all people to cast
himself as a victim, to the point where so many liberals bought this
book that it ended up on The New York Times bestseller list? He was
criticized by the President and his supporters for his journalism.
That’s it.

And just like that, the real victims in America are not the jobless or
the homeless or residents of addiction-ravaged communities or victims
of violent crime but, instead, the rich, famous TV personalities for
CNN. This is the fictitious melodrama — with themselves cast as the
stars — that they are demanding you ingest to treat them with
deference and respect.

As I’ve noted before, I’ve been harshly criticized for my journalism
for years. I was publicly attacked in deeply personal ways by the
President of Brazil many times, and endlessly slandered by his
movement. That’s not fun, but it is also not persecution. What is real
persecution is being prosecuted or imprisoned or threatened with
prison for your reporting. Real persecution is what is being done to
Julian Assange. Criticism, even harsh criticism, comes with the
territory: the cost of the immense privilege of having a public
platform to shape debate. If you do not want to be criticized or
called names, don’t become a journalist or seek out public platforms.

Sunday’s USA Today article which tried to destroy the ability of these
criminal defendants to raise donations for their legal fees contained
the names of three journalists in its byline. The lead reporter — the
one who the paper’s editors put first, Brenna Smith — took to Twitter
to boast of this monumental journalistic exposé. After I saw several
commenters criticizing the story, I added my own critiques of this
story:

    Congratulations on using your new journalistic platform to try to
pressure tech companies to terminate the ability of impoverished
criminal defendants to raise money for their legal defense from online
donations. You're well on your way upward in this industry for sure:
https://t.co/pvpmX3DaaW
    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 28, 2021

Note that the critique I voiced is about the reporting she had just
published in one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the
country. I also engaged the journalist whose name was listed last — a
person named Will Carless — in a lengthy discussion expressing similar
criticisms.

My criticism of Carless, a white straight male listed last on the
byline, attracted no criticism for some reason. But my criticism of
Smith, the lead reporter, caused such an explosion of indignation and
rage from the corporate media class that it caused my name to trend on
Twitter (yet again) as a dastardly online villain: that’s how grave my
moral transgression was.

What was my moral offense here? According to these media mavens and
the self-serving, manipulative framework they are trying to implant, I
did not voice criticisms of a piece of journalism in one of the most
influential newspapers in the country. Instead — in their hands — they
converted it, just as they did with criticisms of Lorenz, into a
narrative in which I bullied a poor, fragile, young lady who is too
weak and too vulnerable to handle public critique.

They emphasized that she is just an intern: in their eyes the
equivalent of a high school junior — even though she has a long
history of writing deranged articles for the U.S.-Government-funded
Bellingcat and was, at least in the view of her editors, competent and
professional enough to be the lead reporter on what they treated as a
major news story designed to harm the lives of numerous private
citizens. If she is “merely an intern,” then why is she listed as the
lead reporter on a major news story? And if her editors determine that
she is capable of fulfilling that role, then you can’t simultaneously
demand she be treated like a young debutante off-limits from critique.

Do you see what they are doing here? They are working to create a
moral framework where it is always impermissible to criticize their
journalism, no matter how shoddy, deceitful and amoral it is. They
constantly concoct reasons why the journalist in question is too
marginalized and too vulnerable to legitimately criticize. They are
all apparently competent and sophisticated enough to be trusted to
byline news reporting in major corporate outlets — and we must treat
them as tough, talented professionals when it comes time to deference
due — but we are then simultaneously instructed that they are not
mature or strong enough to endure criticisms of that work. If she had
not been an intern, they still would have decreed criticisms of her
off limits on the ground that any criticism will stoke misogynistic
abuse: after all, Lorenz is a borderline-middle-aged reporter, not an
intern, but that is how criticisms of her are delegitimized.

What is even more remarkable is how these liberal media figures invoke
the most long-standing sexist, racist and homophobic tropes to erect
this shield of immunity around themselves that they demand you honor.
Look at how they transformed this journalist from what I see her as
and what she is — an adult professional reporter who has sufficiently
risen in the profession to byline a major story in a national
newspaper — into an offensive sexist caricature straight out of the
1950s. In their manipulative hands, she — like Taylor Lorenz of The
New York Times — becomes not a professional adult journalist but just
a fragile little china doll who cannot withstand any critiques.

A senior USA Today editor actually emailed me to chide me for my
inappropriate behavior — i.e., critiquing the journalism of the
reporter they placed first on the byline. And here is how USA Today’s
former “diversity and inclusion editor” Hemal Jhaveri — who just got
fired for posting a series of racist decrees about how white people
are the root of all evil — decided to interpret this event:

    Two USA TODAY reporters getting targeted in the span of days isn't
by chance. What is happening to Brenna Smith is not a coincidence.

    Top editors showed they would cave at the slightest provocation.
Now, female journalists through the org will be more susceptible to
harassment. pic.twitter.com/TrDjfmWH8x
    — Hemal Jhaveri (@hemjhaveri) March 29, 2021

Journalists with these outlets wield immense power and influence.
These are not the voiceless, marginalized, powerless people in
society. They’re the ones who attack, expose and ruin marginalized
people if they dare express political views of which these journalists
disapprove.

It is not just morally repugnant but quite dangerous for them to try
to place themselves off limits from criticism this way. The whole
point of journalism — the reason why a free press is vital — is
because it is the only way to hold accountable powerful institutions
and powerful actors. Corporate media outlets and those they employ as
reporters are among the most powerful and influential actors in
society and, as such, are completely fair game for criticisms,
protests, and denunciations.

What they are trying to do by exploiting the language of oppression
and marginalization to cast themselves as vulnerable victims who
cannot be criticized is despicable. It deserves nothing but contempt.
That is precisely why I intend to heap scorn on it every time they try
it, precisely because these in-group, swarming corporate journalists
are the real bullies, trying to stigmatize and destroy the reputations
of ordinary citizens who commit the crime of criticizing their
journalism or expressing political opinions they want banished.

They know that the public — for very good reasons — has lost faith and
trust in their work at unprecedented levels. They know that their
industry is failing. When journalism turns its guns not on the
powerful but on the powerless — descending as low as trying to prevent
them from raising needed money for a legal defense — the contempt is
well deserved. The demographic characteristics of the journalists
doing this disgraceful, cowardly journalism is irrelevant. The only
reason they even mention it is because they think they can weaponize
it against their critics.

This lowly tactic will succeed only if people are cowed and
intimidated by it. It will fail, as it should, if people ignore it and
treat them like any other power centers by freely expressing the
criticisms you think their journalism merits regardless of what names
they call you as a result.