The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry by Glenn Greenwald, 7 Feb 2021
A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.
I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.
Just as the NSA is obsessed
with ensuring there be no place on earth where humans can communicate
free of their spying eyes and ears, these journalistic hall monitors cannot
abide the idea that there can be any place on the internet where people are
free to speak in ways they do not approve. Like some creepy informant for a
state security apparatus, they spend their days trolling the depths of chat
rooms and 4Chan bulletin boards and sub-Reddit threads and private
communications apps to find anyone — influential or obscure — who is saying
something they believe should be forbidden, and then use the corporate
megaphones they did not build and could not have built but have been handed in
order to silence and destroy anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their
corporate managers or challenges their information hegemony.
Oliver Darcy has built his
CNN career by sitting around with Brian Stelter petulantly pointing to people breaking the
rules on social media and demanding tech executives make the rule-breakers
disappear. The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who
refer to their twerpy work with the self-glorifying title of “working in the
disinformation space”: as intrepid and hazardous as exposing corruption by
repressive regimes or reporting from war zones — spend their dreary days
scrolling through 4Chan boards to expose the offensive memes and bad words used
by transgressive adolescents; they then pat themselves on the back for
confronting dangerous power centers, even when it is nothing more trivial and
bullying than doxxing the identities of powerless, obscure citizens.
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But the worst of
this triumvirate is the NYT’s tech reporters, due to influence and reach
if no other reason. When Silicon Valley monopolies, publicly pressured by Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other lawmakers, united to remove Parler from the internet, the
Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks
to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the
Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried
about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for
group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That
seems problematic.”
These examples of
journalism being abused to demand censorship of spaces they cannot control are
too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. And they are not confined to those
three outlets. That far more robust censorship is urgently needed is now a
virtual consensus in mainstream corporate journalism: it’s an animating cause
for them.
"Those of us in
journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle
that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of
journalism," complained Ultimate Establishment Journalism
Maven Steve Coll, the Dean of Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Journalism and a Staff Writer at The New Yorker. A New
Yorker and Vox contributor who runs a major journalistic listserv
appropriately called “Study Hall,” Kyle Chayka, has already begun shaming Substack for hosting writers he
regards as unacceptable (Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss). A recent Guardian
article warned that podcasts was one remaining area
still insufficiently policed. ProPublica on Sunday did the same about Apple, and last month one
of its reporters appeared on MSNBC to demand that Apple censor
its podcast content as aggressively as Google’s YouTube now censors its video
content.
Thus do we have the
unimaginably warped dynamic in which U.S. journalists are not the defenders of
free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them. They do it in
part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They
do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is
so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous
“disinformation.” And they do it from petty vindictiveness: they clearly get
aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations
and lives, no matter how powerless. Whatever the motive, corporate media
employees whose company title is “journalist” are the primary activists against
a free and open internet and the core values of free thought.
The profound
pathologies driving all of this
were on full display on Saturday night as the result of a reckless and
self-humiliating smear campaign by one of The New York Times’ star
tech reporters, Taylor Lorenz. She falsely and very publicly accused Silicon
Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen of having used the “slur” word
“retarded” during a discussion about the Reddit/GameStop uprising.
Lorenz lied. Andreessen
never used that word. And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified
her mistake by claiming it was a “male voice” that sounded like his, then
locked her Twitter account as though she — rather than the person she
falsely maligned — was the victim.
But the details of what
happened are revealing. The discussion which Lorenz falsely described took
place on a relatively new audio app called “Clubhouse,” an invitation-only
platform intended to allow for private, free-ranging group conversations. It
has become popular among Silicon Valley executives and various media
personalities (I was invited onto the app a few months ago but never attended
or participated in any discussions). But as CNBC noted this week, “as the app has grown, people
of more diverse backgrounds have begun to join,” and it “has carved out a niche
among Black users, who have innovated new ways for using it.” Its free-speech
ethos has also made it increasingly popular in China as a means of
avoiding repressive online constraints.
These private chats have
often been infiltrated by journalists, sometimes by invitation and other times
by deceit. These journalists attempt to monitor the discussions and then
publish summaries. Often, the “reporting” consists of out-of-context statements
designed to make the participants look bigoted, insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior. In other
words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new
frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.
Fulfilling her ignoble
duties there, Lorenz announced on Twitter that Andreessen had said a bad word.
During the discussion of the “Reddit Revolution,” she claimed, he used the word
“retarded.” She then upped her tattling game by not only including this
allegation but also the names and photos of those who were in the room at the
time — thus exposing those who were guilty of the crime of failing to object to
Andreessen’s Bad Word:
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Numerous Clubhouse
participants, including Kmele Foster, immediately documented that Lorenz had lied. The moderator
of the discussion, Nait Jones, said that “Marc never used that word.” What
actually happened was that Felicia Horowitz, a different participant in the
discussion, had “explained that the Redditors call themselves ‘retard
revolution’” and that was the only mention of that word.
Rather than apologizing and retracting, Lorenz thanked
Jones for “clarifying,” and then emphasized how hurtful it is to use that word.
She deleted the original tweet without comment, and then — with the smear fully
realized — locked her account.
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Besides the fact
that a New York Times reporter recklessly tried to destroy someone’s
reputation, what is wrong with this episode? Everything.
The participants in
Clubhouse have tried to block these tattletale reporters from eavesdropping on
their private conversations precisely because they see themselves as Stasi
agents whose function is to report people for expressing prohibited ideas even
in private conservations. As Jones pointedly noted, “this is why people block”
journalists: “because of this horseshit dishonesty.”
One reporter, Jessica
Lessin, recently complained she was blocked by Andreessen from
his Clubhouse discussions — as if she has the divine right to monitor people’s
communications. And Lorenz herself has been obsessed with monitoring Clubhouse discussions
in general and Andressen in particular for months, mocking him just last week
when she obtained a fake credential to enter:
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Just take a second
to ponder how infantile and despotic, in equal parts, all of this is. This NYT
reporter used her platform to virtually jump out of her desk to run to the
teacher and exclaim: he used the r word! This is what she tried for months
to accomplish: to catch people in private communications using words that are
prohibited or ideas that are banned to tell on them to the public. That she got
it all wrong is arguably the least humiliating and pathetic aspect of all of
this.
Beyond all this, what if he
had used the word “retarded”? What would it mean? If someone uses that
term maliciously, as a slur against others to mock their intellect, it is
certainly reasonable to condemn that. Used with that intent and in that
context, it is unnecessarily hurtful for people who suffer diseases of
cognitive impairment.
But that is not remotely
what happened here. Anyone who spent any time at all on the sub-Reddit thread
of r/WallStreetBets knows that “retards” was the single most common term used by
those who short-squeezed the hedge funds invested in the collapse of GameStop.
It is virtually impossible to discuss the ethos of that subculture without
using that term. This was one of their most popular
battlecries:
“We can stay retarded
longer than you can stay solvent.”
And the use of that term in
the sub-Reddit was not just ubiquitous but fascinating: layered with multiple
levels of irony and self-deprecation. Sociologists could, and should, study how
that term was deployed by those Redditors and what role it played in forming
the community that enabled them to strike a blow against these hedge funds. It
reflected their self-perceived place at the bottom of social hierarchies,
expressed the irony that they as unsophisticated investors were defeating
self-perceived financial wizards, and marked their culture and community as
transgressive. Did some use it with malice? Maybe. But there was vast
complexity to it.
To declare any discussion
of that term off-limits — as Lorenz tried to do — is deeply anti-intellectual.
To pretend that there is no difference in the use of that term by the Redditors
and its discussion in Clubhouse on the one hand, and its malicious deployment
as an insult to the cognitively disabled on the other, is dishonest in the
extreme. To publicly tattle on adults who utter the term without any minimal
attempt to understand or convey context and intent is malicious, disgusting and
sociopathic.
But this is now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism. They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them.
The same stunted mentality
just resulted in the destruction of the career and reputation of Lorenz’s far
more accomplished colleague, science reporter Donald McNeil. On a 2019 field
trip for rich high school kids to Peru, he used the
“n-word” after a student asked him whether he thought it was fair that one of
her classmates was punished for having used it in a video. McNeil used it not
with malice or as a racist insult but to inquire about the facts of the video
so he could answer the student’s question.
After New York Times
senior editors — including African-American editor-in-chief Dean Baquet —
investigated and concluded that “only” a reprimand was appropriate — “it did
not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious,” said Baquet —
dozens of McNeil’s colleagues wrote a furious letter demanding far more severe
punishment. “Our community is outraged and in pain,” said the 150 Times
employee-signatories, adding: “intent is irrelevant.” Intent is irrelevant
when judging how harshly to punish this storied journalist for uttering this
word.
They got what they wanted.
McNeil wrote a grovelling, abject apology, and then the Times
announced he was gone from his job after forty-five years with the
paper, including for COVID reporting over the last year that the paper had
submitted for a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Just think about that: New
York Times employees, who are unionized, demanded that management punish a
fellow union member more harshly than management wanted to. In 2002,
McNeil won the 1st place prize from the National
Association of Black Journalists for excellence in his reporting on how the
AIDS crisis was affecting Africa. Now his forty-five-year career and reputation
are destroyed — at the hands of his own colleagues — because “intent is
irrelevant” when using off-limit words.
The overarching rule of
liberal media circles and liberal politics is that you are free to accuse
anyone who deviates from liberal orthodoxy of any kind of bigotry that casually
crosses your mind — just smear them as a racist, misogynist, homophobe,
transphobe, etc. without the slightest need for evidence — and it will be
regarded as completely acceptable. That is the rubric under which the most
famous lawyer of the ACLU, an organization once devoted to rigid precepts of
due process, decided on Saturday to brand two of his ideological opponents as
“closely aligned with white supremacists.” Fresh off being named by Time Magazine as one
of the planet’s 100 most influential human beings — this is someone with a
great deal of power and influence — trans activist and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio
decided to spew this extremely grave accusation about
J.K. Rowling and Abigail Shrier, both of whom oppose the inclusion of trans
girls in female sports:
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As I’ve written before, I’m not in agreement with
those who advocate this absolute ban. I’m open to a scientific consensus that
develops hormonal and other medicinal protocols for how trans girls and women
can fairly compete with CIS women in sporting competitions. But that does not
entitle you — especially as an ACLU lawyer — to just go around casually
branding people as “closely aligned to white supremacists” who have never
remotely demonstrated any such affinity, just because you feel like it, because
you crave the power to destroy your adversaries, or are too slothful to engage
their actual views.
But this is absolutely
acceptable behavior in mainstream and liberal circles. I just spent the week
being widely branded by these kinds of people as a “misogynist” — someone who hates
women — because I criticized and mocked Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez for
her scornful rejection of the offer from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to work with her
to investigate Robinhood’s conduct in the GameStop affair. I particularly
critiqued her ludicrous accusation to Cruz that “you almost
had me murdered” — a claim that even CNN’s “fact-checker” Daniel Dale, who
would rather poke out his own eyes than conclude that a popular Democrat has
lied — said was without evidence because “Cruz did
not advocate violence against Ocasio-Cortez, much less call for her murder.”
AOC is a popular and
powerful politician, and journalists are allowed to criticize and mock such
people. It’s our job. Yet for doing mine, I was casually and widely cast as a
sexist hater of women (ironically, an old homophobic trope long deployed
against gay men) by the likes of Ashley Reese (“just baldly
misogynistic”) of Jezebel (which really ought to just change its name
to You’re a Misogynist, since it has no other content) and long-time
Media Matters and David Brock smear artist Eric Boelhert (“Greenwald’s hatred of women
knows no bounds”).
That I was one of AOC’s
first and most active supporters back in 2018 when she
ran against incumbent Joe Crowley — when people like Reese and Boelhert had not
even heard of her — and that I have defended her more times than I can count,
while also criticizing her on occasion, obviously goes unmentioned and does not
matter (for those asking why I supported her, I interviewed AOC during her primary run and she
gave impressive answers now unrecognizable from her politics). My support of
AOC in 2018 was simultaneous with my misogynistic support for Cynthia Nixon for New York
Governor and Zephyr Teachout for Attorney General. Was my misogyny hidden then,
or did it just recently develop? There’s no reason to interrogate any of this.
It does not deserve that. There’s zero rationality let alone evidence to this
tactic. It’s just driven by spite and stupidity and vindictiveness.
I can ignore these kinds of
accusatory smears, or scorn and ridicule them and their practitioners — and I
do — because they have no power over me. But consider how many people in
journalism or other professions whose positions are less secure are rightly
terrorized by these lowlife tactics, intimidated into silence and conformity.
They know if they express views these Stasi agents and their bosses dislike,
their reputations can be instantly destroyed. So they remain silent or pliant
out of necessity.
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