On Being Greenwalded

Glenn Greenwald's beef with The Intercept, it seems to me, has just as much to do with the violation of his contract as it does with his editor censoring or attempting to censor a piece he wrote about the Hunter Biden scandal, a/k/a "Laptopgate."

As a co-founder of the news organization that paid his salary, Greenwald had written a clause into his contract which granted him total editorial independence and immunity from the dreaded blue pencil of any editor. It's the rare journalist indeed who can draw a handsome salary with one hand and not only write freely with the other, but never even have to bodily show up in the newsroom.

The feeble legal defense being proffered by The Intercept editor is that this immunity only applied to his opinion pieces and not to his news pieces. Given that Greenwald has always written with a civil libertarian slant, the line between news and opinion as it pertained to his work has always been on the fuzzy side. His muckraking articles, at least the ones that I've read in the last decade or so, have always had his unabashed, often sarcastic, and righteously indignant persona running right through each and every one of them.

Although I'd immediately plopped The Intercept right on my eclectic "Blog Roll" almost the minute it went live, I recently found myself reading it less and less, as his work began appearing less and less, and as the rest of the site began going more and more mainstream. When his articles did appear, they were relegated to small-font headlines at the bottom of the page. So rather than checking in every day, I started checking in once or twice a week, at most.

Just because Greenwald is now gone from the site, however, doesn't mean I'm going to ban The Intercept from my own blog list. There's already enough cancel culture out there. I still enjoy reading some of their writers, including Ryan Grim and Lee Fang, while giving others a pass. James Risen, whom I used to so admire for his fight against the New York Times for its own censorship of his investigative series on the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration (until Bush was safely re-elected and after Risen had threatened to go public and independent with a book), has now devolved into a Russiagate mouthpiece for the CIA. I would assume that the undoubtedly generous pay package that Risen is getting from billionaire Pierre Omidyar has a lot to do with his pivot to cooperation.

Of course, since Greenwald himself is reportedly a millionaire thanks to his reporting on the Edward Snowden leak, with the Pulitzer and the Oscar that went along with it, he certainly is in no danger of starving. To his credit, he is continuing the good fight along with a precious few other independent journalists who are still publishing and broadcasting on a national and even international level from widely visible platforms.

As a journalist myself, the closest I've ever come to national "recognition" was my decade or so writing reader comments on the New York Times. before new "community" management and a sharp rise in subscriptions after Trump was elected resulted in most of my commentary being suppressed. I finally decided to quit the endeavor when moderators approved one too many comments hysterically accusing me of being a Trump supporter, a single-handed Hillary-defeater, a Russian asset, or all three. 

 McCarthyism has developed an undeniable liberal bias, and it's become all too damaging to way too many people. 

All the journalists who are now so gleefully and maliciously piling on Glenn Greenwald are probably afraid for their own jobs. With just days to go before the presidential election, none of them wants to be viewed or remembered as the writer who gave us four more years of Trump because they either defended Greenwald, or they dared even ask a question about the Biden scandal. To delve into this story, if it doesn't kill their careers outright, will damage their access to the expected Biden administration.

During my own very first reporting job in the late 70s, at an extremely conservative local newspaper (the long-defunct Newburgh, NY Evening News) a Republican named Joan Shapiro was running for mayor in that majority Black city on the racist "law and order" platform that was so popular at the time. One Saturday morning, as I was perusing the previous night's police blotter at the cop shop, I came across the arrest sheet of Shapiro's own teenage son, who'd been busted with a bunch of his buddies in a vandalism spree. I duly wrote up the incident in my usual low-key crime report roundup, and it passed inspection by the weekend editor, who got a pretty good chuckle over the irony of it all.

And then, come Monday morning, all hell broke loose. Since the newspaper had endorsed Shapiro, and its top brass very much shared her paranoid concerns about Black crime, I was in big, big trouble. My male boss informed me that I had done a very mean bitchy thing, reducing a female candidate to tears and deliberately trying to ruin her political career.

Long story short: Joan Shapiro went on to win that election in a landslide as well as a second term. Me? From that day on, until I finally resigned (when the paper was sold and upon being offered the coveted 6 p.m. - 2 a.m. graveyard shift), I  was silently frozen out of big assignments. My offense was that I had violated the unwritten rule which applies to journalists everywhere: Be a crusading muckraker, sure, and win awards for investigative series, and expose the bad guys - but only as long as the bad guys aren't big advertisers. and only as long as the bad guys don't belong to the favored political party, or only as long as they don't belong to the same country club as the boss.

So, yeah, I definitely empathize with Glenn Greenwald. I can also empathize, to a certain very minimal extent, with the fellow journalists who are piling on - or just as bad, staying completely and complicitly silent. The story of "you have to go along to get along" is as old as human civilization itself, and it applies to every profession.

One good thing about writing this blog for the past 10 years is that I can write whatever I want, with total editorial independence. Nobody is going to fire me, although the censorious Google algorithm has certainly buried me, right along with most other independent bloggers and Youtubers from both the right and the left.

Censorship is real. Big Brother is real. So kudos to Glenn Greenwald for sticking to his principles and - to the probable chagrin of his former employer - bringing all that much more attention to political hypocrisy and corruption. I hopes he sues for breach of contract.

In closing, though I have already written to most of you individually with only a few more thank-you notes left to compose, let me express my profound gratitude for the fantastic reader response to my recent fund-raiser.

Above all, please keep the great comments and suggestions coming!

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When Journalism Becomes Corrupt Boosterism

Forget about Joe Biden's promise to restore The Soul of America - whatever the heck that even is. How about restoring the heart, soul and purpose of journalism, a/k/a The Fourth Estate?

Granted, "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted" was always more or less the aspirational motto of American journalism.  As Edward Bernays noted nearly a century ago in his seminal Propaganda, at least one quarter of all the front page articles in the New York Times were unabashed corporate or government propaganda. Still, the line between the news pages and opinion pages was almost always taken seriously, If you wanted to sneak a point of view into a straight news story, then you had to go about it stealthily, through the discreet use of innuendo, or the occasional omission of a salient fact.

Not so in the Age of Trump, when reporters double as #Resistance Fighters in the interests of careerist justice. And with only eight weeks to go in this sad, scary and ridiculously close presidential contest between a carnival barker of a mob boss and a mediocre career politician teetering on the edge of dementia, the line between reporting and punditry has been erased right off the journalistic ethics map.

It is no longer enough to dispassionately expose Trump's serial crime spree. It is incumbent upon the increasingly consolidated corporate media to also become the unabashed boosters of the #resistant Democratic Party, which itself might be better described as a coalition of corporate and military/security state interests whose sole agenda is the return to the same neoliberal status quo which produced Trump in the first place.

Fox News, which for decades had been the de facto propaganda arm of the Republican Party, now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of criticizing its erstwhile biggest fan, Donald Trump, himself now reduced to manically re-tweeting various right-wing websites and dark web conspiracy groups.

The turn of the "liberal" media to outright party boosterism took off like a shot last week with the obviously orchestrated Atlantic scoop that Trump had been overheard, a couple of years ago, disrespecting the military by calling dead soldiers "losers" and "suckers". The only shocking thing about this belated reportage is the amount of time it took for four anonymous sources to become shocked and appalled enough to spill the beans to The Atlantic, or alternatively, for the magazine itself to become shocked and appalled enough to finally publish them. It's as though they were hoarding the Big Reveal, that Trump is a clear and present danger to national security, for the sole purpose of winning an election. 

The owner of The Atlantic just happens to be billionaire Democratic mega-donor Laurene Powell Jobs, whose Emerson Collective think tank is headed by former Obama Education Secretary and school privateer Arne Duncan. Her editor and the author of the Trump story is neoconservative pundit Jeffrey Goldberg, who proved his own boosterism bona fides years ago by cheerleading George W.Bush's invasion of Iraq. If you point out these facts, or if you notice that within hours of the article's publication, the Democratic Party was already running slick TV ads expressing shock and outrage about Trump's remarks, or that Joe Biden already had a major speech written on the subject, complete with the inevitable comparison between Trump's spurious bone spurs and the noble military service of the late Beau Biden, then you are in danger of being exposed either as a Russian operative or loony conspiracy theorist.

 You are not, however, in any danger of being exposed as a closet Republican. That is because the Democratic Party has embraced with open arms such "moderate" Republicans as unindicted former Michigan governor and Flint water-poisoner Rick Snyder while relegating Bernie Sanders supporters ("purists") to the dust with a whole chorus line of high-kicking designer jackboots.

You are hereby on strict notice. With only eight weeks to go in The Race, ask not what Joe Biden can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for the Biden-Soul of Your Country.

That's a tall order for sure, especially if you've lost your job and your health insurance and you might be kicked out of your rented digs once all those eviction moratoriums conveniently expire right after the election.

So why not forget about your own fear and trepidation as you are being pressured to declare publicly that yes, you will hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden. Wallow instead in the high-minded fear and trepidation that your financial and intellectual superiors are also wallowing in. They are, deep within their credentialed souls of America, veddy veddy afraid. They're just like you!

"Our Democracy Is Deeply Imperiled," is the top news story in Wednesday's Guardian, and it is tailor-made to get you gripping your nose in a frenzy of highly motivated fear, relying as it does on the "ominous forebodings" of five "leading figures in the non-partisan (my bold) world of democracy reform and civil rights."

Notwithstanding that with the exception of the head of the NAACP, which does not endorse candidates, The Guardian's "non-partisan" sources all have close or even direct  ties to the Democratic Party. Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, is a former Obama administration official. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice is a former Bill Clinton speechwriter. K. Sabeel Rahman, currently CEO of the Demos think tank, hails from the oligarch-funded New America Foundation, which is led by former Clinton State Department official Anne- Marie Slaughter.

And then there's Deirdre Schifeling, the founder and director of "Democracy For All 2021."

"A few years ago," credulously writes Guardian chief US correspondent Ed Pilkington, "she came to the realization that there was a growing disconnect between the will of the American people and their political representation in federal and state governments."

Would it be indelicate or even treasonous of me to surmise that Schifeling arrived at her Eureka moment as miraculously late as The Atlantic came to its own shocked realization that Trump doesn't care about dead soldiers - because her paycheck depends upon her not realizing that this reality existed even when Joe Biden was vice president?

Democracy For All is a project of the dark money SuperPAC called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which also paid the PR firm of Anita Dunn, Biden's deputy campaign director, the whopping sum of $3,2 million for its own "consulting work" in 2018.

This is chump change next to the $140 million furnished by Sixteen Thirty's anonymous donors to other "left-leaning" organizations and political campaigns in that mid-term election year, which ushered in a hyped-up "Blue Wave" of centrist Dems, many of whom hail from the military and the CIA.

As Politico reported about Sixteen Thirty last November:

The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one gift totaling $51.7 million. That single donation was more than the group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald Trump was elected. Most of the group's funders are likely to remain a mystery because federal law does not require "social welfare"-focused nonprofits to reveal their donors.
The group's 2018 fundraising surpassed any amount ever raised by a left-leaning political nonprofit, according to experts, who pointed to the Koch network and the Crossroads network as rare right-leaning groups that posted bigger yearly fundraising totals at the height of their powers.

This is the kind of operation that The Guardian's Ed Pilkington actually casts as being in "the world of democracy reform and civil rights." It kind of makes you think that their definition of democracy reform is simply getting rid of it, and that civil rights are plutocratic rights, and plutocratic rights are civil rights.

Not for nothing, moreover, are the Democrats moaning about "fake news" and Russian interference in said democracy. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported recently, Sixteen Thirty also funds numerous party-aligned news sites which dishonestly pose as local independent journalism outlets.

Democracy For All 2021, which depends entirely upon dark oligarchic money for its very existence, nonetheless brags on its website, without a hint of irony, that it wants to "ensure transparency for all political spending."

It's no surprise that Democracy For All's idea of an anti-Trump health care platform is restricted to reproductive rights. Forget about polls showing that the majority of Americans support Medicare For All. Because 70 percent of Americans also support the be-all and end-all of Roe v Wade! 

If you demand both, then you're apparently asking for way too much. You have to pragmatically pick the battles that are so carefully selected for you by the credentialed Knowledge Class.

Pilkington explains:

Yet Schifeling found herself spending more and more of her time defending Planned Parenthood against the aggressive attacks of a small minority of extremist anti-abortion politicians. Despite the settled nature of the law, and the clear progressive bent of public opinion, women were finding it increasingly difficult in practice to secure their reproductive rights.

 She reached a reluctant and unhappy conclusion: “Our government is not able to represent the will of the people.”

Since then, Schifeling and her peers have been looking at the causes of this dysfunction and searching for solutions.

Schifeling has not yet come to the reluctant realization that affording guaranteed single payer health care to all citizens in the middle of a pandemic is among the obvious solutions for this dysfunction. We wouldn't want Democracy For All (Wealthy Socially Liberal People) to explode, or for their lifestyles to fundamentally change, would we?

It's their constant searching that really counts, right along the complicity of the churnalists operating right out there in the open as oligarchy-boosters. 

They don't call it the Media-Political Complex for nothing.