Corporate Media’s Double Standard: They Attack Whomever They Want, But You Cannot Criticize Them

the Glenn Greenwald

On Monday, The Washington Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi contacted me to say that he had spoken with numerous editors and journalists at The Intercept, who voiced to him a wide range of personal and professional accusations about me. This was all in response to criticisms I had expressed about two recent Intercept stories. On Friday morning, The Post published Farhi’s article about their attacks on me.
 
Among other things, that Post article features The Intercept‘s ongoing attempt to depict me as mentally unwell in order to delegitimize my criticisms of their shabby journalism. It quotes the site’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, as saying I have “lost [my] moral compass and grip on reality,” echoing The Intercept’s prior claim that mounting anger at their organization is being fueled not by widespread revulsion over their increasingly unethical and politicized journalism but rather by my “unbalanced tweets.” The Post also quotes Reed as claiming that I have “done a good job of torching [my] journalistic reputation”: liberal journalists, who only speak to and for one another, always believe that the primary if not sole metric of journalistic credibility is how popular one is among other liberal journalists. “He’s a huge bully,” she added.
 
Depicting critics of liberal orthodoxies as mentally ill, rage-driven bullies, and shadows of their former selves, is a long-time tactic of guardians of establishment liberalism to expel dissidents from their in-group circles. A lengthy 2003 New Yorker smear job on Noam Chomsky headlined “The Devil’s Accountant” — at the time when he was a rare and vocal critic of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy — described how Chomsky was once a credible voice but, sadly, has now “become increasingly alienated from the mainstream” because he “has no ideas to offer.” Chomsky’s “thinking has grown simplistic and rigid,” the author wrote. She quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that while he once admired Chomsky’s stable ideology and noble commitment to principle, he is now going basically insane, describing his views of the war in Afghanistan as “the gleam of utter lunacy piercing through.”
 
The article also claimed that while Chomsky’s criticisms of Israel have alienated his liberal following, it has caused him to become popular in far-right anti-Semitic circles. That article also described Chomsky as an angry bully, prone to outbursts of rage against female colleagues to the point of making them cry, being humorless, and in general just plagued by mental pathologies which accounts for his unwillingness to accept liberal pieties. Sound familiar?
 

 
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 Intercept was 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.
 

This is repulsive. The Intercept was founded during the Snowden story to defend privacy rights & oppose the security state. Now, the liberal DNC hacks who "edit" it are boasting they got personal data from Gab users & are sorting through it, doing FBI's work to find "extremists." pic.twitter.com/GHpJRosvod

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 4, 2021

 
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 Intercept would 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.

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