From Substack
This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent
On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public's increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.
That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with "harassment," "abuse" and "violence" so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them "in danger." Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people's reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.
Any independent platform or venue that empowers other journalists or just ordinary citizens to do reporting or provide commentary outside of their repressive constraints is viewed by them as threats to be censored and destroyed. Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan's Spotify program has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.
Back in November, the media critic Stephen Miller warned: "It's only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack." And ever since, in every interview I have given about the success of Substack and every time I have written about journalist-led censorship campaigns, I have echoed that warning that they would soon turn their united guns on this platform. Miller's prediction was prompted by a Columbia Journalism Review article entitled "The Substackerati" which claimed that Substack was structurally unfair because "most" of "the most successful people on Substack" are "white and male; several are conservative" and "have already been well-served by existing media power structures."
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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)