Greenwald: Media spent years drowning US in conspiracy theories
The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the media reaction to the Mueller report on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald, a co-founder of The Intercept, eviscerated the mainstream media for elevating former FBI and CIA figures such as CNN’s Josh Campbell and MSNBC’s John Brennan to “noble truth-tellers” of U.S. democracy to spread “false propaganda,” as he put it.
Greenwald’s piece, “The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media,” said the FBI’s heavy reliance on the dossier from British ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was “particularly concerning,” and the media essentially fed the fire. Greenwald cited revelations from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, who last week released a report on the FBI's launch of the Russia investigation.
“If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both,” Greenwald wrote.
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“The revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false,” Greenwald added.
Greenwald noted that many commentators and journalists have been “sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend” or news organizations recklessly relying on the claims of security agents.
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“Far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news,” Greenwald wrote. “It’s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.”
Greenwald mocked some journalists for having “lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors about the Grave Russian Threat” while relying mostly on “anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives.”
Greenwald said the “few exceptions” to the anonymity came when pundits such as Campbell and Brennan appeared on TV to “spread their false propaganda,” which had significant consequences.
“U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA [National Security Agency], the Pentagon, the FBI. And their lying has been highly effective,” Greenwald wrote. “The narrative manufactured by the security state agencies and laundered by their reliable media servants about these critical matters was a sham, a fraud, a lie.”
Greenwald wrote that he felt liberals were “eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying” and therefore “came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.”
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He also said “none of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and vindicates the political beliefs” of their cable-news audiences.
“Until that stops, credibility and faith in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved,” Greenwald wrote.
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