Over the weekend, ostensible “news” outlets like NBC and The Washington Post ran with a too-good-to-check story that the FBI had warned OAN and Rudy Giuliani that they were “the [targets] of a Russia influence operation.”
Whoopsie. Their bad! Mistakes happen, right?
Glenn Greenwald can’t help but notice that these kinds of mistakes seem to happen a lot. And they always seem to go in one direction.
Corporate News Outlets Again "Confirm" the Same False Story, While Many Refuse to Correct it: my autopsy of the latest corporate media humiliation: https://t.co/zpKxvbvBc4
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2021
Journalists with major outlets know they spread a false, now-retracted story about the FBI and Giuliani, but many refuse to remove it, because their real job is disinformation.
The question they won't address: how do they keep "independently confirming" the same falsehoods?
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2021
This is an obvious scam — they have not “independently confirmed” anything but rather merely acted as servants to the same lying security state agents who planted the original false story — but they do it over and over.
Remember this humiliation? That's how it was done: pic.twitter.com/QizhuW0KYl
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2021
As an experiment to see how willing these corporate journalists are to lie, I spent the day notifying more than a dozen that their false tweet about the FBI/Giuliani remained up & uncorrected. Only one — NBC's @GeoffRBennett — responded; by blocking me *and leaving it up.* pic.twitter.com/q7EjrfwgFR
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2021
I compiled the examples here of who continues to spread this fake story, refusing to remove or correct it.
Remember: these are the outlets that claim to be so upset by Fake News they want to censor the internet over it. Nobody spreads it more than they:https://t.co/zpKxvbvBc4
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2021
Greenwald concludes:
Every journalist, even the most honest and careful, will get things wrong sometimes, and trustworthy journalists issue prompt corrections when they do. That behavior should be trust-building. But when media outlets continue to use the same reckless and deceitful tactics — such as claiming to have “independently confirmed” one another’s false stories when they have merely served as stenographers for the same anonymous security state agents while “confirming” nothing — that strongly suggests a complete indifference to the truth and, even more so, a willingness to serve as disinformation agents for various official factions. And when a journalist spreads a false story and knows they have done so, but still refuses to correct it or remove it — as is the case for many of the above examples — then they are just tawdry liars who should be driven out of journalism. But they are not driven out and will not be because the reality is that their job is to spread disinformation as long as it is in servitude to the right factions (the CIA, FBI and DNC) and against those who are ideologically disfavored.
Again we see the core truth of U.S. corporate journalism. The outlets that most vocally claim to condemn disinformation and fake news — to the point of agitating in favor of corporate and online censorship of their critics and competitors in the name of combating it — are the most prolific, aggressive and destructive disseminators of disinformation. Their refusal to remove the fake news here even after I explicitly notified them of it just makes this latest example a particularly vivid one.
There’s no shortage of bones to pick with Glenn Greenwald when it comes to politics. But when it comes to media malpractice? He’s consistently on target. And he’s always got receipts (see for yourselves).
I don’t like Trump, I don’t like Giuliani, but the willingness of corporate media to _lie_ en masse, might be more destructive than anything those clowns have done https://t.co/R29DHjXsiB
— Thomas Attila Lewis (@tomdog) May 3, 2021
***
Related:
Join the conversation as a VIP Member