Greenwald: Yesterday Journalists Spread a Significant Lie All over Twitter

It seems it’s a very corrupt institution and probably always has been. For a while there they made people believe them to be the “fourth estate” the defenders of the democratic faith, etc. Sadly, it seems it was all a rouse and a bullshit narrative.<p>They are not defending the constitution in any way. All they care about is whatever happens to be their particular agenda at a particular point in time which may coincide with constitutional interests.<p>I’m not referring to your local beat reporter but rather your journalists with renown who bask in the power they feel they have and aren’t shy to wield their symbolic swords.

Wow. Just wow. I remember early cyberpunks talking about how the internet would enable infinite lies to spread and for the truth to be completely buried in the noise. And here we are. Now our entire reality has been taken over by people living in a fantasy world. No end in sight. Maybe they weren&#x27;t nearly pessimistic enough.

Who is <i>Mr. Greenwald</i>[0]<p>&gt; <i>Greenwald, a former lawyer who, in 2013, was one of the reporters for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency, is a longtime critic, from the left, of centrist and liberal policymakers and pundits. During the past two years, he has further exiled himself from the mainstream American left by responding with skepticism and disdain to reports of Russian government interference in the 2016 Presidential election. On Twitter, where he has nearly a million followers, and at the Intercept, the news Web site that he co-founded five years ago, and as a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!,” the daily progressive radio and TV broadcast, Greenwald has argued that the available evidence concerning Russian activity has indicated nothing especially untoward;...</i><p>&gt; <i>... Greenwald has tried to cut back on social media. “My No. 1 therapeutic goal is to reduce my Twitter usage,” he said...</i><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;glenn-greenwald-the-bane-of-their-resistance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;03&#x2F;glenn-greenwal...</a>

Greenwald is certainly biased, on the one hand he says this:<p>&gt; Think about that: to a CNN reporter, evidence-free assertions from the U.S. security state are tantamount to “confirmation.” That they really do think this way is nothing short of chilling.<p>On the other hand, the laptop produced by Guliani (of which how he got it is weird) is taken as absolute gospel by Greenwald.<p>I mean, question both sides at least??

Excerpt from the tweet quoted in the article from Asha Rangappa who is retweeting Patrick Tucker:<p>&gt;&quot;Derkach, Kilimnick, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to <i>launder their narratives</i> to US officials and audiences...&quot;<p>Now, I don&#x27;t know if any of this is true or not...<p>In fact, I don&#x27;t know any of these people...<p>But that&#x27;s not the point!<p>You see, as an amateur linguist (I know, &quot;keep the day job!&quot; &lt;g&gt;), I am always on the look out for new buzzwords, new catch phrases, new lingo...<p>Before this article (or more specifically, the quoted retweet), I had never seen the words &quot;launder&quot; and &quot;narrative&quot; used adjacently (or very close to adjacently), that is, &quot;launder their narratives&quot;.<p>Phrasing those two concepts in language more succinctly, one gets:<p><i>&quot;Narrative Laundering&quot;</i><p>Which is my (linguistic!) takeaway from this article...<p>So, that term -- is going into my 2021 lexicon!<p><i>&quot;Narrative Laundering&quot;</i><p>(It sort of fits alongside such other words&#x2F;terminology as &quot;Fake News&quot;, &quot;Making Mountains Out Of A Molehills&quot;, &quot;Memory Hole&quot;, &quot;De Minimis&quot;, &quot;Much Ado About Nothing&quot;, &quot;Revisionism&quot;, &quot;Damnatio Memoriae&quot;, &quot;Conflation&quot;, etc.)

I don’t see a way out of this, I suppose we should all just get used to living in reality tunnels and learn to get along with people with opposite beliefs.

See related discussion:<p>&quot;Media trust hits new low&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26508039" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26508039</a><p>(I don&#x27;t think that article itself is very good, but the HN discussion is interesting.)

If we are critical of Trump&#x27;s lies, and expect media to fact-check Trump&#x27;s statements, I suppose that we should likewise morally expect media to fact check CIA statements (with a track record of false statements), as opposed to the behavior that Greenwald is criticizing here, i.e. spreading and exaggerating their statements.

people were happy to buy the medias distortions when it came to trump, so it&#x27;s its only natural the media became accustomed to distort what they want. one cannot understand the news anymore without reading every sentence skeptically, as everything is obfuscated to fit the narrative.

question is why now? what is their motive?

The premise is it was Hunter Biden’s laptop. There is no evidence of this.<p>It’s completely impossible there could be a disinformation campaign on such a pedestrian political campaign. &#x2F;s

Glenn Greenwald is correct, the initial tweet by Patrick Tucker was false as the ODNI report does not explicitly mention Hunter Biden&#x27;s laptop. However, Glenn Greenwald also massively mischaracterizes how the &quot;liberal corporate media bubble&quot; handled the situation.<p>&gt; As this false claim went massively viral, conservative journalists — and only they — began vocally objecting that the report made no mention whatsoever of the Hunter Biden laptop, let alone supplied proof for this claim.<p>Greenwald basically invalidates his own argument a few sentences later where he describes how there actually were other journalists such as Chris Hayes who objected to the description of the report. And, again stated by Greenwald, Patrick Tucker himself came around, deleted his initial tweet and posted a clarification.<p>And just as an aside, the &quot;conservative journalists&quot; cited by Greenwald work for the Daily Caller, described by Wikipedia [1] as:<p>&gt; The Daily Caller has published false stories on multiple occasions. The website publishes articles that dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Until 2018, the website had also published articles by white supremacists such as Jason Kessler and Peter Brimelow.<p>I also find it laughable that he characterizes some journalists as minions of the &quot;liberal corporate media&quot; but The Daily caller, founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, is somehow home to harmless independent &quot;conservative journalists&quot;. That Glenn Greenwald tries to sell me journalists of a white supremacist outlet as trustworthy and truthful is not really a good sign in my book.<p>So while I agree that the initial tweet by Patrick Tucker lead to a falsehood being spread on social media I just can&#x27;t follow Glenn Greenwald&#x27;s take of seeing this as a coordinated misinformation operation.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Daily_Caller" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Daily_Caller</a>

Framing is a <i>really</i> important part of mitigating the damage of this story.<p>For example, make the story about <i>where the laptop came from</i>, and avoid as much as possible the fact POTUS son has incriminating photos and videos (and more?) of himself in the hands of our foreign adversaries.

&gt; It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.<p>I wonder if that might also be due to the previous president repeatedly referring to them as &quot;the enemy of the people&quot;.

This takes a very Boolean attitude to truth.<p>Like if I said &quot;the current president of the United States &#x27;s family name is Bidden&quot; then that&#x27;s as false as &quot;Santa Clause&#x27;s middle name Elvis, is in tribute to his mother&#x27;s favourite singer&quot;.<p>But you could argue that there&#x27;s measures by which one is more true than the other.<p>In this case, these &quot;lies&quot; all seem to be vaguely within shouting distance of the truth, and his repetition of the accusation seems a bit lawyerly in its specificity. In fact, a fuzzy definition of &quot;lie&quot; could well suggest that his statements are further from the truth than the ones he&#x27;s criticizing.