NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

&gt;the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram chat room. That seems problematic.”<p>I&#x27;m already hearing this in local debates. It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.<p>(PS: Open groups and channels are not encrypted on Telegram servers and can be reported. It is just that Telegram doesn&#x27;t have a history of letting other abuse it.)<p>Edit: I&#x27;ve been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now.<p>Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done.<p>Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing.

Some thoughts on the bigger picture-<p>1: Really? Do you have to write &quot;r-word&quot; instead of &quot;retard&quot; when you&#x27;re writing about someone saying something? What if Marc literally said &quot;r-word&quot; and I&#x27;m vastly underestimating how woke this reporter is? Wait, I have a solution. Use the actual word that a person said when quoting them. Just write the exact sentence where you think Marc said the word retard. Nobody should prosecute you for quoting someone without endorsing their opinion. Obfuscating your reporting to avoid a word is bad writing style.<p>1.5: Otherwise, the above seems to limit us to 26 taboo slurs in the English language. A-word, b-word, c-word, ... There are other rude words, but there can only be a single r-word so bad that I mustn&#x27;t spell it. To prevent confusion, I have to completely spell&#x2F;say the rest of the r-words. What I&#x27;m getting at is whole thing of not saying a word is silly. Everyone knows that the c-word means cunt (at least in the USA). If this wasn&#x27;t common knowledge then you couldn&#x27;t say c-word and have everyone know what you meant. (Who decided that cunt was a worse word than chink anyway? That&#x27;s marginalizing Chinese people and totally not-woke. &#x2F;s)<p>2. There are people that exaggerate and sensationalize something to get more views. Some people are even fine trying to ruin someone&#x27;s reputation. But we are getting wise to these sorts of things. If it&#x27;s an isolated event these things kind of go away. Even if Marc is on record once saying &quot;retard&quot; he&#x27;s probably not a bad guy. Just from growing up in the 90&#x27;s I&#x27;ve easily said it a thousand times. If I start to hear several other instances accusing Marc of using a slur and saying it in a hurtful manner then I&#x27;ll revisit the issue.

He&#x27;s right. When I started writing in the 90&#x27;s, there was an idea of journalism as telling stories in the principled defence of minority interests and as a public check on institutional power, but it has mutated into the unhinged and corrupt prosecution of deviance from official narrative lines. Social media is just a way for neighbours to denounce one another in a new snitch culture that rivals any 20th century system. I&#x27;m usually a couple of years ahead of the curve on trends, and I even dropped Slack last year because it&#x27;s not a place for real discourse.

It must surely be some Internet Law that people who spend most of their time in bubbles where they converse with the worst of their opponents make the worst arguments to people outside the bubble.<p>So, if you take an otherwise decent smart person and place her in a spot where all her enemies are vitriolic morons, she will start to apply vitriolic rhetoric. Bring this person out of that universe and into the normal world and she will continue to act as if she is speaking to that subset. However, the normal world now sees only her polemic, not what she is reacting to.<p>You can use this technique very effectively to turn normal people into weird people. Surround them temporarily with enemies who are violent-sounding morons and then return them to the general world. It&#x27;s the equivalent of everyone in a parking lot parking over the lines and then forcing the last guy into a space where he has to park over the lines. Then you leave, and everyone else coming in thinks this one guy is the asshole.<p>Of course, reading the article he is actually absolutely correct about these Hall Monitor scarlet letter &quot;label the witch&quot; people.

Greenwalds tactics aside, do we really consider someone saying the word &quot;retard&quot; in a private discussion newsworthy? More importantly it wasnt even reported correctly and appears to be the result of Taylor Lorenz having an axe to grind with Marc Andreessen.

&gt; &quot;But this is now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism. They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them.&quot;<p>This should be the real concern: that journalism may be dedicated (and some would say, specifically incentivized) to performing non-valuable work, at the expense of valuable work the public needs journalists to perform. In this media landscape, everyone loses except for the people with actual power, who gain more.<p>Where does this lead? And how much of this nonsense is driven or encouraged by the very establishment that journalists are supposed to be keeping in check?

After a few pages the article gets past Greenwalds hatred for the NYT and eventually makes an interesting point (which I&#x27;ll quote without further comment):<p>&quot;Beyond all this, what if he had used the word “retarded”? What would it mean? If someone uses that term maliciously, as a slur against others to mock their intellect, it is certainly reasonable to condemn that. Used with that intent and in that context, it is unnecessarily hurtful for people who suffer diseases of cognitive impairment.<p>But that is not remotely what happened here. Anyone who spent any time at all on the sub-Reddit thread of r&#x2F;WallStreetBets knows that “retards” was the single most common term used by those who short-squeezed the hedge funds invested in the collapse of GameStop. It is virtually impossible to discuss the ethos of that subculture without using that term. This was one of their most popular battlecries:<p>“We can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent.”<p>And the use of that term in the sub-Reddit was not just ubiquitous but fascinating: layered with multiple levels of irony and self-deprecation. Sociologists could, and should, study how that term was deployed by those Redditors and what role it played in forming the community that enabled them to strike a blow against these hedge funds. It reflected their self-perceived place at the bottom of social hierarchies, expressed the irony that they as unsophisticated investors were defeating self-perceived financial wizards, and marked their culture and community as transgressive. Did some use it with malice? Maybe. But there was vast complexity to it.&quot;

1. Greenwald weakens his point by conflating different types of reporting as one type of &quot;hall monitoring&quot;. First he focuses on journalists who write about disinformation. For example, he links to a piece discussing how InfoWars and similar outlets game the social media algorithms to get views and how they aren&#x27;t stopped at all.<p>But to compare that type of journalism, against disinformation sources who have repeatedly and purposefully put out fake news that has lead to considerable harm and even death because of the number of people that believe the falsehoods, with telling on Marc Andreessen, is a strange argument.<p>The second part of his argument is quite strong! There is a weird obsession with finding and calling out people whose opinions and words are out of line with accepted mainstream beliefs. But I don&#x27;t understand why the first part was included in this piece. It makes the whole thing come across as petty, despite the valid arguments.<p>2. He condescendingly uses &quot;millennial&quot; as a pejorative, which is unnecessary and exhausting. It&#x27;s also bad writing.<p>3. This line, &quot;Jezebel (which really ought to just change its name to You’re a Misogynist, since it has no other content)&quot;, is objectively hilarious, regardless of its accuracy.

I&#x27;m gonna be honest, I don&#x27;t like &quot;tattletale media&quot; either, and I wanted to read this article, but, wow. Other comments are calling it &quot;subtle&quot;, I&#x27;m finding it pretty hard to read:<p>&gt; primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power<p>Primary objective is clicks&#x2F;outrage, &quot;WHO said WHAT?&quot; is a big driver of outrage&#x2F;&quot;angry media&quot;<p>&gt; The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who refer to their twerpy work...<p>Wow... A lot of vitriol here. No attempts at nuance or any understanding of why lies and misinformation can be dangerous, or how to respond to misinformation with discussion and correction rather than censorship. Just anger.

This guilt by association is really scary (and a trial by mob). And it doesn&#x27;t seem to even matter if the accusor is telling the truth - as long as they have enough Twitter followers, they can wreck someone&#x27;s life.<p>How do we get out of this though? It seems a big return to anonymity will happen, along with decentralization.

Almost as an aside, he mentions the need for &quot;content&quot;. The 24 hours news cycle and proliferation of Internet based news sources has created an insatiable need for content. These media personalities are so desperate for something to &quot;report&quot; that they will literally do anything to create it. The derogatory use of terms meant to slur a person with limited mental capacity is obviously poor taste and maybe offensive, but is it news? Is that what a &quot;reporter&quot; with a national audience should be focusing on? The news business is in desperate need of constriction.

From the outside, if a society fires their best reporters because they use a &quot;forbidden word&quot; it is already over the edge. Everything else that will probably follow (reeducation camps, etc.) is barely driven by momentum. In the end, there will be a revolution. Given the fervor of the zealots, it will probably be a violent one.

&gt; Like some creepy informant for a state security apparatus<p>I really admire his restraint with what he’s trying to convey here despite how many people will miss reading between the lines.

Reporters like Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins were writing about the threats extremists were making before Jan 6th. That&#x27;s not &quot;junior high hall-monitor tattling&quot;; that&#x27;s reportage that I wish more people would have taken seriously.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;internet&#x2F;violent-threats-ripple-through-far-right-internet-forums-ahead-protest-n1252923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;internet&#x2F;violent-threats-ripple...</a>

If NYT or any big dinosaur media company has any shred of integrity left they&#x27;ll fire and blacklist every single so called journalist engaging in this sort of behavior. They represent your brand, their behavior <i>is</i> your behavior. It reflects on every other employee you have, including any presumably honest ones. If you&#x27;re an honest journalist and you work for one of these companies, know that their behavior makes me and millions of others distrust you, they&#x27;re making the most important company on your resume into a hindrance, you need to demand that these people be fired, if not for any reason than to save your own reputation.

It&#x27;s interesting how polemic Greenwald has become, bringing with it the same magnitude of reality denial as the actors he is going after.<p>A title like &quot;The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows&quot; coming from an investigative journalist like himself really sounds like a sore loser&#x27;s version of &quot;investigative journalism needs to die if it doesn&#x27;t share my narrative and political opinion.&quot;<p>I used to be a free speech absolutist myself back in Snowden times, but having seeing the flip side of anonymous, unverified, amplified and maliciously orchestrated communication of lies by unknown actors myself over the past few years, his ad-hominem attacks and inexact comparisons surely lack the subtleness this topic demands.

So, an NYT reporter snooping on a Clubhouse conversation got her facts wrong (although she later corrected them), and the entire thing seemed relatively trivial to start with. And... this is exhibit A for the prosecution about how no one is doing <i>real</i> journalism anymore, they&#x27;re just playing hall monitor. Or turning into the modern Stasi. Sure, those two things don&#x27;t seem very similar, but we always forget how the SS started out as elementary school crossing guards, don&#x27;t we.<p>Okay, Glenn, we get it. You don&#x27;t like -- say it with me in your spookiest voice, everyone! -- CAAAAAAAANCELLLL CUUUUUUUUUUULTURRRRRE. I mean, sure, it was fine when they were cancelling Bari Weiss, because he was on board with that, but then they came for him! (And by &quot;they,&quot; I mean fact-checkers, or as I believe Greenwald refers to them, Paramilitary Death Squads.)<p>I&#x27;m just saying, maybe we should stop treating &quot;but he&#x27;s the guy that Edward Snowden worked with!&quot; as some kind of Get Out of Making Sensible Arguments Free card.

Interestingly, China blocked access to Clubhouse today [0]. Even though our censors are annoying, at least they&#x27;re less effective.<p>Actually, they appear less effective, but could it be that they&#x27;re better because they&#x27;re more subtle? Are we absolutely sure that the media elite doesn&#x27;t ever conspire with those in the government towards particular goals?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulmozur&#x2F;status&#x2F;1358745066915860481" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulmozur&#x2F;status&#x2F;1358745066915860481</a>

One of the best Swedish journalists I know is not on Twitter. I found it annoying at first as I wanted to follow him, interact with him and so on. But I now think it adds a lot to his credibility. It seems however quite rare. Every journalist seems to build a personal brand and gather a following that follows them to wherever they write.<p>In the same vein, I really appreciate The Economist for it&#x27;s unsigned articles. Basically, I trust journalism more when the journalist does not put themselves between me and the subject of their writings.

I&#x27;ve attempted to make the title more factual and neutral, in keeping with the HN guidelines.

It seems counter-productive to me for journalists to call for spaces like this to be taken down.<p>Far more valuable to them should be to leave them up, set up their own account, and lurk. Online fora where people believe they are chatting privately or psudonymously are the ultimate honeypot for teasing out things they would never say in public. I recall the time Mitt Romney was outed by an anonymous recorder who divulged several things he said during a high-ticket fundraiser that did poorly for his messaging on the campaign trail in 2012 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Politics&#x2F;OTUS&#x2F;top-13-quotes-mitt-romneys-leaked-fundraiser-video&#x2F;story?id=17264969" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Politics&#x2F;OTUS&#x2F;top-13-quotes-mitt-romn...</a>).

Is Substack a good option for the amateur writer trying to make a email list for free while creating valuable content ; or is it better suited for someone with a large fan following like Greenwald?

&quot;They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers&quot;<p>funny line in a story that&#x27;s basically just twitter&#x2F;clubhouse drama

Interning at Fairness &amp; Accuracy In Reporting in my youth was worthwhile. Mis&#x2F;disinformation, mass media, and the power&#x2F;biases of tech corporations to manipulate is a problem. But this case isn&#x27;t &quot;journalism&quot; anymore than tabloid garbage. I also expected more from a Berkman Klein affiliate.

Does no one else recognize that the US are slipping into totalitarianism also because of assholes like her?<p>It already is a borderline fascist country, the last steps aren&#x27;t too far off.

The NYT reorganization that transformed it into an UltraWoke 5000 reporting machine is starting to bear fruit.

Wait, do people still believe anything glen greenwald says?

She’s doing everybody a favor, in truth. Journalisms been dead for decades and Big Tech needs to punish all of us until we abandon it.

The NYT is hardly beyond criticism. But Greenwald&#x27;s whole schtick these past few years has been little more than a more articulate Trumpian &quot;the press is the enemy of the people&quot; anti-intellectual nonsense.<p>I don&#x27;t think Greenwald is a Russian agent. But it&#x27;s hard to imagine a Russian agent behaving a whole lot differently, if their motive was to sow discord and distrust in our most historically credible institutions.

He&#x27;s right! HN is next.

The tone of this article is atrocious, if Glenn had a point it was completely lost when he peppered this article with snark and derision.<p>He clearly holds disgust for his subject, which ruins his ability to speak impartially about this topic. This is an attempted hit piece and he&#x27;s not subtle about it, but I guess I shouldn&#x27;t be surprised, he&#x27;s never been very adept at objectivity or impartiality.<p>I&#x27;m honestly surprised more folks haven&#x27;t seen through his shtick yet, as they saw through Taibbi&#x27;s.

No wonder this guy can&#x27;t hold down a job.

There&#x27;s probably some portion of a reasonable point buried somewhere in here, but boy is he going out of his way to make the reader distrust him!

This sounds similar to the subreddit whose members post &quot;CP&quot; to subreddits they do not like in order to get them taken down. We should be talking about the false accusation and false accusations in general, but it is probably easier to talk about the messenger.

And ironically, Greenwald stoops low on their level to fight in the mud with pigs instead of focusing on more relevant things.<p>The internet and Twitter have amplification feedback loops which means that the best way to handle this stuff is to not interact and promote it by giving it more eyes.<p>Ever since a feminist gamer started pointing out sexist oddities from video games and my fellow video game enthusiasts got their panties in a bunch and started a hate machine against her, I&#x27;ve seen this pattern repeat itself again and again.<p>Stop giving them the notoriety and eyes and they would have disappeared 5 years ago.

God I love the &quot;R&quot; word. It has just the right amount of edge that people&#x27;s ears perk up just a little bit when you say it and then they start paying attention.

He criticizes other journalists for being singularly focused on calling out “bad behaviour”, but has anyone made a bigger career out of doing exactly that than Greenwald?<p>It’s hypocritical. I’m not even saying he’s factually wrong (I don’t have the interest in fact checking him). I’m just saying that every time he writes anything, he can’t help but draw comparisons to fascism.<p>Yes, it’s helpful to reference fascism when witnessing truly fascist things. I, too, am opposed to fascism. But that’s hardly an interesting or controversial position.<p>Yet everything Glenn doesn’t like seems to be a part of either a grand conspiracy or a symptom of said conspiracy.<p>Dude is off his rocker.