Glenn Greenwald: The Corporate Media Are “Stenographers for the State”

CONFIRMED!

BOMBSHELL!

Glenn Greenwald has been dunking on these people lately and destroying whatever residual credibility that they had left with the public. In just the last two weeks, the Russian bounties bombshell and the Rudy Giuliani was warned by the FBI that he was the target of a Russian influence operation bombshell which had been breathlessly and independently “confirmed” and reported by serious “journalists” and broadcasted across social media rigged with its own corporate algorithm turned out to be fake news and misinformation. The same was true of the bombshell that Assad was gassing his own people in Syria as well as the bombshell that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick had been beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by “insurrectionists.” The Russia Hoax which was based on the infamous piss dossier which should have been laughed at was the ultimate example of misinformation.

Glenn Greenwald:

“One of the primary plagues of corporate journalism, which I have documented more times than I can count, just reared its ugly head again to deceive millions of people with fake news. When one large news outlet publishes a false story based on whispers from anonymous security state agents with the CIA or FBI, other news outlets quickly purport that they have “independently confirmed” the false story, in order to bolster its credibility (oh, it must be true since other outlets have also confirmed it).

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, creating the deceitful perception that a fake story has been “confirmed” by multiple outlets, thus bolstering its credibility in the public mind. It was the favored tactic for spreading debunked Russiagate frauds and is still used. …

On Thursday night, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources (of course), claimed that the FBI gave a “defensive briefing” to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine, that he was being targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign to hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy, yet he ignored the FBI’s warnings and went anyway. The Post also claimed that the right-wing news outlet OANN was similarly briefed. The claim about Giuliani not only predictably ricocheted all over social media and cable news — where, as usual, it was uncritically treated as Truth — but it was shortly thereafter “independently confirmed” by both NBC News’ de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian along with The New York Times. …

And the answer is obvious: they all serve as mouthpieces for the same propagandists and disinformation agents of the CIA, FBI and other security state agencies. In this capacity, they dutifully write down and vouch for what they are told by those agencies to publish without any investigative scrutiny or confirmation. …

As usual, the MSNBC program of Nicolle Wallace — who has magically transformed from a disinformation agent for the Bush/Cheney White House into an identical disinformation agent but now for the DNC — was one of the leaders in spreading this lie. She brought on former FBI agent and current MSNBC analyst Clint Watts to do just that (just as Wallace dramatized how Brian Sicknick died by falsely claiming that “they beat a Capitol Police Officer to death with a fire extinguisher” and repeatedly glorified Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) as a great and truthful leader on COVID):

This is all par for the course. But in this case, dozens of journalists for NBC News, MSNBC, CNN and The Washington Post — the very outlets that purported to “confirm” the false story — as well as activists and scholars who purport to combat “disinformation,” spread it all over Twitter and, days later, have left it up, even knowing the story is false, while not even telling their followers that the story was false and has been retracted. …”

Are they embarrassed that trust in the corporate media has plummeted to a record low and is now completely polarized? Are they embarrassed at getting caught spreading so many lies including the big ones which worsen our foreign relations or end up killing foreigners? Of course not.