The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several
Well-Deserved Blows
The NYT's Taylor Lorenz falsely accuses a tech investor of using a slur
after spending months trying to infiltrate and monitor a new app that allows
free conversation.
Glenn Greenwald
Feb 7
New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz and Silicon Valley investor Marc
Andreessen
A new and rapidly growing journalistic "beat" has arisen over the last
several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high
hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half
adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control,
censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its
epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis
of journalism.
I've written before about one particularly toxic strain of this
authoritarian "reporting." Teams of journalists at three of the most
influential corporate media outlets - CNN's "media reporters" (Brian Stelter
and Oliver Darcy), NBC's "disinformation space unit" (Ben Collins and Brandy
Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin
Roose, Sheera Frenkel) - devote the bulk of their "journalism" to searching
for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being
violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken
(banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These
hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies,
which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the
responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary
blunt force: they are shamed by the world's loudest media companies when
they do not.
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Just as the NSA is obsessed with ensuring there be no place on earth where
humans can communicate free of their spying eyes and ears, these
journalistic hall monitors cannot abide the idea that there can be any place
on the internet where people are free to speak in ways they do not approve.
Like some creepy informant for a state security apparatus, they spend their
days trolling the depths of chat rooms and 4Chan bulletin boards and
sub-Reddit threads and private communications apps to find anyone -
influential or obscure - who is saying something they believe should be
forbidden, and then use the corporate megaphones they did not build and
could not have built but have been handed in order to silence and destroy
anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their corporate managers or
challenges their information hegemony.
Oliver Darcy has built his CNN career by sitting around with Brian Stelter
petulantly pointing to people breaking the rules on social media and
demanding tech executives make the rule-breakers disappear. The little crew
of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC - who refer to their twerpy work
with the self-glorifying title of "working in the disinformation space": as
intrepid and hazardous as exposing corruption by repressive regimes or
reporting from war zones - spend their dreary days scrolling through 4Chan
boards to expose the offensive memes and bad words used by transgressive
adolescents; they then pat themselves on the back for confronting dangerous
power centers, even when it is nothing more trivial and bullying than
doxxing the identities of powerless, obscure citizens.
But the worst of this triumvirate is the NYT's tech reporters, due to
influence and reach if no other reason. When Silicon Valley monopolies,
publicly pressured by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other
lawmakers, united to remove Parler from the internet, 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."
These examples of journalism being abused to demand censorship of spaces
they cannot control are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. And they
are not confined to those three outlets. That far more robust censorship is
urgently needed is now a virtual consensus in mainstream corporate
journalism: it's an animating cause for them.
"Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free
speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the
principles of journalism," complained Ultimate Establishment Journalism
Maven Steve Coll, the Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of
Journalism and a Staff Writer at The New Yorker. A New Yorker and Vox
contributor who runs a major journalistic listserv appropriately called
"Study Hall," Kyle Chayka, has already begun shaming Substack for hosting
writers he regards as unacceptable (Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Bari
Weiss). A recent Guardian article warned that podcasts was one remaining
area still insufficiently policed. ProPublica on Sunday did the same about
Apple, and last month one of its reporters appeared on MSNBC to demand that
Apple censor its podcast content as aggressively as Google's YouTube now
censors its video content.
Thus do we have the unimaginably warped dynamic in which U.S. journalists
are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to
destroy them. They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can
control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of
hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all
dissent is inherently dangerous "disinformation." And they do it from petty
vindictiveness: they clearly get aroused - find otherwise-elusive purpose -
by destroying people's reputations and lives, no matter how powerless.
Whatever the motive, corporate media employees whose company title is
"journalist" are the primary activists against a free and open internet and
the core values of free thought.
________________________________________
The profound pathologies driving all of this were on full display on
Saturday night as the result of a reckless and self-humiliating smear
campaign by one of The New York Times' star tech reporters, Taylor Lorenz.
She falsely and very publicly accused Silicon Valley entrepreneur and
investor Marc Andreessen of having used the "slur" word "retarded" during a
discussion about the Reddit/GameStop uprising.
Lorenz lied. Andreessen never used that word. And rather than apologize and
retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a "male voice" that
sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she - rather
than the person she falsely maligned - was the victim.
But the details of what happened are revealing. The discussion which Lorenz
falsely described took place on a relatively new audio app called
"Clubhouse," an invitation-only platform intended to allow for private,
free-ranging group conversations. It has become popular among Silicon Valley
executives and various media personalities (I was invited onto the app a few
months ago but never attended or participated in any discussions). But as
CNBC noted this week, "as the app has grown, people of more diverse
backgrounds have begun to join," and it "has carved out a niche among Black
users, who have innovated new ways for using it." Its free-speech ethos has
also made it increasingly popular in China as a means of avoiding repressive
online constraints.
These private chats have often been infiltrated by journalists, sometimes by
invitation and other times by deceit. These journalists attempt to monitor
the discussions and then publish summaries. Often, the "reporting" consists
of out-of-context statements designed to make the participants look bigoted,
insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior. In other words,
journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier
for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.
Fulfilling her ignoble duties there, Lorenz announced on Twitter that
Andreessen had said a bad word. During the discussion of the "Reddit
Revolution," she claimed, he used the word "retarded." She then upped her
tattling game by not only including this allegation but also the names and
photos of those who were in the room at the time - thus exposing those who
were guilty of the crime of failing to object to Andreessen's Bad Word:
Numerous Clubhouse participants, including Kmele Foster, immediately
documented that Lorenz had lied. The moderator of the discussion, Nait
Jones, said that "Marc never used that word." What actually happened was
that Felicia Horowitz, a different participant in the discussion, had
"explained that the Redditors call themselves 'retard revolution'" and that
was the only mention of that word.
Rather than apologizing and retracting, Lorenz thanked Jones for
"clarifying," and then emphasized how hurtful it is to use that word. She
deleted the original tweet without comment, and then - with the smear fully
realized - locked her account.
Besides the fact that a New York Times reporter recklessly tried to destroy
someone's reputation, what is wrong with this episode? Everything.
The participants in Clubhouse have tried to block these tattletale reporters
from eavesdropping on their private conversations precisely because they see
themselves as Stasi agents whose function is to report people for expressing
prohibited ideas even in private conservations. As Jones pointedly noted,
"this is why people block" journalists: "because of this horseshit
dishonesty."
One reporter, Jessica Lessin, recently complained she was blocked by
Andreessen from his Clubhouse discussions - as if she has the divine right
to monitor people's communications. And Lorenz herself has been obsessed
with monitoring Clubhouse discussions in general and Andressen in particular
for months, mocking him just last week when she obtained a fake credential
to enter:
Just take a second to ponder how infantile and despotic, in equal parts, all
of this is. This NYT reporter used her platform to virtually jump out of her
desk to run to the teacher and exclaim: he used the r word! This is what she
tried for months to accomplish: to catch people in private communications
using words that are prohibited or ideas that are banned to tell on them to
the public. That she got it all wrong is arguably the least humiliating and
pathetic aspect of all of this.
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.
But that is not remotely what happened here. Anyone who spent any time at
all on the sub-Reddit thread of r/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:
"We can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent."
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.
To declare any discussion of that term off-limits - as Lorenz tried to do -
is deeply anti-intellectual. To pretend that there is no difference in the
use of that term by the Redditors and its discussion in Clubhouse on the one
hand, and its malicious deployment as an insult to the cognitively disabled
on the other, is dishonest in the extreme. To publicly tattle on adults who
utter the term without any minimal attempt to understand or convey context
and intent is malicious, disgusting and sociopathic.
________________________________________
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.
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The same stunted mentality just resulted in the destruction of the career
and reputation of Lorenz's far more accomplished colleague, science reporter
Donald McNeil. On a 2019 field trip for rich high school kids to Peru, he
used the "n-word" after a student asked him whether he thought it was fair
that one of her classmates was punished for having used it in a video.
McNeil used it not with malice or as a racist insult but to inquire about
the facts of the video so he could answer the student's question.
After New York Times senior editors - including African-American
editor-in-chief Dean Baquet - investigated and concluded that "only" a
reprimand was appropriate - "it did not appear to me that his intentions
were hateful or malicious," said Baquet - dozens of McNeil's colleagues
wrote a furious letter demanding far more severe punishment. "Our community
is outraged and in pain," said the 150 Times employee-signatories, adding:
"intent is irrelevant." Intent is irrelevant when judging how harshly to
punish this storied journalist for uttering this word.
They got what they wanted. McNeil wrote a grovelling, abject apology, and
then the Times announced he was gone from his job after forty-five years
with the paper, including for COVID reporting over the last year that the
paper had submitted for a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Just think
about that: New York Times employees, who are unionized, demanded that
management punish a fellow union member more harshly than management wanted
to. In 2002, McNeil won the 1st place prize from the National Association of
Black Journalists for excellence in his reporting on how the AIDS crisis was
affecting Africa. Now his forty-five-year career and reputation are
destroyed - at the hands of his own colleagues - because "intent is
irrelevant" when using off-limit words.
The overarching rule of liberal media circles and liberal politics is that
you are free to accuse anyone who deviates from liberal orthodoxy of any
kind of bigotry that casually crosses your mind - just smear them as a
racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, etc. without the slightest need
for evidence - and it will be regarded as completely acceptable. That is the
rubric under which the most famous lawyer of the ACLU, an organization once
devoted to rigid precepts of due process, decided on Saturday to brand two
of his ideological opponents as "closely aligned with white supremacists."
Fresh off being named by Time Magazine as one of the planet's 100 most
influential human beings - this is someone with a great deal of power and
influence - trans activist and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio decided to spew
this extremely grave accusation about J.K. Rowling and Abigail Shrier, both
of whom oppose the inclusion of trans girls in female sports:
As I've written before, I'm not in agreement with those who advocate this
absolute ban. I'm open to a scientific consensus that develops hormonal and
other medicinal protocols for how trans girls and women can fairly compete
with CIS women in sporting competitions. But that does not entitle you -
especially as an ACLU lawyer - to just go around casually branding people as
"closely aligned to white supremacists" who have never remotely demonstrated
any such affinity, just because you feel like it, because you crave the
power to destroy your adversaries, or are too slothful to engage their
actual views.
But this is absolutely acceptable behavior in mainstream and liberal
circles. I just spent the week being widely branded by these kinds of people
as a "misogynist" - someone who hates women - because I criticized and
mocked Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez for her scornful rejection of the offer
from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to work with her to investigate Robinhood's
conduct in the GameStop affair. I particularly critiqued her ludicrous
accusation to Cruz that "you almost had me murdered" - a claim that even
CNN's "fact-checker" Daniel Dale, who would rather poke out his own eyes
than conclude that a popular Democrat has lied - said was without evidence
because "Cruz did not advocate violence against Ocasio-Cortez, much less
call for her murder."
AOC is a popular and powerful politician, and journalists are allowed to
criticize and mock such people. It's our job. Yet for doing mine, I was
casually and widely cast as a sexist hater of women (ironically, an old
homophobic trope long deployed against gay men) by the likes of Ashley Reese
("just baldly misogynistic") of Jezebel (which really ought to just change
its name to You're a Misogynist, since it has no other content) and
long-time Media Matters and David Brock smear artist Eric Boelhert
("Greenwald's hatred of women knows no bounds").
That I was one of AOC's first and most active supporters back in 2018 when
she ran against incumbent Joe Crowley - when people like Reese and Boelhert
had not even heard of her - and that I have defended her more times than I
can count, while also criticizing her on occasion, obviously goes
unmentioned and does not matter (for those asking why I supported her, I
interviewed AOC during her primary run and she gave impressive answers now
unrecognizable from her politics). My support of AOC in 2018 was
simultaneous with my misogynistic support for Cynthia Nixon for New York
Governor and Zephyr Teachout for Attorney General. Was my misogyny hidden
then, or did it just recently develop? There's no reason to interrogate any
of this. It does not deserve that. There's zero rationality let alone
evidence to this tactic. It's just driven by spite and stupidity and
vindictiveness.
I can ignore these kinds of accusatory smears, or scorn and ridicule them
and their practitioners - and I do - because they have no power over me. But
consider how many people in journalism or other professions whose positions
are less secure are rightly terrorized by these lowlife tactics, intimidated
into silence and conformity. They know if they express views these Stasi
agents and their bosses dislike, their reputations can be instantly
destroyed. So they remain silent or pliant out of necessity.
That's the purpose, the function, of these lowly accusatory tactics: to
control, to coerce, to dominate, to repress. The people who engage in these
character-assassinating, censorship-fostering games - especially those who
call themselves "journalists" - deserve nothing but intense scorn. And those
who are free from their influence and power have a particular obligation to
heap it on them. Aside from being what it deserves, that scorn is the only
way to neutralize this tactic.
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________________________________________
I'm aware that I returned one day earlier than I said I would from my
announced one-week break, but I also acknowledged upfront that I am an
unreliable vacation-taker, and corporate journalists, with behavior like
this, produce high motivation levels to write.
