What is wrong with this episode? Everything.

From The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows by Glenn Greenwald.  

The subheading is 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.

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.

It is a marked irony of our time that among the fiercest foes of free speech are corporate media companies.  The Fourth Estate used to be one of the key bulwarks against totalitarian authoritarianism and yet are now among the primary cheerleaders of this antiquated and destructive form of governance.  

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.

Greenwald has an interesting insight here.  I have long assumed that the false and malicious reporting of mainstream journalists was a function of two dynamics.  One is that so many journalists are emerging from journalism school totally lacking in numeracy, life experience or broader knowledge of history and/or science.   It is the only generous explanation for the raw misreporting now so rampant.

The other dynamic has been the transformation of the cost structure of news collection.  With the rise of the internet and citizen journalism, etc. most mainstream media have shed their experienced editors and journalists by the thousands.  You can see this cost cutting as well in the near complete decimation of news bureaus across the US and internationally and the substantial shift to press-release journalism by which corporate, think tank, and advocacy groups release a press release which is then rewritten and marginally augmented by journalists to produce something which is skewed or one sided reporting but which can be claimed as original content.

There is always the third explanation which I think is to a degree well-founded but something we don't want to acknowledge.  That mainstream journalists are tight in their media bubbles, in their credential bubbles, in their choice of urban living and in their mindless adherence to critical theory, critical race theory and social justice theory, compared to the great majority of Americans.  The dynamic here being that they are living in tight bubbles which limit their exposure and that they suffer from ideological passions not grounded in reason or empiricism.

Greenwald musters example after example of this taudry totalitarianism.

"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.

Greenwald provides an example of this cognitively empty authoritarian spirit in a case study from yesterday.  Keep in mind, that Taylor Lorenz's employer has spent the past year firing its own reporters who may have used a wrong word at anytime from the past three or four decades simply because the word is now in the weaponized lexicon of its young tattle-tale woke journalists.  Two of its more experienced journalists have been fired/resigned in just the past two days at the behest of totalitarian junior staffers outraged about . . .  well about their own personal feelings apparently.

Here is this weekend's new storm from Greenwald.

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.”

Here is the insight I am taking from Greenwald's excellent piece (read the whole thing.)

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.

This sentence jumped out to me.  Not because it is wrong but because it is so ironic.

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.  

Freedom of speech, ideological and religious pluralism, and tolerance of diversity (diversity of religion, of ideology, or simply opinion) are the very hallmarks of liberal orthodoxy.  Or at least Classical Liberal Orthodoxy.  It highlights the fact that we need to abandon the courteous platitude of liberal to those who are so clearly in the throes of critical race theory, social justice and postmodernism and whose demonstrated behavior is destructive, coercive, totalitarian and authoritarian.  Mainstream media are not liberal - they are demonstrably totalitarian and authoritarian.  We should quit according them the values of liberalism and acknowledge them as the revolutionary Jacobins which their behavior points towards them being.  

Time for the old call, What's That? Distinguo