Glenn Greenwald: Mainstream US Media Is Culpable for Disseminating Deceitful News on Russia
January 5, 2017
Democracy Now! - We are joined by Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest article is
headlined "WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia
Threat While Public Is Deceived." In it, he writes, "Any story that
bolsters the prevailing DC orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how
dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often,
when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is
done to correct the deceitful effects."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
We're talking about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allegations of
Russian cyber-attacks. During his interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity
this week, Assange was asked whether mainstream media in the US is
dishonest.
JULIAN ASSANGE:
It's very dishonest. "Corrupt" is interesting; it depends on your
definition. If you look at what we published in the Podesta emails --
SEAN HANNITY: Wait a minute. If they're colluding with Hillary, that's not corrupt?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It's an ethical corruption.
SEAN HANNITY: They're not identifying it to their audiences. They claim that they're objective journalists.
JULIAN ASSANGE:
It's ethically corrupt, corrupt by its -- "corruption" also means
something in law, which is that you're taking money in exchange.
SEAN HANNITY: OK.
JULIAN ASSANGE: So I don't that --
SEAN HANNITY: Collusion.
JULIAN ASSANGE: They're colluding, yeah.
SEAN HANNITY: Because they share her political agenda. Well, why else would they collude? Or they hate Donald Trump.
JULIAN ASSANGE: I think that's an optimistic interpretation, that they share the political agenda.
SEAN HANNITY: Well, explain that.
JULIAN ASSANGE:
It's more like, "You rub my back, I'll rub yours." I'll give you -- you
know, I'll give you information. You'll be -- you'll come to my -- I'll
invite you to my child's christening or our next big party or -- do you
know what I mean?
AMY GOODMAN: That's WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Fox News. Glenn Greenwald, your latest
article
for The Intercept is headlined "WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False
News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived." So, could you
comment on what Assange said and your own findings regarding mainstream
media coverage of alleged Russian cyber-attacks?
GLENN GREENWALD:
So let's focus on the extraordinary behavior of The Washington Post for
the moment. They have produced two of the most humiliating debacles in
American journalism over the last several years. And these two
humiliations have taken place just within the last six weeks, both of
which were about completely fictitious and fabricated claims about the
threat posed by Vladimir Putin and Russia.
The
first
was on November 24th, when they claimed, based on a newly formed
anonymous group, that there has been a very widespread, successful
effort to implant Kremlin propaganda in the American discourse. And they
accomplish this by giving credence to this secret list that this
anonymous group of cowards had created in which they claim that a whole
range of American media outlets and websites, such as the Drudge Report
and other libertarian critics of Hillary Clinton on the right and
long-standing left-wing critics of the Democratic Party, like Naked
Capitalism and Truthout and Truthdig on the left -- they decree them to
be tools of Kremlin propaganda. And The Washington Post created this
huge story, that went all over the place, based upon giving credence to
this list and saying that Russian propaganda had been viewed more than
200 million times in the United States. Journalists all over Twitter,
throughout the American media, mindlessly spread it, aggressively
endorsed it. It became a huge story. And over the course of the next two
weeks, the story completely collapsed, and there's now a major editor's
note at the top of the article disclaiming the key source, saying that
they did not intend to in any way vouch for the validity of the findings
of the source on which the entire story was based.
But even more embarrassing was this weekend, when the Post trumpeted this
story
on Friday night that Vladimir Putin and Russia had hacked into the
electric grid of the United States through a Vermont utility, which
caused Vermont officials like the governor and Senator Pat Leahy to
issue statements saying Vladimir Putin is trying to endanger the safety
and the welfare of Vermonters by stealing their heat in the winter. The
whole story, from start to finish, turned out to be a complete
fabrication. There was no invasion of the American electric grid. The
malware that was found on one laptop had nothing to do with Russia. The
story was completely false. And again, the American media, in this
hysteria, kept spreading and endorsing it.
And in both cases, the retractions were barely noted. So you have
millions of people being misled into this hysteria, into this view that
Russia is this grave threat, and when the story journalistically
collapses, they barely hear about it. And it happened over and over
through the election, with Slate saying that a secret server had been
found between Donald Trump and a Russian bank, which turned out to be
completely false. The Post aired allegations that Putin had poisoned
Hillary Clinton on the day that she collapsed on 9/11. And so, it's not
really just dishonesty. It's the kind of behavior we saw in 2002, where
American media outlets are willing to publish anything that the US
government tells them to publish, to inflate and expand the threat posed
by Russia, to raise fear levels to the highest possible degree. And
it's an incredibly irresponsible and dangerous form of behavior that
media outlets, led by The Washington Post, are engaging in.
AMY GOODMAN:
And you talk about how retractions obviously don't get anything like
the play of the story, that also has to do with what's tweeted by the
publication, even when they retract, and what isn't, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right. So let me just give you two examples of just the corruption that's at play here. So, when the
Post
unveiled their huge story about Russia fake news based on this
McCarthyite list that has been proven to be a fraud, they had Marty
Baron, the executive editor, the widely respected executive editor of
the paper, go onto Twitter and announce this huge exposé. And
predictably, it got tweeted and retweeted and shared thousands and
thousands of times by all of the biggest journalists with the biggest
social media followings. When the story collapsed over the next two
weeks and they appended this huge editor's note, The Washington Post did
nothing to bring anyone's attention to the fact that the key claims of
the story have been gutted. Marty Baron refused to answer any questions
over that two weeks about what the paper did, and he uttered not one
syllable on Twitter or anywhere else to tell all the followers that he
alerted to this story that the story had collapsed.
With the story that I just talked about over the weekend of the -- of
how Putin had wanted to steal the heat from Vermonters to make them
suffer in the winter, Brent Staples, who works for The New York Times
editorial page, went on Twitter and said, "Our friend Putin has invaded
the US electric grid." And when that story collapsed and The Washington
Post retracted it, he did something even worse: He just went and quietly
deleted his tweet a day later, as though it never happened, and also
failed to tell his 30,000 followers that what he had just told them the
day before, that caused them to run around and share with all their
friends on Facebook and Twitter that this has happened, was in fact a
complete fiction.
And you see this over and over and over again. And remember, these
are the people who keep saying that fake news is a huge problem, that
Facebook has to suppress it. And yet it's America's leading journalistic
outlets that are doing more to disseminate false and deceitful stories
than Macedonian teenagers by a huge amount. And when they do it and it
turns out that the stories are discredited, they take very little to no
steps to alert the people that they've misled about the fact that the
stories were false. And it's incredibly reckless journalistically. And
these are the same people pretending to be crusaders against fake news,
who are themselves disseminating it more aggressively than anyone else.
