{"id":180835,"date":"2021-03-15T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T12:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=180835"},"modified":"2021-03-12T05:58:46","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T05:58:46","slug":"journalists-start-demanding-substack-censor-its-writers-to-bar-critiques-of-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/03\/journalists-start-demanding-substack-censor-its-writers-to-bar-critiques-of-journalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor Its Writers: To Bar Critiques of Journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Supporters of Mark Meechan aka Count Dankula gather in central London to protest against his conviction under the Communications Act in March 2018.
(Wiktor Szymanowicz \/ Barcroft Media via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

11 Mar 2021 – <\/em>On Wednesday [10 Mar], I wrote<\/a><\/strong> about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public\u2019s increasing contempt for what they do<\/a> is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates<\/em>, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.<\/p>\n

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with \u201charassment,\u201d \u201cabuse\u201d and \u201cviolence\u201d \u2014 so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism<\/em> on the ground that any criticism of them places them \u201cin danger.\u201d Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people\u2019s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.<\/p>\n

Any independent platform or venue that empowers other journalists or just ordinary citizens to do reporting or provide commentary outside of their repressive constraints is viewed by them as threats to be censored and destroyed. Every platform that enables any questioning of their pieties or any irreverent critiques of mainstream journalism \u2014 social media sites, YouTube, Patreon, Joe Rogan\u2019s Spotify program \u2014 has already been systematically targeted by corporate journalists with censorship demands, often successfully.<\/p>\n

Back in November, the media critic Stephen Miller warned<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.\u201d And ever since, in every interview I have given about the success of Substack and every time I have written about journalist-led censorship campaigns, I have echoed that warning that they would soon turn their united guns on this platform. Miller\u2019s prediction was prompted by a Columbia Journalism Review <\/em>article<\/a> entitled \u201cThe Substackerati\u201d which claimed that Substack was structurally unfair because \u201cmost\u201d of \u201cthe most successful people on Substack\u201d are \u201cwhite and male; several are conservative\u201d and \u201chave already been well-served by existing media power structures.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of that was false. The most-read and highest-earning writer on Substack is Heather Cox Richardson<\/a>, a previously obscure Boston College History Professor who built her own massive readership without ever working at a corporate media outlet. And the writers that article identified in support of its claim \u2014 Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and myself \u2014 do not remotely owe our large readerships to \u201cexisting media power structures.\u201d The opposite is true, as The Washington Post\u2019s <\/em>Megan McCardle explained<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[These Substack writers] got so big by starting blogs that they could sell to traditional publications. They are not monetizing an audience they acquired through larger institutions, but reclaiming one they created themselves\u2026. [O]bviously, one major characteristic of the successful one (wo)man show is the ability to swim against a crowd. Given that, it seems almost obvious that Substack would select people who are not in tune with the dominant views of the establishment media. And that the biggest audience numbers will come from folks who are not in tune with the establishment media\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That <\/em>is precisely why they are so furious. They cannot stand the fact that journalists can break major stories and find an audience while maintaining an independent voice, critically questioning rather than obediently reciting the orthodoxies that bind them and, most of all, without playing their infantile in-group games and submitting to their hive-mind decrees. In fact, the more big stories you break while maintaining your independence from them, the more intense is the contempt they harbor for you<\/a>: that explains, among other things, their willingness to watch Julian Assange (who has broken more major stories than all of them combined) be imprisoned for publishing documents.<\/p>\n

That they are angry and upset is irrelevant. It only matters because these resentments and fears that they are losing their monopolistic power over public thought are translating into increasingly concerted and effective censorship campaigns.<\/p>\n

As it turns out,<\/strong> we did not have to wait long for the initiation of the censorship campaign aimed at Substack. It has arrived. And amazingly<\/em>, the trigger for it was my criticism of the work<\/em> of a front-page New York Times <\/em>reporter which, as I wrote yesterday, is \u2014 like all criticisms of journalists in Good Standing and Decent Liberal Society \u2014 being recast as \u201cabuse\u201d and \u201charassment\u201d and \u201cviolence\u201d in order to justify the banning and outlawing of that criticism.<\/p>\n

A long-time tech reporter at BuzzFeed<\/em> who was fired<\/a> by that outlet in June for serial plagiarism<\/a>, Ryan Broderick, wrote an article<\/a> on Wednesday night warning that Substack is now dangerously providing a platform to a \u201ccadre of writers\u201d which, in addition to me, includes such societal menaces as \u201cBari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and, I\u2019d argue, Slate Star Codex writer Scott Alexander Siskind.\u201d He darkly notes: \u201cThere are more.\u201d This group of writers, he says, is \u201cfocusing on culture war Twitter drama about being \u2018canceled\u2019 and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Broderick detailed how he had carefully reviewed a prior article of mine<\/a>, one that examined the emergence of \u201ctattletale culture\u201d in the country\u2019s largest corporate media outlets, to determine \u2014 like the good little diligent junior-high hall monitor that he is \u2014 whether it ran afoul of Substack\u2019s terms of service rules against \u201cdoxing\u201d and \u201charassment.\u201d<\/p>\n

That article of mine was devoted to a critique of the prevailing journalistic practices at the most powerful and influential media corporations on the planet: The New York Times<\/em>, CNN<\/em>, and NBC News.<\/em> But to Broderick, whether that <\/em>article should be banned on the grounds of harassment is a close call. While reluctantly conceding that I did not \u201cdox\u201d anyone, he called the article \u201ca vicious screed\u201d and said that the danger signs from my critiques of corporate journalists are clear: \u201conline harassment is a constantly evolving process of boundary testing.\u201d He lamented that Substack\u2019s terms of service are too permissive (\u201cOne thing that worried me was how simplistic their definition of harassment was\u201d) and insisted that Substack is soon going to have to step in and put a stop to this:<\/p>\n

Right now most of the abuse being carried out by this group is confined to Twitter, but it stands to reason that it will eventually spill over to Substack. And dealing with people like Greenwald is going to be much harder to moderate than your average troll.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[Please permit me to pause here just a moment and marvel at the towering irony that a journalist who spent years at BuzzFeed<\/em> doing absolutely nothing of value and then got fired for serial plagiarism (again: he got fired for ethical breaches by BuzzFeed<\/em>) is now, with a straight face, holding himself out as the Guardian and Defender of Real Journalism. Even more amazingly, he believes he is fulfilling that role by demanding that I \u2014 not a journalist but just a \u201ctroll\u201d who is the enemy of Real Journalism despite having more impactful scoops and journalism awards and, as I detailed yesterday, resulting persecution campaigns from governments than all of these petulant fragile babies combined \u2014 be silenced in the name of saving journalism and protecting real reporters like him and his friends from harassment].<\/p>\n

In case Broderick\u2019s article was not explicit enough in his demand that Substack start censoring me and others, he took to Twitter to promote his article, where he made that even clearer. He described his article this way: \u201cI wrote about the attacks against @TaylorLorenz<\/a> and the growing community of right-wing culture warriors and TERFs that are using Substack to network and organize.\u201d<\/p>\n

TO CONTINUE READING Go to Original \u2013 greenwald.substack.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Glenn Greenwald\u00a0is\u00a0one of three co-founding editors of <\/em>The Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four <\/em>New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, <\/em>\u201cNo Place to Hide,\u201d is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to co-founding <\/em>The Intercept, Glenn\u2019s column was featured in the\u00a0<\/em>Guardian\u00a0and<\/em> Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2019s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, <\/em>Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for the <\/em>Guardian\u00a0was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service. Glenn is an animal fanatic & founder of HOPE Shelter.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Mar 2021 – This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent. That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with \u201charassment,\u201d \u201cabuse\u201d and \u201cviolence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":178252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[2375,1785,2314,378,1855,234,2419],"class_list":["post-180835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-alternative-media","tag-censorship","tag-corporate-media","tag-journalism","tag-mainstream-media-msm","tag-media","tag-substack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}