[Peace] More on why Democracy Now and The Intercept are establishment media

[J.B. Nicholson]

Aaron Maté and Glenn Greenwald discuss the "Left media promoting propaganda it once 
exposed". I highly recommend this and the preceding segment of this interview:


https://yewtu.be/watch?v=6AXcjwX-JGA (35m 03s) -- "BlueAnon: Glenn Greenwald on why 
Russiagate disinformation never ends"

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=FoCDZESfgV4 (19m 23s) -- "Neocon Now!: Glenn Greenwald on 
Left media promoting propaganda it once exposed"


I can't recommend the latter for UPTV because Glenn Greenwald rightly called Stuart 
Stevens' book "It Was All a Lie" a "shitty book" about 5 minutes into the second 
segment listed above. But that doesn't stop me from recommending this clip to you, 
here, and I do strongly recommend both of these clips.

They also bring up Jimmy Dore's show because they're both repeat guests on Dore's 
show and because Dore's show is one of the few places you can find the kind of 
exposés you used to get on, for example, Democracy Now. DN used to have guests on who 
did the journalism needed to uncover the 2003 Iraq War lies and DN used to provide 
this on a regular ("drumbeat") basis. No more, now DN has ceded that work to Jimmy 
Dore (as Dore regularly says, "Thanks for leaving me this wide lane" to show that he 
can do journalism better than you and do it while he's high on cannabis, which he 
often is).

Now things are different for DN. As Greenwald pointed out just after a clip of 
Stevens on DN hawking his book at 5m 36s:

> Glenn Greenwald: ...but he [Stuart Stevens] went on and poured that book out and
> [DN co-hosts] Amy [Goodman] and Juan Gonzalez talked about talked about this book
> like it was such an important piece of political literature, and he [Stuart
> Stevens] got to talk all about how George Bush was genuine a compassionate
> conservative and they didn't say, 'well, isn't, like, rendition and torture, and
> like Guantanamo, and lying to destroy Iraq, and letting New Orleans drown contrary
> to the view that compassionate conservatism reigned in the Bush years?'. They said
> nothing! He was treated like -- what happened is the Trump era broke everybody's
> brain in the center left or left-wing media not everybody's brain to the point
> where everything became binary: you were either pro-Trump or anti-Trump and if you
> were anti-Trump you are considered to be an ally, somebody who is, you know,
> deserves adoration and support -- Bill Kristol, David Frum -- became stars of
> MSNBC because of that framework and that's what led Stuart Stevens to onto
> Democracy Now. Conversely, if you weren't sufficiently anti-Trump, if you didn't
> shape your entire politics to oppose Trump, if you didn't endorse every lie
> disseminated in the name of stopping Trump, you became an enemy to the point where
> you are blackballed. So, Democracy Now which always, like The Intercept, conceived
> of itself as earring dissident marginalized voices; it wasn't just me, they don't
> put anyone on who's banned from MSNBC or CNN because of left wing descent. Even
> Matt Taibbi or yourself, it's just that they are indistinguishable from all of the
> liberal outlets that they always perceived and conceived of themselves as being
> opposed to and they're no different; they fit perfectly into the kind of Vox, you
> know, MSNBC, Talking Points Memo, pro-DNC media, they do nothing different! All
> the people they put on could easily go on those programs and do, and all the
> people they ban and exclude are excluded and banned from those same networks. And
> that has contaminated so much center-left and left-laying media that, you know,
> it's almost impossible to find distinctions between them and CNN or the New York
> Times at this point.


Regarding "the Trump era [nearly] broke everybody's brain": I find this to be rather 
inarticulately expressed, and I can understand the social pressure Maté and Greenwald 
discuss -- I think that the establishment outlets vet their interviewers/newsreaders 
for qualities that tend toward adopting whatever line their advertisers like -- but I 
don't think people are unaware of where their money comes from and I think people 
work to preserve that income and I doubt few need to explicitly be told to do 
something conformant (those people who need such reminders are probably fired in 
favor of those who demonstrate obeisance). Read twitter.com account posts from young 
stand-up comics and you'll find plenty of people who echo mainstream narrative, don't 
exhibit serious analytical skill, and effectively audition themselves for 
establishment media jobs.

I believe it was Max Blumenthal who had another take on this: that Ford Foundation 
funding provides a way to understand the change for DN. I'll see if I can find the 
reference, but the gist was that the DN co-host Nermeen Shaikh was basically supplied 
by or approved by the Ford Foundation and DN takes Ford Foundation money. That money 
informs why DN became supportive of the establishment.

That said, I think that the interview is well worth your time to hear in its 
entirety. The vast majority of it is prescient to explain what frauds the "left" 
media is.

-J