Glenn Greenwald Just Beat The Snot Out Of Fake News Rag ‘The Washington Post’

In a sixteen-hour window overlapping March 6th and 7th, the Washington Post published a truly gobsmacking sixteen smear pieces on Bernie Sanders during what was arguably the single most heated period of the Democratic primaries. Those sixteen hours happened to include the crucial debate between Sanders and Hillary Clinton in Michigan, a state that Sanders went on to win in a shocking upset. 

In response to the understandable outrage expressed by Sanders supporters and anyone who cares about journalistic integrity, WaPo trotted out one of their shill reporters to defend their shill rag, who seriously tried to argue that hit pieces trying to slyly cast Sanders as a racist and a crime-coddler were “rooted in math” and therefore impartial, because Sanders was having more success in states with a greater white majority and wanted to decrease America’s embarrassingly huge prison population. 

Sixteen smear pieces in sixteen hours. And yet this ridiculous parody of a news media outlet has the gall to run story after story decrying “fake news”.

In their latest frantic attempt to claw power back to the neoliberal establishment, WaPo has published an extremely popular article titled “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” reporting that unnamed, anonymous “experts” working for a brand new organization calling itself PropOrNot have used an unnamed, unknown methodology to produce a list of alternative media organizations it claims are “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” and passing it off as news. This now-viral blacklist (literally titled “The List” on ProOrNot’s website) includes such esteemed media outlets as The Drudge Report and Naked Capitalism, as well as WikiLeaks, Zero Hedge, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Consortium News, Truthdig, Antiwar.com, The Anti-Media, and The Ron Paul Institute.

“Basically,” writes Glenn Greenwald in a surgical evisceration of this insipid neoliberal shill piece that you absolutely must read, “everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary-Clinton/Jeb-Bush spectrum is guilty.”

Greenwald points out some of WaPo’s violations of journalistic integrity that are even more egregious than the sixteen smear pieces in sixteen hours, like the way they pushed deceitful pro-war propaganda in the leadup to the Iraq invasion, an unforgivable act of needless military aggression that got upwards of a million people killed to prop up the U.S. petrodollar economy, and when they ran an actual, serious article about some guy’s conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton’s collapse on 9/11 Day was due to her having been poisoned by Putin operatives. 

Greenwald goes on to argue just how absurd PropOrNot is as an establishment, how childish whoever runs its Twitter account is, how many outlets passed on this story before WaPo agreed to run it, what that says about their journalistic integrity, and how disturbing it is that this deceitful, pernicious story “spread like wildfire” upon its release.

“Even more disturbing than the Post’s shoddy journalism in this instance,” Greenwald adds, “is the broader trend in which any wild conspiracy theory or McCarthyite attack is now permitted in U.S. discourse as long as it involves Russia and Putin – just as was true in the 1950s when stories of how the Russians were poisoning the U.S. water supply or infiltrating American institutions were commonplace. Any anti-Russia story was – and is – instantly vested with credibility, while anyone questioning its veracity or evidentiary basis is subject to attacks on their loyalties or, at best, vilified as “useful idiots.””

Greenwald’s article highlights brilliantly the sickest aspects of the neoliberal establishment, especially its nonstop bloodthirsty drive toward a military confrontation with Russia. It might be shocking to see media outlets that allege themselves to belong to the political left pushing for a war with a nuclear superpower, and to see people who identify as liberals and progressives actively subscribing to that push themselves, but if you’ve got your ear to the ground it isn’t really surprising. Just as when Saddam broke the OPEC convention of selling oil exclusively in U.S. dollars, threatening the unseen foundation of neoliberal economics, Russia has been working with China to move away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency and buying up gold like it’s going out of style. Syria, where Russia is forming an extremely useful alliance, is also one of the few nations left government-owned central bank, which the neoliberal International Monetary Fund has openly stated it wants to change. The bankers who have risen to such immense power under the neoliberal system aren’t having any of this, and they’re trying to use their plutocratic leverage and unprecedented control of the media to stop it. It remains to be seen if Trump will play ball with this agenda or will remain as opposed to it as he claims to be.

Until then, stay watchful dear reader. WikiLeaks revealed beyond a doubt that our government is lying to us and the media is helping them, and this latest stunt by WaPo shows there are no depths these people won’t stoop to.

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