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National News See other National News Articles Title: The Media Suppression of Our Leading Journalists and Scholars American Pravda: Giants Silenced by Pygmies . Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept During the height of the NSA disclosures a few years ago, Glenn Greenwald probably ranked as the world’s most famous journalist, and his entire career had seemed something out of a left-liberal storybook. Becoming disenchanted with his corporate law career at a top firm, he co-founded a small practice specializing in First Amendment issues, then started a personal blog denouncing the civil liberties violations of the Bush Administration. He gained such recognition for his insightful commentary that he was hired by Salon, the premier leftist webzine, and a couple of years later was recruited by the liberal Guardian, then at the height of its international reputation. His high-profile writings on governmental abuses drew the attention of Edward Snowden, the young NSA whistleblower, who offered him the story of a lifetime, complete with its James Bond flourishes in Hong Kong, and worldwide fame together with a Pulitzer Prize soon followed. No sooner had the echoes of those establishment accolades begun to fade than he returned to the front-pages as co-founder of a new international media organization aimed at providing honest reporting free from any political restrictions, an enterprise backed by a pledge of $150 million in future funding from a public-spirited Silicon Valley multi-billionaire. That truly seemed a Cinderella tale complete with happy ending, fit to inspire future generations of liberal young journalists. However, the story didn’t end at that point. The old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons of my childhood always included a “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment, providing a satirical account of what probably happened after the curtain came down, and over the past year Greenwald’s personal trajectory unexpectedly swerved into that territory. In late 2020, he angrily departed the sizable anti-censorship media empire he had helped to create because his own writing was being censored, choosing to return to his roots as an independent blogger on the new Substack platform. As far as I can tell, none of his ideological positions had shifted more than a whit over the last decade or more, but the same views that had once enshrined him as the conquering hero of liberal and left-liberal journalists have now suddenly rendered him toxic and unwanted in those same quarters, with his sole remaining foothold in the traditional media being his regular appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight, a FoxNews broadcast regularly attacked as representing the most extreme rightwing fringe still found on television. For at least three generations, American liberals had regarded our national security organs—the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI—as some of their greatest villains, with such hostile sentiments reaching their peak just a few years ago when Greenwald and Snowden revealed the massive scale of illegal NSA spying. Yet these days, former high-ranking CIA, NSA, and FBI officials are regularly featured and employed at liberal CNN and MSNBC, while it is Greenwald and Snowden who have become completely unwelcome. So we have a fable that ends with the brave knight slaying the beautiful princess and marrying the hideous dragon, quite an unexpected turn of events. The breaking point for Greenwald came with the 2020 election. During the Democratic primaries, the reigning political oligarchs of the liberal establishment had faced down the unexpectedly strong Bernie Sanders insurgency by desperately employing every possible connivance to drag the widely unpopular Joe Biden across the finish line, then coupled him with Kamala Harris, a candidate so unappealing that she had dropped out of the presidential race long before the first vote had even been cast in Iowa. These arrogant Democratic kingmakers then discovered to their horror that although Donald Trump was greatly disliked, their own hand-picked candidates fell into the same category. An extremely dishonest racial media narrative had provoked America’s greatest wave of urban riots and looting in two generations, and while 200 of our cities suffered such severe unrest, a number of prominent Democratic activists responded to the scenes of chaos and disorder by loudly proclaiming that the solution was to “defund the police.” Under such circumstances, many voters understandably began to wonder whether Trump—notwithstanding his disastrous four years in office—might actually be the lesser of the two evils. So to forestall that dangerous possibility, Big Media and Big Tech colluded to ensure that Americans voted the right way, imposing the most extreme political censorship of any modern election, yet even so their efforts nearly fell short. According to the post-election media headlines, Biden won the 2020 race by a substantial margin and Trump’s claims of a stolen presidential vote represented the final proof of his criminal insanity, blatant lies that eventually provoked his deluded followers into storming the Capitol on January 6th. But as I pointed out a few days after that event, the official vote count told an entirely different story: Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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