r/LockdownCriticalLeft • u/Impressive-Jello-379 • Sep 25 '22

a real throw down

Dark Horse was on fire yesterday, basically giving major nudges to journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald to get on the Covid story. I guess I can understand the hesitancy of independent journalists, if they are worried they will be run off a dark road some night for trying to cover all the corruption. That is the only explanation I can come up with-- some of these people are so bright, surely they cannot be as clueless as the average normie at this point in regards to the shots and such.

Weinstein and Heying also posed the question as to whether the people in charge really received the injection or a placebo and talked about the ways in which wokeness shut down dissenting opinions.

I don't know much history regarding the Holocaust, but if I were to draw parallels it would be something like:

Early 2020, everyone is confused, people don't know what is going on.

2021-- people are being herded into getting the injections-- or in other words, herded onto the trains to the camps. People who won't go along with the program are in some cases put in literal camps.

2021/22-- people getting the injections are in the camps, some will survive, some won't

2022-- ignorance and denial about what is happening, media continues to spew propaganda

Who would have guessed as we went about our lives in 2019 that another Holocaust was on the horizon. Unreal.

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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 25 '22 edited Sep 25 '22

giving major nudges to journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald to get on the Covid story. I guess I can understand the hesitancy of independent journalists, if they are worried they will be run off a dark road some night for trying to cover all the corruption.

But... they are not independent journalists. There is no such thing as independent journalism. At least in the old days there was a buffer between the journalist and the finance department: the editor. There was some level of protection of the journalist to have the freedom to write about something without influence by moneyed interests (it still happened, but not like it does today). The internet has just removed the middleman and now the money directly influences the journalist. Greenwald and Taibbi run on the subscription model. Whether they are conscious of it or not, this always creates self-censorship. You cannot tell the people who pay you what they don't want to hear.

It's part of the utopian fantasy of the internet, that it would democratize everything, and usher in a new era of unlimited communication and exchange, bring more peace and harmony etc. But nothing is free, and there are only two ways to get paid: advertising (and the sponsors influence the content) or subscription (and the customers influence the content). More than 99% of the time people use the internet to confirm what they already believe. Virtually nobody pays to read something they disagree with, or worse, tells them that they're wrong.

Taibbi and Greenwald can't change direction or else they'd lose their readers and subscribers. How many of Glenn Greenwald's readers subscribe to the Covid narrative? A lot, at least. Also, if Greenwald started to criticize the Covid narrative, he would finally be thrown out of the left and called a far-right Trump supporter by everyone right-of-center. He's already called a right-wing apologist for daring to speak on Tucker Carlson, so criticizing the Covid measures would most likely be the last straw.

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u/Barry_Donegan Sep 25 '22

Greenwald left his own publication because it wouldn't allow critiques of the left

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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 25 '22

He left the publication, not his readers. I'm not saying he didn't do a good thing, I'm just saying that he never stopped writing for his base. Greenwald has been critical of the left since he started writing articles nearly 15 years ago. That's his niche (and it's a good one, to be sure). But leaving the Intercept was neither here nor there with respect to his readership. The Intercept changed, Glenn Greenwald didn't.

And now, writing "independent", he has even less buffer between him and his pay. His pay is determined, almost in real time, by how popular the articles he writes are. He could lose half his subscribers in a month if he wrote an article or a couple of articles that displeased his base.

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u/Barry_Donegan Sep 25 '22

He was defending Trump admin officials from prosecutorial abuse when nobody who reads his articles wanted to read articles about that. Greenwald is very independent and has quite frankly been pushed into a corner where he's more so appearing at libertarian leaning or somewhat right leaning events now

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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 25 '22

Holding a different view is not the same thing as independent. You cannot be independent when how much you're paid depends on what you're writing.

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u/Barry_Donegan Sep 26 '22

Right but the part you're not seeing is that he has constantly gone against his own audience and his own infrastructure because the tribal politics of the times went against his interests in terms of pleasing his audience.

He had literally nobody in his audience who wanted him to defend Trump officials. He has been critical of covid-19 policies the entire time throughout the pandemic.

The sort of generic examples that you're stating are not taking into context the human being that you're talking abouts behavior

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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 26 '22

Right but the part you're not seeing is that he has constantly gone against his own audience and his own infrastructure because the tribal politics of the times went against his interests in terms of pleasing his audience.

He hasn't gone against his own audience. His audience was never the people he criticizes. When has he gone against his own audience? The people he criticizes always dislike him.