The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations by Glenn Greenwald

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Daniel Ellsberg speaks to the press outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles, April 28, 1973. Credit: Wally Fong / Associated Press.
On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post‘s long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks — which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws — that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now — in a new and genuinely shocking escalation — it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI’s work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves. Thus:

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – showing the US Government was lying to the American public that it believed it could win the war in Vietnam – FBI and CIA agents broke into the office of his psychoanalyst to try to expose his psychosexual secrets to discredit him and distract from the substance of the disclosures.

When Chelsea Manning leaked massive evidence of hidden US war crimes to WikiLeaks, long-time anti-LGBT bigot Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC and others said the overarching motive was mental illness over gender identity.

When it became clear that Julian Assange had created a powerful and formidible instrument for holding the U.S. Security State accountable and exposing their lies and crimes — WikiLeaks — corporate outlets began puking up a deluge of personal attacks against him, ones designed to make people conclude he is so repellent that the disclosures he enabled should be ignored because he was just too personally distasteful. The then-editor-in-chief of The New York Times Bill Keller even stooped to demeaning his personal hygiene, publishing this 2011 paragraph that he said he received from one of his reporters:

“He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

When Edward Snowden furnished to myself and Laura Poitras the previously secret evidence that Obama national security official James Clapper lied to the public when denying that the NSA spied en masse on millions of Americans —  reporting that ended up winning every major journalism prize in the West and that caused an appellate court to rule that Obama’s NSA had acted both unconstituitonally and illegally in infringing the privacy rights of millions of Americans — CNN, NYT. NBC and The New Yorkier’s Jeffrey Toobin labeled him a “narcissist” for believing he knew better than everyone else, and numerous outlets dug through his old blog comments to prove he had bad politics as a teenager.

Now, when doing the FBI’s work by outing Jack Teixeira, both the Washington Post and CNN are emphasizing transgressive comments he made about race and anti-Semitism in a teenagers’ gaming room to distract attention from the lies these docs reveal about, among other things, Biden’s role in Ukraine.

On last night’s episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, we examined the media’s conduct this week with regard to the leaker, and the way in which they proudly did the FBI’s job of hunting him down, exposing him and ensuring his arrest. On Monday night, we examined the key revelations from those documents and the strange circumstances surrounding that leak. The key leaked documents we examined can be read at the link below.

A full transcript for last night’s episode will be posted later today on Locals (we post transcripts for each night’s show on this platform exclusively for our Locals subscribers); the transcript for Monday night’s show is below. And you can watch the full SYSTEM UPDATE episode on the video player below.

To support the independent journalism we are doing here and with our live nightly SYSTEM UPDATE program on Rumble, please join our Locals community; that gives you full access to our live interactive after-show on Tuesday and Thursday night, all of our written journalism, and full transcripts for each night’s show:

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