Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Media & Biden Admin Get Far Too Cozy at WHCD—Revealing Rotten Core of US Journalism. Plus: Lula/Google Ominous Online Censorship Battle
Video Transcript
May 05, 2023
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The corporate media on Saturday threw itself a gaudy, glitzy celebration of itself at the White House as it does every year. Employees of large media corporations who bear the title ‘journalist’ made a pilgrimage to the White House to gush over their own importance, desperately trying to secure selfies with mid-level Hollywood celebrities and toast to their own courage, all as they swoon over President Biden, the person they pretend to hold accountable. It is both easy and entertaining to spend time mocking this monument to its debauchery, and we will certainly spend some time doing exactly that, but how these journalists are just so giddy and eager to spend just a night of glitter and glamor behind the walls of Versailles, admitted to the Royal Court for one night for good behavior, is more than just repellent to watch: it is deeply revealing of their true function. And – while I will not feign being above delighting in the mockery this provides – it is also a vivid window into the specific ways that our corporate press corps is so deeply rotted and corrupted. 

Then we're trying this show to report on developments in Brazil only when there are important implications beyond that country. And that is definitely the case with the extraordinary events taking place right now and all week long in that country, the government of Lula da Silva is on the verge of implementing one of the most repressive and dangerous Internet censorship laws yet seen in the democratic world, one that we've reported on multiple times because it is being eyed by the EU, Canada and eventually the U.S. as the model for ending a free Internet as a means of expressing and organizing meaningful dissent. While the law is technically being sponsored by Lula's government, its most aggressive opponents, as is true in the U.S., are Brazil's highly powerful media corporations, which know that their ability to maintain their hegemony over the flow of information depends upon ending social media as a venue for legitimate dissent. And that is why they are such ardent supporters of this bill. This law in Brazil does nothing less than empower the government to silence and criminalize dissent and the means that are being used by all but outlaw opposition to this law as it's being debated, including by legally banning Google, Facebook and Spotify from criticizing the law and then ordering their executives forward to appear for interrogation at the Brazilian equivalent of the FBI. All things that happened just today are deeply alarming, but also very aligned with the spirit of the bill itself, one that has already begun to wind its way through the legislatures of other democratic countries. If you care about Internet freedom, it is imperative that you care about these developments. 

As a programming note, we were off the last few days of last week as well as yesterday, largely due to my need to attend to family matters, which I've discussed on this show before, and for that reason, as well, we won't have our live aftershow on Locals tonight, but we'll be back with it on Thursday night. To gain access to that live aftershow every Tuesday and Thursday night, simply join our Locals community by clicking the join button right below the Rumble screen. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. It appears 12 hours after we broadcast this show, live, here on Rumble. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and other major podcasting platforms. If you rate and review the show, it helps spread its visibility.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 

 


 

As repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy, it actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are.  It's become kind of like the Oscars, in the sense that – in many senses, actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night, but many days leading up to it, where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend. But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is that these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars, in gowns and tuxedos, and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest and sleaziest event you can possibly imagine held at the White House hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering. 

And so, in the days leading up to the event, they spend a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing and within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think. As I said, it's a mask-dropping event. They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides. It's really why they do their job – to be around power or to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the Royal Court – and so, it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know that it's one of the most revealing lights that ever get shined on them. 

So, let's take a look at a couple of the pre-event discussions that took place as they tried to explain to the public and prepare the public for the nauseating sight to which they were about to be exposed. And we're going to begin with a program that is on MSNBC. It is hosted by a former adviser to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Symone Sanders. She has our own MSNBC show on Saturday and here she is speaking to Joe Biden's former White House press secretary, who now also has her own show on MSNBC. So, you can see, these roles are completely interchangeable. You can go and work at the White House. You can go and work for NBC News. And you don't have to change a single thing. No one notices anything that you do differently because you don't do anything different. It's the same exact role. You're propagandizing the public on behalf of a Democratic president. And so, on this show with Symone Sanders, they had Jen Psaki, who, as I said, has her own show. And Jen Psaki was interviewed about her relationship with the press and how she saw both it and the importance of this event and listen to what it is that she said. 

 

(Video. MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Symone Sanders: […] With the White House Correspondents Association. 

 

Jen Psaki: You know, I will say the majority of the time they were really incredible partners because when we were navigating COVID, even that was some of the hardest times. It was also some of the most collaborative times. […]

 

 

Okay, so just let's stop right there because that is an extraordinary statement. Here is a person who worked for the Biden White House. Her job was to spin and deceive and disseminate propaganda on behalf of the Biden White House. And how she saw journalists were not as her adversaries, not as the people around whom she had to work or against whom she had to work, but instead her very good partners, which of course, is exactly what the media is. They are partners to the government and to the State. Obviously, there's nobody in the Trump White House who would ever call this part of the media or any part of the media – other than very small segments of it – partners, because they played a very different role when the Trump administration was in power. She's talking here about her role in the Biden administration and the way in which she sees the media writ large, the corporate media, and the first words she uses for them are partners, not just partners, but very good partners. Listen to her explanation about why she sees it that way. 

 

(Video. MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Symone Sanders: What was your best day with the White House Correspondents Association? 

 

Jen Psaki: You know, I will say the majority of the time they were really incredible partners, because when we were navigating COVID, even that it was some of the hardest times, it was also some of the most collaborative times. When I was the press secretary, Zeke Miller from the Associated Press at the time was the president, Long may he reign, I used to say, even after he was no longer the president […] 

 

That part is amazing, too. So, Zeke Miller is a White House reporter for the Associated Press, and he was long the president of the White House Correspondents Association, the group that sponsors this glitzy, nauseating affair at the White House. And she is so enamored of Zeke Miller, the person who's the head of the press organization, and she's talking to her not as a member of the press, but as a member of the state. But again, you're seeing there's really no difference. And she said she was so enamored of him; he was such a dedicated partner to what she was doing. They were collaborative, she said – the opposite of adversarial – that her phrase used to be ‘long may he reign’, ‘long may Zeke Miller reign.’ 

You may have seen the footage of a couple of weeks ago where a reporter from Africa, who is not part of this clique, tried to question the White House and the White House press secretary before he was called on, and all of the journalists there were extremely agitated, angry with him because it was the day that they got to see the cast of Ted Lasso. And they were incredibly excited. And this journalist wasn't interested in the cast of Ted Lasso because he's actually a journalist. He wanted to ask the Biden administration about their Africa policy, and his colleagues in the media were incredibly hostile to him telling him to shut up, lecturing him, or treating him like, as he said, like just some kind of a black interloper – is how he described it. He definitely thought there was a racist dynamic to it, but either way, they were very hostile to him. And the reason was that they were not there to ask questions about policy. They wanted to see the stars of Ted Lasso, and it was Zeke Miller – long may he reign – who, on behalf of the entire press corps, apologized for this journalist to the White House press secretary, this very sycophantic apology that he made to her on behalf of all journalists, because there was one journalist there wanting to do his job. So, this is how Jen Psaki sees the press and the person who is the leader or has long been the leader of this organization who reports supposedly on the White House for the Associated Press, a collaborator, a partner, someone about whom she says “long may he reign.” 

 

(Video. MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Jen Psaki: We had to navigate through a very difficult time in history, a time where we wanted to return access to the press, show value and respect for the media, but also do it in a way that was keeping people safe. They're also very important and valuable partners when there are foreign trips. I mean, you know this – when you're going to a war zone, you do go to the Correspondents Association and you say, “Hey, we're going to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere that is a challenging security place to be. I need to work with you on how we create a press pool for them.” 

 

I mean, have you seen anything less adversarial in your life than Jen Psaki's view of the White House press corps? She regards them as what they are – her partners. It's just bizarre that she's forgetting that that's not supposed to be how it works. That's not supposed to actually be what their function is. That's not what they pretend it is. But for some reason, I think probably because she was speaking with her current colleague and her prior colleague at the White House, they forgot that there are cameras on and that there's a fraud that's supposed to be maintained about the relationship between the White House and the media. They're not supposed to be described publicly as partners, collaborators, friends, or people with whom you work towards the same aim. But that is the reality. And that's why this clip was so revealing. 

Equally revealing was a reporter, I believe, from the Wall Street Journal. We don't see her name here. We are about to see her. She is a guest as well talking to Sanders, on the same show, about the role of the media. Let's listen to what she says. 

 

(Video. MSNBC. April 28, 2023)

 

Symone Sanders: Let's just be honest, okay? Know, I was going to get a straight answer from the podium in the briefing room. If you were traveling with the president or the vice president, you do not always get a straight answer for the president or vice president. I used to be one of the people helping people craft maybe some not-so-straight answers. So […]

 

All right. Well, so there, first of all, is Symone Sanders saying that her job at the White House was to craft answers that weren't direct, honest, informative, or straight for journalists. She was supposed to deceive journalists. Jen Psaki evidently thought they were very happy with that. They were great partners as she did that. So that's the admission. So, we're going to get her name in a second. She's currently the White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She used to be at The Guardian. I want you to listen to her as she describes how she sees her role and her relationship with the current White House. 

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
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The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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