Russians under the bed: Greenwald details MSNBC’s uncorrected lies, smear tactics

by WorldTribune Staff, July 12, 2018

On MSNBC, “lies are not corrected; they are rewarded, provided the lies are designed to smear the reputations of Democratic Party critics,” journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in a July 8 report for The Intercept.

Greenwald pointed to an MSNBC “fabrication” during the 2016 presidential election which, to date, the cable news network has not issued a correction for. He also cited ongoing “classically McCarthyite tactics” the network uses as a de facto organ of the Democratic Part.

On August 20, 2016 MSNBC “intelligence expert” Malcolm Nance said that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “has a show on Russia Today.”

“Whatever your views might be about Stein and her third-party candidacy, there is no disputing the fact that Nance’s statement was a falsehood, a fabrication, a lie,” Greenwald wrote. “Stein did not have a show on RT, nor did she ever host a show on RT. What Nance said was made up out of whole cloth – fabricated – in order to encourage MSNBC viewers to believe that Stein, one of the candidates running against Clinton, was a paid agent of the Kremlin and employee of RT.”

The media watchdog group FAIR documented Nance’s fabrication and urged MSNBC to issue a correction. The Intercept wrote about the the incident on several occasions.

“To date – almost two years later – neither NBC News nor MSNBC, nor a single journalist who works for either one of those media outlets has corrected this significant falsehood, despite obviously knowing that it was broadcast to their viewers,” Greenwald noted. “In other words, NBC News and MSNBC know that they told viewers something that was materially false, and yet refuse to correct it.”

Nance “has since gone from ‘MSNBC contributor’ to ‘MSNBC intelligence analyst,’ and is far more pervasive on the network, and its hosts have spent the month aggressively promoting his new book on how Vladimir Putin is destroying U.S. democracy,” Greenwald wrote.

Which brought Greenwald to another recent incident involving Nance.

Last week, Greenwald noted he traveled to Moscow “to meet with Edward Snowden, as well as to participate in a cybersecurity conference, on a panel regarding ‘fake news.’ ”

After the event, Greenwald said, “there were camera crews from numerous media outlets wanting to interview some of the panel participants. I spoke to all of them. One of them was RT, which published the full transcript of the three-minute interview, as well as selected video clips. The primary point I made that received the most attention – namely, that it has become regarded as suspicious, and even treasonous, merely to visit Russia, and that I accepted the invitation to attend in part to combat that toxic, dangerous, and xenophobic perception – is the statement of mine that RT highlighted on social media.”

Nance then did “exactly what he did on MSNBC to Jill Stein in August 2016: In two tweets, he outright lied about me on purpose, telling his 420,000 Twitter followers that I am ‘an agent of Moscow’ and ‘deep in the Kremlin pocket.’ He further lied by stating that I ‘helped Snowden defect’ and that I ‘reports into [my] masters in Moscow,’ ” Greenwald wrote.

“None of Nance’s statements here is opinion. These claims – especially that I am an ‘agent of Moscow’ and ‘deep in the Kremlin pocket’ – are intended to be factual statements: that I work for, and am paid by, Russia and the Kremlin, and that I aided Snowden in ‘defecting’ to Moscow. They are all outright lies. There is no other way to describe them.”

Nance, Greenwald wrote, “will be celebrated inside MSNBC, not sanctioned or even told to rescind his lie, because – just as happened with the lie he told about Jill Stein – the person he chose to falsely accuse of being a paid agent of Russia is someone that the MSNBC audience of Democratic partisans hates, and lying is thus permitted and encouraged, just the way it is in any partisan organization. The network is derided as ‘MSDNC’ for a reason.”

Greenwald continued: “Obviously, Nance is simply adhering to the post-World War II tactic of the U.S. military and intelligence community from which he emerged: For decades, they accuse any journalists they dislike, or dissidents of any kind, of being covert agents of Moscow.”

Nance’s tactic of “accusing a journalist of being an agent of Russia without a shred of evidence” is nearly identical to “the actual words Joseph McCarthy spoke at one of his notorious hearings,” Greenwald noted.

NBC News and MSNBC “have essentially merged with the CIA and intelligence community and thus, use their tactics. The network is filled with former generals and CIA officials who are part of the community that pioneered these smear tactics of accusing journalists and critics they dislike of being traitors, spies, and Kremlin loyalists. Indeed, Nance sometimes appears on MSNBC along with former CIA Director John Brennan, who MSNBC also hired as an ‘analyst.’ This is who they are,” Greenwald wrote.

Greenwald concluded that “you can’t be a credible critic of lies – whether told by other cable outlets or politicians – if you not only permit but clearly encourage and reward your own on-air personalities when they do the same. And in the case of MSNBC, they not only do this, but they practice one of the most historically destructive versions of it: fabricated allegations that their critics, including journalists, are treasonous agents of a foreign power.”


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