No one will be immune or exempt from the canceled culture pendulum as long as the media uses it as a weapon to silence their critics and restrict freedom of speech, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald warned over the weekend.
Greenwald sounded on Twitter Thursday after a contributing opinion writer from The New York Times was fired from his think tank post over a tweet that jokingly suggested that former Vice President Mike Pence should be lined up to unite the country.
NYT CONTRIBUTOR LOST THINKS TANKING OVER TWO SUGGESTED BID ‘LYNCH MIKE PENCE’
Greenwald published his grievances over the weekend in Substack, where he defended the author and tore his “moronic” shooting into the hands of the “technocratic centrist think tank he worked for.”
“In the prevailing climate, the rational choice is to avoid social contempt and extinction, no matter how unfounded the grievances may be,” Greenwald wrote.
The investigative journalist has long warned about the dangers of media trust caused by a recent embrace of the cancellation culture, but the latest attack, he said, sends a strong message: you may believe you are above the fight, but it is a matter of time before the media mob “will come for you.”
“Release this monster and one day it will come to you,” Greenwald wrote. “And you have no principle of calling credibly out of protest.”
In a follow-up to Sunday Morning Futures, Greenwald pointed to a new survey by global communications firm Edelman, which found that only 46 percent of Americans trust traditional media.
“They are losing confidence and trust, and this is not a new sudden development. It has been going on for years,” he told host Maria Bartiromo.
The reason, he believes, is because mainstream media reactions have accepted the reaction that they ‘blame others who criticize their reporting, their bad reporting, as if they are being unfairly insulted.’
“The rational choice is to avoid social contempt and extinction, no matter how unfounded the grievances may be.”
“If it does not work,” he said, “what they are doing now is a third response that is trying to censor critics and those who are actually confident by saying kick these people off the internet, their audience is too big, censor these people, throw their platform on the internet. ‘
What the media could not ask is ‘what they did that caused the public to lose confidence,’ he explained. “And rather than do that, they are now at the point where they are censoring advocates to force the audience to listen to them.”