Thread by @ggreenwald

In one sense, this is just the latest dreary article whining about Substack by a jealous, resentful, wispy, inconsequential journalist: those come daily now - just a reflexive content-filler for digital outlets. But it's worth taking a brief look at this one: it's quite revealing

Just **72** hours ago, the Guardian was forced by public shaming to correct a falsehood that many outlets have long recognized as false: namely, Substack recruited me with an advance. Yet today, the Guardian publishes the same lie by @jamesrbuk. Look!
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

Do see what's going on? These are the outlets that insist that Substack writers are just "bloggers" while they -- the august, trustworthy news sites -- are carefully edited and fact-checked. The reality is the opposite: *they publish any shit that pops into their bloggers' heads.

The Guardian article by whiny, resentful James Ball published this lie -- the same one they just corrected 72 hours ago -- not once but twice: that I was "targeted" by Substack with an advance. They have *no* editorial rigor. That's why they publish multiple false stories.

Then there's this little snide wielding of labels, the hallmark of every bitter, resentful journalist who has never broken a story: I'm just a "blogger" known for Twitter fights: this by an author writing at a paper that won a grand total of 1 Pulitzer in its 200 years: my story.

This is a vivid mirror into these large corporate sites. James Ball never broke a story of any significance: let alone the Pulitzer-winning NSA reporting I did or the Brazil exposés (which his own paper heralded). Nobody reads him, so they use this framework to beg for prestige.

Just yesterday, 3 of the largest US corporate outlets -- which love to claim how editorially rigorous they are: NYT, WPost, NBC -- got caught, again, purporting to have "confirmed" one another's false stories.

This is why they malign anything independent

These large outlets know they constantly publish lies. The employees who write for them feel bitter and resentful at anyone who breaks stories that matter (James Ball & The Guardian Assange despise more for the same reason: he reveals the journalism they don't do).

So their only method to try to manage collapsing public trust in their work is to try to convince you that their critics and those doing journalism outside their control are even more unreliable: just "bloggers," Twitter pundits, etc.

But this is the *reality* of what they are:

How is this even possible at an outlet that wants to convince you to trust them and ignore any journalists who don't work in corporate structures like theirs?

Having been told by hordes of unruly, lowly peasants that his article contains two blatant factual falsehoods -- in an article designed to imply that only he does "real journalism" -- this is how the Guardian's @Jamesrbuk responds. This is how they think:

The Guardian has quietly deleted the multiple factual errors in its article by blogger @jamesrbuk which I documented here, though did not note any correction or editor's note: just trust-building stealth edits:

(On the left: the original errors - on the right: how it now reads)

The Guardian now has a note acknowledging the correction (way, way down at the bottom) -- the same correction they had to make 3 days ago to a different article: adding to my collection.