Thread by @ggreenwald

The @NewYorker profile of Dan Bongino by CNN's @eosnos is so predictable you could write it yourself without reading it. It *laments* that the new online/media ecosystem Bongino uses is built to prevent censors like Media Matters from banning ideas -- as if that's a bad thing.

Whatever you think of Bongino or anyone else whose views you hate, it's incomparably dangerous to allow groups created by supreme DC scumbag David Brock to police our discourse, and it's good and healthy that new independent platforms deny them that power

newyorker.com/magazine/2022/…

The reason we created @FreedomofPress was Joe Lieberman and other neocons had pressured and threatened Paypal, Visa, MasterCard, Amazon and banks to cut off WikiLeaks' fundraising. That's the new tactic to crush dissent. Anything that subverts it is good.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

One last point about the formulaic Bongino profile: it used to be that a @TheNewYorker hit piece by a CNN writer would be harmful. Now: it doesn't matter. They've so whittled their credibility that the targets of their smears have larger audiences than they, making them impotent.

To malign competitors who have more success, corporate outlets accuse them of catering to an insular like-minded audience. Pure projection! That's what The Atlantic/NewYorker axis does: speaks only to mainstream liberals & David Frum types. That's why they lost their influence.

Over the last decade, corporate outlets decided their only profit model was to feed a specific ideological camp a non-stop orgy of validation and flattery. That's why so many fail: Vice/Gizmodo/HuffPost/Vox = NYT/NewYorker/Atlantic. Same ideology, no dissent: purely insular.

As their audience, prestige and influence rapidly erodes, the go-to line of attack for old corporate outlets is to claim that their more successful, more independent competitors only speak to a homogenous audience. That's true of *them*: we speak to a diverse range of readers.