Glenn Greenwald Obliterates “Tattling, Hall Monitoring, Speech Policing” Journalists After Taylor Lorenz Self-Owns Into Oblivion
20th February 2021
I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.” Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.
One of the essential characteristics of ‘Puritan’ is the firm believe that there is one righteous way of acting, one righteous way of speaking, one righteous way of thinking; everything outside of that narrow compass is Unrighteous, concerning which condemnation is not only permissible but compulsive. It is not enough to be righteous yourself, you must be committed to promoting righteousness in others, which always winds up being committed to denouncing unrighteousness in others and seeking their punishment.
That is why the analogy between the Old Puritans and the Social Justice Warriors is obvious to the most casual observer. Neither group can rest easy so long as somebody, somewhere is acting, speaking, or thinking unsupervised by their moral superiors. As the people of Salem discovered, if you were insufficiently proactive about denouncing others, you ran the risk of being denounced yourself, and fanatics have no liking for what we lawyers call Due Process.