Robert B. Jones

Glenn Greenwald says corporate journalists are losing their minds over @elonmusk calling out major corporations for stifling free speech because they are in bed with the very corporations they claim to scrutinize. @ggreenwald explains that we are at a crossroads where journalism, once a watchdog of establishment power, is now shackled by corporate advertisers. "What went wrong here is not what Elon Musk said. It's so revealing that so many journalists are aghast that anyone would dare tell Disney and major corporations to go f**k yourself when they're trying to limit, censor, and control the flow of political content. If you aren't willing to say that to corporations who are trying to limit what you can say, don't bother calling yourself a journalist. We need way more journalists willing to say, go f**k yourself to people who try and limit what they say. The problem is, is that the people who are hired by these major media corporations, and who thrive in them and succeed in them are people who have the opposite instinct. Their instinct is to assuage and serve and placate establishment power, not to defy it. Even though the purpose of journalism is to be adversarial to establishment power. Once journalism started getting corporatized no longer owned by families dedicated to journalism or local communities but by major corporations that have all kinds of other interests besides their media division. And, what kind of attributes are awarded at major corporations? People who avoid controversy who avoid conflict, who avoid displeasing and angering powerful people. That's the corporate ethos, and the corporatization of media meant that that kind of attribute was imported into journalism. And that's why almost no one who works for large media corporations or the media corporations themselves has the courage to say this. They're shocked. They think it's a sign that he's unhinged when in reality, it's just a sign of how cowardly and craven they are."