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DISGUSTING & DANGEROUS,” screamed the banner headline at the bottom of the television screen, just under the blonde-sheathed visage of Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “GREENWALD BLASTS INTERCEPT FOR SMEARING INGRAHAM GUESTS.”
And so during a recent episode of The Ingraham Angle, Glenn Greenwald—who is so familiar to the top-rated cable channel’s millions of viewers that he requires only a surname—put on a suit and tie in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives, to continue doing what has occupied his energies for much of the past month.
That’s deploying every conceivable platform—from Twitter (where he has 1.6 million followers) to YouTube to Substack to an array of popular conservative websites to the very top of the ziggurat, Rupert Murdoch’s corporate cash cow—to denounce former friends and colleagues at The Intercept, the left-leaning digital news and opinion site he co-founded with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill in 2013.
“These millennial digital liberal outlets like the Intercept, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, so many of them—they think that if you’re a conservative, you’re not really a journalist,” the 54-year-old Greenwald intoned (a tad weirdly, because most of his targets are in their late forties and fifties), while Ingraham could barely contain a gleeful grin. “They think that you’re part of this crypto-fascist movement, that you’re the enemy,” he added—referring to two young conservative videographers whose coverage of Black Lives Matter and other protests came under The Intercept’s withering scrutiny.
This past month has occasioned spectacular success, of a sort, for the pugnacious contrarian pundit, an erstwhile leftist journalist-turned-Donald Trump defender who once again is proving his mastery of the right-wing media ecosystem.
Indeed, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.
Last year, following his exit from The Intercept, Greenwald admitted to The Daily Beast that Fox News airs its share of “horrific, toxic, damaging, destructive, and bigoted” content. However, he defended his frequent Fox hits, saying, “I have no doubt that some people at the Intercept were upset that I was going on Fox, but I would no sooner allow anyone to dictate to me which shows I can go on than I would allow anyone to censor my opinions.”
And now he is effectively operating as something of a Fox News assignment editor, as indicated by The Daily Beast’s spot check of the frequency with which Greenwald’s online musings on social media and elsewhere, especially his Substack page, have served as the basis for dozens of articles on Fox News’ website.
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