Grayzone Revelations Prompt Awkward Questions

Tankies love to attack others for receiving public funding - at least until their own donors come to light.

Aaron Maté speaks at the "Woke Imperialism / Diversity Among War Mongers" seminar, April 29th, 2021. Sounds like a great time. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Aaron Maté wants you to know he is very concerned about journalists who work at state-funded outlets.

Unless, of course, that someone is his own editor, who was on Iran’s payroll as of a few years ago.

In fact, Maté and his ilk are far more compromised than those they attack.

Yesterday, on Twitter, Maté accused Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, associate editor at New Lines Magazine, of being “Pentagon-tied.” His apparent rationale for making this claim is that New Lines, like many Western media organizations and NGOs, depends in part on public funding. In addition, its owner, the New Lines Institute, has a research collaboration with the Modern War Institute at West Point (hence the specific charge that New Lines is “Pentagon-tied”).

After all, what reporter worthy of the name could possibly maintain independence if they rely on government money?

As it happens, emails from a recent hack reveal that Wyatt Reed, “managing editor” of The Grayzone News (whatever the hell that means), once accepted regular monthly payments from PressTV. The Grayzone News is Maté’s employer, while PressTV is an Iranian state-run website known, among other things, for hosting forced-confessions from dissidents right before their executions.

(Credit to ItsArtoir for publishing those emails.)

The PressTV revelations are not particularly surprising given that other Grayzone contributors such as Kit Klarenberg and Mohamed Elmaazi previously worked for Sputnik, a Kremlin-run propaganda rag—as did Reed himself.

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One would think The Grayzone, of all places, would identify its top funders—being that Maté and other Grayzone hacks love to berate others over their own funding sources (which, mind you, those other outlets publicly disclose). Unless, of course, there is something The Grayzone wants to hide.

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What’s more, The Grayzone News is notorious for its refusal to disclose its own major donors. But fear not; Reed, its editor, will not tolerate such behavior from other organizations. Take this comment he tweeted at Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat (which, by the way, does reveal its donors, unlike Reed’s outlet). It is just precious.

(Hats off to Twitter user toadintheholioo for digging that up.)

In what was supposed to be some sort of “gotcha” reply to me, Reed explained yesterday that “we don’t name our individual donors as they generally don’t want unemployed neocon freaks like you stalking them.”

It should go without saying that if major donors to a media organization condition their donations on remaining anonymous, this should disqualify them as donors.

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While many Western outlets do receive public funding, political interference in their content is practically non-existent. In the very rare instances when it does occur, it becomes a major news story. So, if censorship were at all common, we would hear about it. People would resign. Scandals would erupt—kind of like what is happening now under Trump.

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One would think The Grayzone, of all places, would identify its top funders—being that Maté and other Grayzone hacks love to berate others over their own funding sources (which, mind you, those other outlets publicly disclose). Unless, of course, there is something The Grayzone wants to hide.

While many Western outlets do receive public funding, political interference in their content is practically non-existent, as I explained in a previous post. In the very rare instances when it does occur, it becomes a major news story.

So, if censorship were at all common, we would hear about it. People would resign. Scandals would erupt—kind of like what is happening now under Trump.

Since his victory in the 2024 election, Trump and his allies have brought tremendous pressure to bear on private and public media alike. The result is exactly what one would expect: mass resignations and a flood of news stories. Here is a sampling:

Until Trump came along, neither state nor private donors tried to lean on media organizations to influence their content—at least not to any significant degree. Again, if they had, we would have heard about it. There would have been stories all over the place.

But for outlets funded by autocratic regimes such as Russia and Iran, state money comes with strings attached. These are countries where the rule of law is a fiction and there is no pretense of allowing independent reporting. As a result, you can either toe the official line or get lost.

This is how it works when the rules and norms of liberal democracy no longer hold. As it goes in Russia and Iran, so it goes in Trump’s America.

Nihilism Posing As Principle

The difference between Maté and the journalists he criticizes is that the latter possess something he does not: integrity. Maté simply cannot grasp how any reporter would operate without regurgitating state propaganda. So, he assumes everyone else must be just like him.

Spewing official propaganda is easy for Maté because he does not have any actual principles. If he did, he would not engage in transparently idiotic atrocity-denial on behalf of autocratic regimes. That is his M.O., after all.

In sum, the next time Maté or his charlatan friends call into question the independence of a legitimate reporter, keep in mind that they do not actually give a shit about journalistic integrity; they just pretend to. Because if anybody is compromised, it is them.