There’s a war brewing between corporate journalists who work for mainstream media (MSM) and subscription journalists on Substack – some of whom were once employed by the very publications they now denounce and colleagues to the journalists they now critique.
Each side says the other side is out of order in trying to repress free speech or report radical falsehoods. They also, as journalists, offer well-articulated arguments to underscore their points. The “information war” – as it has been dubbed by Subtack star and Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald – has people weighing in on both sides.
According to Greenwald, corporate MSM journalists don’t like Substack journalists because they are threatened by their freedom of thought and averse to criticism.
“That is precisely why they are so furious. They cannot stand the fact that journalists can break major stories and find an audience while maintaining an independent voice, critically questioning rather than obediently reciting the orthodoxies that bind them and, most of all, without playing their infantile in-group games and submitting to their hive-mind decrees,” Greenwald wrote.
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The commentary came after Greenwald and Fox News host Tucker Carlson were heavily criticized for alleged “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” aimed at popular New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz.
Those who came to Lorenz’s defense and/or derided the danger of Substack’s failure to moderate content included: former BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Broderick (who was fired for plagiarism in 11 of his stories); UCLA Professor of Information Studies Sarah Roberts; and Google’s vice president of Privacy Product Management Rob Leathern, RT.com reported.
“I wrote about the attacks against @TaylorLorenz and the growing community of right-wing culture warriors and TERFs that are using Substack to network and organize,” Broderick tweeted, along with a link to an article in which he further independent Substack journalists.
“Greenwald is part of a cadre of writers who position themselves as neither left or right-wing, instead focusing on culture war Twitter drama about being ‘canceled’ and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students to make the actually very standard and traditional right-wing status quo that they’re defending sound slightly less tedious,” Broderick wrote. “It’s worth thinking about this group not as a collection of writers, but instead as a (sic) online subculture that lives on Substack.”
However, Greenwald said not so in his article. “Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them,” Greenwald wrote.
This fight was predicted by media critic Stephen Miller in Nov. 2020 when he tweeted, “It’s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to substack.”
Interestingly, Lorenz herself sent a tweet encouraging users to follow her on Substack in February, so it seems not every corporate MSM journalist has a problem with the platform, but rather some of the independent journalists using it.
