Press freedoms are tightening for journalists who report adversarially on NATO
Legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone argued that freedom of the press required going as far as "freedom for lies". Western governments increasingly demand alignment with NATO.
According to documents and statements regarding his detainment, British citizen Kit Klarenberg was compelled to disclose the passwords for his electronic devices to British border security officers after landing in London’s Luton airport roughly two-and-a-half weeks ago, on Wednesday, May 17. The passwords belonged to his phone, tablet, and what Klarenberg told me was “a dead foreign sim card I forgot I had with me”. While Klarenberg asserts that neither his phone nor tablet has been used for sensitive conversations with his journalistic sources, he worries that the small music storage device seized by U.K. authorities might have previously held “journalistic materials” which the government could forensically recover.
Klarenberg has spent more than two years as the de facto U.K.-arm of the firebrand, anti-imperialist online news outlet The Grayzone, which was spun out of the progressive online news site AlterNet in January 2018. Grayzone’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Max Blumenthal, has built the organization into a veritable third rail, such that even their major scoops are generally ignored or smeared as a matter of propriety. But when the organization makes embarrassing mistakes — most notably publishing a contributed article which invoked artificial intelligence text generation to back up several of its claims — the criticisms make headlines.
According to Klarenberg, his detainment in Luton centered around allegations that he had agreed to report on hacked materials provided to him by the Russian Federal Security Service — better known as the FSB. Klarenberg described the allegations as laughable and, when reached for comment, Blumenthal stated that his organization has “never knowingly even spoken with a Russian intelligence operative.” (By comparison, even PBS and major human rights groups comfortably report on hacked files when the target is a U.S. adversary.)
To their most vocal critics, Grayzone journalists are “prolific spreader[s] of disinformation” who “support authoritarianism, defend dictators, and deny human rights abuses”. To their supporters, such as Columbia University Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, the organization is a necessary counter to increasingly staid reporting from major outlets. In an interview with Blumenthal and fellow Grayzone host Aaron Maté posted on October 9, 2022, Sachs lamented:
“When I was young, a long time ago, the New York Times actually used to do investigative reporting…Now it’s like a different world…that’s why…what you’re doing is so important. We’re not getting it from sources that are the ‘authoritative sources’, what we’re getting is the government line.”
All Governments Lie
Isidor Feinstein Stone was an expert in exposing government lies through the careful analysis of official government statements. His impact and style were so pronounced that, despite his ferocious independence from institutions, he became the namesake of both the Harvard-affiliated I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence and the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award. (Democracy Now! co-host Amy Goodman has won both.)
I. F. Stone’s name became synonymous with left-leaning, independent journalism, but his convictions on the necessity of defending the extremities of journalistic freedom have arguably been abandoned.
As part of an interview conducted on April 5, 1974 with host James Day for his public television program “Day at Night”, Stone argued that “unless you're willing to have people tell lies or half lies, you shut off truths”.
The roughly one-minute exchange is worth reproducing in full:
I. F. Stone: "I wanted to defend what I considered basic American principles. And that is the right of freedom of speech and free political activity. And that meant defending first the Trotskyites and then the communists. I disagreed with liberals who were only ready to defend people if it could be proven that they were practically illiterate and couldn't possibly be Marxists and they weren't really communists. I felt that unless there was freedom for everybody, it would be whittled away for everybody."
James Day: "And that means freedom for half-truths as well as truths?"
I. F. Stone: "Freedom for lies. I mean, the basic premise of a free society is that none of us can be sure of the truth, and none of us can ever be sure of the whole truth, and therefore it's worth listening to others. And unless you're willing to have people tell lies or half lies, you shut off truths. There's no way of policing it. There has to be freedom. There's no half-way house, and that was the philosophy of Jefferson and the first amendment."
Deteriorating Western Press Freedoms
On Friday, the respected international press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) issued a press release warning that Poland’s new “commission of inquiry into Russian influence on internal security” is likely to be exploited to suppress independent journalism critical of the current Polish government. The same day, the UK-based National Union of Journalists (NUJ) issued its own press release which “expressed grave concern over the arrest of journalist Kit Klarenberg at Luton airport under counter-terrorism legislation”.
By the next day, NUJ’s statement of concern had been silently removed. Neither NUJ nor the president of the union, Natasha Hirst, has responded to a request for comment regarding the reasoning behind the revocation.
According to Blumenthal, “which side you’re on in the new Cold War determines whether you’re a journalist or not in the eyes of the Western media establishment.”
But harassment of Grayzone journalists by NATO-aligned governments is far from new. Both Blumenthal’s spouse, Anya Parampil, and Aaron Maté are listed as “criminals” by the Ukrainian nationalist website Myrotvorets, which was co-founded by an advisor to the Ukrainian interior ministry. The New York-based nonprofit Committee to Project Journalists has repeatedly condemned Myrotvorets’s publication of journalists’ personal information and has documented the website’s role in death threats to journalists.
Seth Stern, the Director of Advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told me that “Publicly listing journalists as criminals can put them in legal and physical danger, especially if the listing site has government ties. If the site’s editors don’t like what the journalists write they should refute it, not call them criminals”.
When for reached for comment, Myrotvorets demanded: “Who are you? Why didn't you send us copies of your documents so that we could make sure that you are not a Russian spy, but who you pretend to be?”
Despite providing Myrotvorets an official website verifying my email address and Signal number, the organization ceased responding.