Though The Washington Post was forced to retract the first sentence and central premise of its nothingburger ‘expose’ targeting The Grayzone, pro-Israel operatives are using the malicious hit piece to demand a federal investigation.
The secret is out. Starting in 2020, for a period of less than a year, and well before ever joining the staff of The Grayzone, journalist Wyatt Reed appeared multiple times on PressTV, an Iranian state-backed international news service. You may have noticed it from Wyatt’s regular postings at the time highlighting these videos, or the “correspondent @PressTV” description that featured in his Twitter bio at the time.
For the Washington Post’s so-called “disinformation threat” researcher, Joseph Menn, this became a vitally important fact to highlight on a full page of a legacy newspaper whose banner motto boldly declares, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
After sending Wyatt a series of aggressively worded emails implicitly threatening to have him criminally prosecuted, and demanding to speak with his lawyer, the Washington Post employee relied on a series of hacked documents to “expose” what Wyatt never attempted to conceal: while beginning his journalistic career, he appeared on the Iranian news outlet Press TV several dozen times.
Incidentally, during this time, Wyatt received payment from such nefarious foreign outlets as CBS Weekend News and CBS This Morning, which correctly credited him as a journalist when airing the footage he gathered reporting from the frontlines of BLM protests.
Since joining The Grayzone in June 2023, Wyatt has not accepted a penny from any government-backed outlet. In fact, The Grayzone imposes far stricter rules on its employees than The Washington Post, which appears to have no such prohibitions on its employees moonlighting for government backed think tanks.
However, the case remains: for a brief period of time, four years ago, he openly appeared in reports for an Iranian outlet which employs Americans to this day.
So why, four years after Wyatt’s last appearance on Press TV, is the Washington Post targeting him, and only him, and even suggesting he should be jailed, despite the fact that dozens of Americans have reported for this same network?
The motive behind this malicious attack is abundantly clear: Wyatt now works for The Grayzone, and The Grayzone’s factual reporting has infuriated boosters of the Ukraine proxy war and members of Israel’s international propaganda network.
That is why the Washington Post’s demonstrably Menn-dacious correspondent falsely stated in the opening line of his smear piece: “Recently unearthed documents reveal that leaders of an online news site aimed at Americans have received money from both Russian and Iranian government media outlets.”
That bogus and defamatory line has since been publicly retracted by the Washington Post, undercutting Menn’s apparent agenda, which was to falsely insinuate Russian and Iranian sponsorship of The Grayzone.
Despite issuing a major correction, the Washington Post article remains loaded with falsehoods and twisted innuendo. For example, the caption of the article’s featured photo, which shows Vladimir Putin delivering a speech through a television screen, reads, “Russia has sought new ways to reach Americans through news sites and social media.” Yet nothing in the article substantiates any connection between this outlet and any such Russian propaganda initiative, because none exists.
Menn’s smear piece has nonetheless inspired a wave of disinformation from a segment of the Western foreign policy establishment determined to muzzle The Grayzone.
As the antiwar commentator Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, “the hit piece is having its intended effect; you see professional empire apologists all over Twitter today promoting the false claim that The Grayzone is funded by Iran and Russia. The empire’s information warriors now have one more weapon they can use to weaken public trust in dissident journalism whenever it presents an inconvenient narrative.”
Ellie Cohanim, who effectively advanced Israeli interests as former US Deputy Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in Mike Pompeo’s State Department, exemplified the trend, falsely and libelously claiming on Twitter, “Max Blumenthal now documented to be on Islamic Republic of Iran’s payroll. A national security threat, he & @TheGrayzoneNews should be investigated.”
Re: Failing Washington Post attempts to get Grayzone editor jailed with error-filled smear piece
on June 7, 2024, 6:51 am