Dan Bongino, the host of Unfiltered with Dan Bongino on the Fox News Channel (FNC), spoke with journalist Glenn Greenwald on Monday about Americans’ lack of trust in the media.
DAN BONGINO: You know, Glenn, between WMD, the Russia hoax, have taken a few notes here. The Hunter Biden laptop, FBI abuses, the pipeline story, is it safe to say that the trust in your government and the media infrastructure is probably a bad bet right now?
GLENN GREENWALD: Every poll shows that there's basically no institution more hated and less trusted than the corporate media. And they sit around complaining about all that all the time. They whine that it's unfair. They insist that they deserve respect.
They blame everybody else, and they never, ever look in the mirror and ask, why is it that we have lost the faith and trust of the American people? Because if they did, they would realize that the answer is staring right at them in that mirror. They're the reasons why people no longer trust them because they lie continuously. Everybody knows that journalists, like all human beings, are sometimes going to get stories wrong. I've been a journalist for 20 years.
I've gotten a few stories wrong. And when you do it, no one likes it. You go and acknowledge the error. You explain to your readers how it happened. You misread a document. A source told you something wrong, and you promptly correct it.
What they though do, though. All of those lies that you just showed them, saying right before the election that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Everybody knows now that's a lie because the New York Times and everybody else has authenticated those documents. And not one of those media outlets and not one has gone back and retracted their lies, has accounted for them, has explained them, has acknowledged the subsequent evidence, disproving them. And that shows you that lying is not something they do because they're incompetent. It shows you that lying is their actual function. They're not apologizing because they did their job.
DAN BONGINO: Glenn, you've been in this space for a long time now. I was reading a piece the other day that I found quite interesting, and the piece was making the case that this isn't going to get any better because a lot of these legacy media outlets at the Times and The Washington Post, are increasingly relying on subscriptions and Glenn candidly a lot of these people just want to be lied to. They really want to believe. Trump and Vladimir Putin were giving each other back rubs and stole an election. Your thoughts on that?
GLENN GREENWALD: No. I think that's the key. It used to be the case that if a journalist got caught lying, they were disgraced. There was a penalty for it. That was the reason people sought to avoid doing it, and if they did it, they apologized. That has changed completely now. The model on which they depend is exactly the opposite. If you look at how balkanized our media is, liberal outlets only speak to liberals, even institutions that used to be considered kind of neutral and in the middle, like NPR and the New York Times, at least that's what they claimed, CBS News, the networks overwhelmingly, they are only speaking to liberals and Democrats, and they know that and their audience wants them to lie to help advance the Democratic Party. So when they get caught, they don't need to apologize because their audience is in favor of them doing that.
