Glenn Greenwald is a member of an exclusive club of intellectually honest , far-left anti Trump journalists who saw through the entire Russiagate collusion hoax.

Greenwald and others in this small, progressive cohort were vocal in denouncing this propaganda push by the Democrats (including Deep State Obama holdovers) and their water-carriers in the monolithic, corporate media to sabotage the Trump administration as part of an attempt remove President Trump from office.

Earlier this week, he published a superb article in The Intercept reacting to New York Times columnist Ben Smith’s critique of Ronan Farrow‘s allegedly sketchy reporting techniques. Farrow’s reporting broke the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal for which he won a Pulitizer.

[It’s ironic that Smith, the former Buzzfeed editor in chief, is throwing shade on another journalist’s integrity when he, Smith, was responsible for publishing the fake, Russian-source Steele dossier paid for by the Democrats, but that’s a separate matter.]

Again, not a supporter of of the incumbent president by any means, Greenwald focused on the bigger picture, which is so-called resistance journalism as practiced by those unaccountable scribes and pundits suffering from the advanced stages of Trump derangement syndrome.

“What is particularly valuable about Smith’s article is its perfect description of a media sickness borne of the Trump era that is rapidly corroding journalistic integrity and justifiably destroying trust in news outlets. Smith aptly dubs this pathology ‘resistance journalism,’ by which he means that journalists are now not only free, but encouraged and incentivized, to say or publish anything they want, no matter how reckless and fact-free, provided their target is someone sufficiently disliked in mainstream liberal media venues and/or on social media…”

Greenwald quotes this paragraph from Smith’s article:

[Farrow’s] work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

Greenwald continues about how mainstream media reported one so-called bombshell after another about Russian collusion that turned out to be utter nonsense:

“Put another way: As long the targets of one’s conspiracy theories and attacks are regarded as villains by the guardians of mainstream liberal social media circles, journalists reap endless career rewards for publishing unvetted and unproven — even false — attacks on such people, while never suffering any negative consequences when their stories are exposed as shabby frauds…

“Exactly the same journalism-destroying dynamic is driving the post-Russiagate media landscape. There is literally no accountability for the journalists and news outlets that spread falsehoods in their pages, on their airwaves, and through their viral social media postings.

“In ‘resistance journalism,’ facts and truth are completely dispensable — indeed, dispensing with them is rewarded — provided ‘reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices.‘

That describes perfectly the journalists who were defined, and enriched, by years of Russiagate deceit masquerading as reporting. By far the easiest path to career success over the last three years — booming ratings, lucrative book sales, exploding social media followings, career rehabilitation even for the most discredited D.C. operatives — was to feed establishment liberals an endless diet of fearmongering and inflammatory conspiracies about Drumpf and his White House. Whether it was true or supported by basic journalistic standards was completely irrelevant. Responsible reporting was simply was not a metric used to assess its worth.

“It was one thing for activists, charlatans, and con artists to exploit fears of Trump for material gain: that, by definition, is what such people do. But it was another thing entirely for journalists to succumb to all the low-hanging career rewards available to them by throwing all journalistic standards into the trash bin in exchange for a star turn as a #Resistance icon. That, as Smith aptly describes, is what ‘Resistance Journalism’ is, and it’s hard to identify anything more toxic to our public discourse…

“The most menacing attribute of what Smith calls ‘Resistance Journalism’ is that it permits and tolerates no dissent and questioning: perhaps the single most destructive path journalism can take. It has been well-documented that MSNBC and CNN spent three years peddling all sorts of ultimately discredited Russiagate conspiracy theories by excluding from their airwaves anyone who dissented from or even questioned those conspiracies. Instead, they relied upon an increasingly homogenized army of former security state agents from the CIA, FBI, and NSA to propound, in unison, all sorts of claims about Trump and Russia that turned out to be false, and peppered their panels of ‘analysts’ with journalists whose career skyrocketed exclusively by pushing maximalist Russiagate claims, often by relying on the same intelligence officials these cable outlets sat them next to….

“All professions and institutions suffer when a herd, groupthink mentality and the banning of dissent prevail. But few activities are corroded from such a pathology more than journalism is, which has as its core function skepticism and questioning of pieties. Journalism quickly transforms into a sickly, limp version of itself when it itself wages war on the virtues of dissent and airing a wide range of perspectives.

“I do not know how valid are Smith’s critiques of Farrow’s journalism. But what I know for certain is that Smith’s broader diagnosis of ‘Resistance Journalism’ is dead-on, and the harms it is causing are deep and enduring.”