Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is not a friendly place for journalists. Since the onset of the uprising in 2011, the regime has issued few visas. In 2012, when the American journalist Marie Colvin and the French photojournalist Remi Ochlik entered Syria unauthorized, they were targeted and killed. But in 2021, a Canadian podcaster was given unusual access to regime-controlled Syria, and among his various dispatches, one in particular stood out. Standing in front of the ruins of Yarmouk — a Palestinian refugee camp that the regime had besieged, blockaded and bombed from 2013 to 2018 — he obscured Assad’s responsibility for the camp’s destruction and, in a move breathtaking in its cynicism, appealed for an end to sanctions on his regime.
Aaron Mate, the podcaster in question, was a pro-Palestine activist before he pivoted to whitewashing Palestinians’ killers. He once worked for independent media organizations like Democracy Now! and the Real News Network, but as his career foundered it was propped up by new benefactors. He was trotted out by the Russian mission to the United Nations when it needed someone to obfuscate the facts about Assad’s April 2018 chemical attack on Douma. A cache of emails obtained by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability also revealed that he was seen by the Russian propaganda apparatus as a useful channel for the placement of leaks: An employee of the Russian media organization Ruptly confided to two of Mate’s British allies — the controversial academics Paul McKeigue and Piers Robinson — that he had gathered personal information on the witnesses and survivors of the Douma massacre, which he intended to leak to Mate for amplification. This would have put the individuals in mortal danger since the regime was ruthlessly suppressing any information about its responsibility for the attack.
Mate was only following in the footsteps of his American comrade Max Blumenthal, who had had his own Damascene conversion. In 2012, Blumenthal came out strongly against the Syrian regime and resigned from the Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar English over its pro-Assad stance. But as the so-called Arab Spring was beset by counterrevolution, Blumenthal trimmed his sails. After a pilgrimage to Moscow in December 2015, he returned a new man with new politics — and a new website: The Grayzone. Russian media helped raise his profile, and Blumenthal even married a producer for RT, the state-funded TV station previously called Russia Today. At the time, Russia was facing a public relations disaster because the Syrian volunteer rescuers and medics known as the White Helmets, whom it was systematically targeting, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. A documentary film about their heroics was up for an Oscar. Enter Blumenthal to muddy the waters. He concocted a narrative out of extant conspiracy theories (the pro-Assad activist Vanessa Beeley claimed they were mostly stolen from her), starting with the White Helmets and later extending them to the medical professionals of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS). Deploying Islamophobic tropes that echoed Assad regime propaganda, Blumenthal tried to associate both organizations with al Qaeda, calling SAMS “Al Qaeda’s MASH unit.” These smears have been refuted by seven governments, including the United States. Blumenthal would also appear at the U.N. as a guest of the Russian regime.
This represented a remarkable turn of fortune for Blumenthal. In a 2013 appearance at the University of Denver, he had groused about losing income because of his criticism of the Syrian regime, which he said had left him unable to pay his rent. But with his revised appreciation for Assad and his consequential stop in Russia — where he attended the same gala at which retired Gen. Michael Flynn and perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein dined with President Vladimir Putin — he seems to have left his days of want behind. Blumenthal is now listed in public records as the proud owner of a house in Washington, D.C. He revealed in 2023 that Grayzone’s earnings had even allowed his former sidekick Ben Norton to buy property in Nicaragua before Norton declared him “an unstable megalomaniac with no coherent principles” and absconded to China with what Blumenthal claimed was $70,000 of Grayzone’s money.
On Sept. 11, 2024, U.S. federal prosecutors charged RT employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva with violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for an influence operation that funneled $9.7 million to right-wing media stars Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and Lauren Southern. According to the federal indictment, the money was channeled through shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Mauritius to Tenet Media, a social media company registered in Tennessee by the Canadian couple Liam Donovan and Lauren Chen (the latter a former RT employee). Tenet bought the services of the right-wing influencers, dividing $8.7 million among Pool, Rubin and Johnson alone (Rubin was receiving $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus, and Pool was earning $100,000 per video). The influencers were required to produce videos on some of the same issues that Grayzone covers, discussing conspiracy theories around COVID-19 and vaccines, for example, and offering a sympathetic view of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Grayzone claims that it “does not receive funding from any government or government-backed group or individual” and that it relies entirely on the “support of readers like you.” But if the website isn’t receiving money from Russia, it certainly can’t be because of journalistic independence. Grayzone personnel have junketed as guests of regimes from Caracas to Managua and laundered mass crimes from Damascus to Xinjiang. They have shown no qualms about advancing Russian narratives at public forums organized by Russian officials. Blumenthal was brought to the U.N. Security Council to allege that Ukraine was the intransigent party in its war with Russia, while Mate attended a separate U.N. forum to deny the Syrian regime’s documented responsibility for the April 2018 chemical attack on Douma. Their relations with Russian state representatives appear cordial. Russia’s permanent representative to the U.N., Dmitry Polyanskiy, personally thanked both Blumenthal and Mate for their respective U.N. testimonies. He amplifies Mate on Twitter often and was a guest on the Grayzone podcast.
Unlike the fickle right-wingers that the Kremlin tried to instrumentalize, Grayzone offers dependable familiarity. After the 2016 election, when RT and the Russian state-owned news agency and radio broadcast service Sputnik came under increasing scrutiny, several of their employees decamped to U.S. alternative media. Alongside outfits like MintPress and BreakThrough News, Grayzone apparently became a favored sanctuary. Its employees and contributors, such as Anya Parampil, Wyatt Reed, Mohamed Elmaazi, Jeremy Loffredo, Kit Klarenberg, Dan Cohen and Rania Khalek, have all been in the Russian government’s employ at one time or another. The content they produce for Grayzone is indistinguishable from the content they produced for RT or Sputnik. (Perhaps it’s this redundancy that makes the Kremlin consider them unworthy of the kind of investment it made in Rubin, Pool and Johnson.)
There is no reason to dismiss the possibility, however, that Grayzone is kept in business by the “support of readers like you.” Its readers are supportive, even if they aren’t like me or you. A Grayzone GoFundMe page, for instance, records a $30,000 donation from just one individual, “George Waters” (the legal name of Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, who in his later years has turned to pro-Kremlin conspiracism). If podcasters like Chapo Trap House have been raking in millions on the strength of reactionary banter, Grayzone at least focuses on more consequential issues. It is not inconceivable that there is a large enough audience willing to pay for it.
In recent years, both the U.S. government and EU officials have emphasized the threat of disinformation. Since 2016, a whole industry has emerged around this issue. Retired spooks, canny academics and enterprising journalists have all cut into the action. They almost exclusively focus on the supply side. Follow the money, untangle the web, dismantle the deception, they advise. If you monitor malicious actors and throttle their funding, you can legislate them out of business, they say.
But little attention is paid to the demand side. That there are eccentrics with an affinity for conspiracy theories or ideologues with oedipal politics drawn to contrarian narratives is not surprising. But these are marginal phenomena. Normal people are just as likely to be caught in their snare. Merely ferreting out the malefactors will do little to curb the problem as long as we overlook what makes people fall prey to such narratives.
After years of steadily losing credibility over their blatantly propagandistic coverage of Syria, Ukraine and COVID-19, Grayzone is experiencing a revival of sorts amid Israel’s war in Gaza. In 2016, Grayzone’s conspiracy theories supporting Assad and defaming his victims had prompted hundreds of Palestinian writers and activists to write an open letter denouncing such activities. Mainstream activist groups and venues shunned Grayzone as a result. But they are now being readmitted to respectable forums. Human rights activists in Britain were dismayed to learn recently that Mate is listed as a featured speaker at a fundraising event for the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. This is doubly ironic given Mate’s whitewashing of the murder of Palestinians in Yarmouk and his impugning of the credibility of Forensic Architecture, the London-based research group that frequently partners with Al-Haq to investigate Israeli war crimes (he was upset that Forensic Architecture had tied Assad to the Douma attack). Blumenthal, too, has been making appearances at pro-Palestine forums just years after being widely condemned for a stunt mocking the Syrian victims of chemical attacks and Islamophobic slanders against the same heroic health care professionals (particularly Dr. Zaher Sahloul, the president of MedGlobal) who are now risking their lives in Gaza, despite Israel’s systematic targeting of hospitals.
Grayzone’s fortunes are being revived by the sharp decline in trust in legacy media due to their woeful coverage of Gaza.
I was in Pakistan last spring when the crackdown on student protesters began on U.S. campuses. The images of armored police baton-charging students and body-slamming professors were all over local news. So were reports of the latest atrocities from Gaza. But on CNN, you could watch Kasie Hunt raising alarms about an alleged “intifada” at Columbia where she said a hall had been named after Hind, “the woman who was killed in Gaza” (Hind Rajab, who was murdered by Israeli forces along with her family and the two paramedics sent to rescue her, was 6). Even as Gazans starved, Hunt’s prime-time colleagues Jake Tapper and Bianna Golodryga had earlier hosted Hillel Neuer of the Israel lobby group UN Watch to make a case against the aid agency UNRWA (with unintended irony, UN Watch was introduced as a “human rights organization”). From the White House podium, meanwhile, national security spokesperson John Kirby dismissed the report that Israel had targeted aid workers in Gaza and told journalists that the U.S. government had “to date found no instance where Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.”
No one likes their intelligence being insulted like this. Such gaslighting alienates the audience. People instead look for sources whose grip on reality seems less tenuous — at least as it pertains to the issue at hand. Even Grayzone starts looking less dishonest by comparison. People stop looking for consistency and seek affirmation. When media coverage is shaped by political considerations, truth becomes a function of power. With moral and epistemic baselines collapsing, power alone becomes the arbiter of reality. And to erase this imbalance, those who feel alienated and disempowered turn to any source that they think will help correct the tilt.
This relativization of truth creates a moral hazard. It diminishes trust in the media and licenses cynicism. Media today is more diverse and often more probing than it was two decades ago, and publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN produce excellent journalism at times (see, for example, the stellar work by the visual investigations team at each institution, the hard-hitting journalism of Clarissa Ward and the humane coverage by Christiane Amanpour). But this matters little when front pages and prime time are dominated by superficial, skewed and sensationalist reporting and vapid commentary. In such circumstances, when a broken window at an American university receives more attention than the annihilation of an entire family in Gaza, many switch off and seek alternative sources. A million “disinformation experts” are of little use when a single White House presser can undo all their labors. For all the millions that Russia has wasted on buying influence, it has never had a greater asset than Kirby, whose every statement does more to erode American credibility than a thousand paid influencers.
The cynicism this breeds undermines any notion of universal human rights. When human rights are selectively enforced, they are perceived as a mere cudgel to beat ideological opponents with. It was with much glee that China and Iran issued statements last spring calling on the U.S. to show restraint in its violent crackdown on students. Western statements about human rights abuses elsewhere now only draw sniggers.
This cynicism trickles down. People like Blumenthal who were laundering the mass crimes of authoritarian regimes, mocking the victims of mass murder and even whitewashing the tormentors of Palestinians in Yarmouk are now being invited to human rights forums. To many young activists who have been awakened by Gaza, the war in Syria is a thing of the past. But when they turn to the likes of Grayzone for information on Gaza, they are allowing pro-Assad and pro-Kremlin narratives to be sneaked into activist spaces. Grayzone may be an “alternative” to the U.S. mainstream media, but in relation to the wars in Syria and Ukraine, it has been an appendage of the belligerent states and an amplifier of their narratives. Their worldview is as Manichaean as the one that treats Palestinians as unworthy victims; except, in their schema, it’s victims of anti-Western perpetrators who are unworthy.
In protesting the deceptions of one set of perpetrators, we can’t allow another set to poison our public discourse. Our righteous anger makes us vulnerable, allowing cynics to manipulate our impulses. By suspending skepticism and abandoning principles, we help to create a void where even the suffering of children becomes permissible depending on the context.
Grayzone is a nuisance rather than some ingenious subversion. But operations like these will always exist as long as our media is so compromised and our debates so distorted that it makes the crude contrarianism of propagandists look like courageous truth-telling.
Become a member today to receive access to all our paywalled essays and the best of New Lines delivered to your inbox through our newsletters.