The Grayzone

The Grayzone is an American fringe, far-left news website and blog, founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal The website initially founded as The Grayzone Project, was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent from it in early 2018.

Coverage of The Grayzone has focused on its misleading and false reporting, its criticism of American foreign policy, and its sympathetic coverage of the Russian, Chinese and Syrian governments. The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the persecution of Uyghurs in China, and been accused of publishing conspiracy theories about Xinjiang, Syria and other regions, and publishing disinformation about Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some have described as pro-Russian propaganda.

Grayzone staff Blumenthal and Aaron Maté acted as briefers on behalf of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations at UN meetings organized by Russia. Managing editor Wyatt Reed, contributor Mohamed Elmaazi and regular freelancer Jeremy Loffredo worked for Russian state media before contributing to website.

History
The Grayzone was founded as a blog called The Grayzone Project in December 2015 by Max Blumenthal. The blog was hosted on AlterNet until early 2018, when The Grayzone became independent of the website.

An August 2018 Grayzone report revealed the identity of the owner of Canary Mission, a website reportedly dedicated to demonising pro-Palestinian students. Hamzah Raza, co-author of the report and a victim of Canary Mission himself, told Middle East Eye he hoped his research can stop the "defamation and harassment" of students "by taking away the anonymity that Canary Mission hides behind".

When a humanitarian aid convoy on the border of Venezuela caught fire in February 2019, The Grayzone published an article by Blumenthal in which he stated that the U.S. government and mainstream media had falsely reported forces supporting President Nicolás Maduro were responsible for sparking the flames, writing that "the claim was absurd on its face." Glenn Greenwald, writing in The Intercept, commented that Blumenthal "compiled substantial evidence strongly suggesting that the trucks were set ablaze by anti-Maduro protesters".

Amid the Syrian civil war, the website supported the government of Bashar al-Assad. Articles by Grayzone reporter Aaron Maté echoed claims by the Russian and Syrian governments that documents leaked to Wikileaks showed that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had "doctored" its report on the Douma chemical attack "to frame the Syrian government and justify the missile strikes launched by the US, UK and France against forces loyal to the government," denying that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians, and accusing the OPCW of a "cover-up". Since then, the 13-year-long ongoing war started by Nato-armed rebels has killed and displaced more people than any repressive measure by the Syrian government is said to have done.

Research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which studied 28 social media accounts, individuals, outlets and organisations, stated that Maté was the "most prolific spreader of disinformation" on matters concerning Syria amongst its study group, having surpassed Vanessa Beeley in 2020. Research published in 2020 in the Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review found Blumenthal in the top 20 amplified accounts and Grayzone in the top 20 linked domains in a Twitter information ecosystem promoting pro-government narratives about Syria's White Helmets.

The site has promoted CCP narratives on Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In particular, it downplayed the widely reported scope of China's Xinjiang internment camps and other abuses by the Chinese government against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities. Blumenthal has said that reports of the persecution of Ugyhurs in China use “the hostile language of a Cold War, weaponizing a minority group.” He stated in July 2020 that, "I don't have reason to doubt that there's something going in Xinjiang, that there could even be repression. But we haven't seen the evidence for these massive claims".

The English Wikipedia formally deprecated the use of The Grayzone as a source for facts in its articles in March 2020, citing issues with the website's factual reliability.

The Grayzone promoted the Nicaraguan government's narrative on the 2018–2022 Nicaraguan protests and the November 2021 Nicaraguan general election. The platform also conducted an "unquestioning interview", according to The Guardian, with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Blumenthal and Norton expressed their support to the regime dancing to "El Comandante se queda" (English: The Comandante Stays) a cumbia song composed in support of Ortega during the 2018 protests. The Grayzone published an open letter, promoted by RT, criticizing The Guardian's coverage of Nicaragua and one of its contributors, Carl David Goette-Luciak. Goette-Luciak was later arrested and deported by the Nicaraguan government. John Perry, writing under the pseudonym Charles Redvers, published a "confession" on The Grayzone of student protester Valeska Sandoval. The confession was false and Sandoval made it under duress while in prison.

In February 2021, tweets concerning a Grayzone article by Blumenthal were the first to receive a Twitter warning label stating "These materials may have been obtained through hacking". The story was titled "Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office–funded programs to 'weaken Russia', leaked docs reveal". The story referred to hacked and leaked documents and alleged that a British Army unit has used "social media to help fight wars".

Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the website has published disinformation, including the debunked claim that Ukrainian fighters were using civilians as human shields, and that the 2022 Mariupol theatre bombing was staged by the Azov Regiment to warrant NATO intervention. The Grayzone's invitation to the 2022 Web Summit, the largest technology conference in Europe, was withdrawn over backlash against the website's anti-Ukrainian narratives amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

After the documentary Navalny won an Academy Award in February 2023, The Grayzone published an article by Lucy Komisar criticizing the film; the article was written by the neural network Writesonic and referenced sources that did not exist. The Grayzone amended the article following a controversy about the use of AI in the writing of the article, and then removed it at the request of Komisar.

An analysis in The Grayzone of a UN report corroborating Hamas rape allegations during the Israel–Hamas war, claimed the report had put forward "no evidence of systematic rape". The Grayzone also published a transcribed discussion between Max Blumenthal and Chris Hedges in which they agreed that Israel launched a "shock-and-awe campaign of misinformation" to create "political space for its brutal assault on Gaza".

Funding
In 2022, Blumenthal stated that The Grayzone receives funding through Patreon and from "private friends of mine who are basically progressive Americans who support progressive media." He said The Grayzone receives no state funding from Russia or China.

In August 2023, GoFundMe froze more than $90,000 from 1,100 contributors to The Grayzone, citing unspecified "external concerns". Blumenthal said he believed the concerns were political and related to the platform's coverage of the war in Ukraine. The Grayzone 's managing editor Wyatt Reed had also had issues with PayPal and Venmo since reporting on Ukraine.

In June 2024, The Washington Post reported that hacked documents revealed that Reed received payments of around $5,500 from Iranian state-controlled broadcaster Press TV for "occasional contributions to its programming in 2020 and 2021".

Staff
Several staff, former staff, and freelance writers have previously been employed by Russian government funded media outlets RT and Sputnik, among them Anya Parampil, Alex Rubinstein, Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed, Mohamed Elmaazi and Jeremy Loffredo. Parampil had previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for RT America. Reed, who was credited as a managing editor as of 2023, made occasional contributions to Iranian state-run Press TV in 2020 and 2021.

Reception
According to Norwegian-American writer Bruce Bawer in September 2019, The Grayzone has taken a pro-Hamas line on the Israel-Palestine conflict:

The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe, and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line, centred around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world. The site has been criticized for defending Russia and authoritarian regimes. In Reorienting Hong Kong's Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism, The Grayzone was described as "known for misleading reporting in the service of authoritarian states". Nerma Jelacic, writing in the Index on Censorship, described The Grayzone as "a Kremlin-connected online outlet that pushes pro-Russian conspiracy theories and genocide denial." In 2019, The Grayzone had claimed the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, of which Jelacic is a director, collaborated with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra affiliates.

It has also been criticized for de-emphasizing the scale of the Xinjiang internment camps and other Chinese state abuses against Uyghurs.

The Russian fake news website Peace Data has republished articles by The Grayzone in order to build a reputation as a progressive and anti-Western media source and to attract contributors. False claims published by The Grayzone are referenced by many Twitter users who back Assad and the Russian government.

The government of China, officials within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese state media have viewed The Grayzone's coverage of China positively. In order to dispute accusations of ongoing atrocities in Xinjiang, Chinese media and officials have increasingly cited posts from The Grayzone in their public communications. According to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Chinese media and affiliated entities began to amplify articles from The Grayzone in December 2019 after the site posted an article critical of Xinjiang researcher Adrian Zenz. Chinese media cited The Grayzone at least 313 times between December 2019 and February 2021, 252 of which were in English-language publications, the report said. Similarly, according to the Brookings Institute in 2023, Grayzone contributors such as Aaron Mate ("influencers...affiliated with alternative, Western, English-language outlets, including Grayzone and MintPress news — frequently cited by Kremlin media on a wide variety of topics targeting different regions") are among the most-promoted social media accounts boosted by Russian information networks in Latin America to promote Russia's narrative on its war with Ukraine.

According to a November 2023 opinion article by biology researcher Michal Perach in Haaretz, Max Blumenthal wrote a Grayzone article that denied evidence of Hamas' war crimes in the 7 October attacks and manipulated quotes from Israeli sources to paint Israel (instead of Hamas) as being responsible for most of the victims.