In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, the progressive journalist and co-founder of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald spoke with Carlson about the media’s fixation with the Russia story and how they got so many things wrong. And in the process, Greenwald called out the liberal media for being a self-gratifying echo chamber where consequences for false reporting no longer apply but benefits flow.

Greenwald pointed out how the media was eager to publish any “inflammatory” information pertaining to the Russia investigation no matter how often they “turn out to be totally false.” And with absolutely no consequences from their employer or colleagues.

“They get enormous benefits when they publish recklessly,” he added. “They get applause on social media from their peers, they get zillions of retweets, huge amounts of traffic, they end up on TV. They get applauded across the spectrum because people are so giddy and eager to hear more about this Russia and Trump story.”

He lamented about how there were almost no repercussions for their false reporting because their peers just pretend it didn’t happen and moved onto the next sensationalist article. And according to Greenwald, there were far greater upsides to reckless reporting than downsides:

And when their stories get completely debunked it just kind of -- everybody agrees to ignore it and everyone moves on and they pay no price. At the same time, they’re feeling and pleasing their sources by publishing the sources that the sources want them to publish. So there's huge amounts of career benefits and reputational benefits and very little cost when they publish stories that end up being debunked, because the narrative they are serving as a popular one, at least within their peer circles.

“Gosh, that’s so dishonest,” Carlson exclaimed. “I think all of us and journalism have gotten things wrong, I certainly have. And you feel bad about it, you really do and there's a consequence.” “Do you really think there's that level of dishonesty in the American press,” he asked his guest.

“I think what it is more than dishonesty is a really warped incentive scheme bolstered by this very severe groupthink that social media is fostering in ways that we don't yet fully understand,” Greenwald argued.

Greenwald followed up by noting that many journalists were no longer out in the field anymore, which was to be expected since many newspapers closed down their state house operations in favor of national reporting over the decades. “They're sitting on Twitter talking to one another and this produces this extreme groupthink where these orthodoxies arrive in deviating from them or questioning them or challenging, believe me, results in all kinds of recrimination and scorn,” Greenwald explained.

And when it came to the media’s rush to publish leaked information that undermined Trump’s administration, Greenwald observed a suspicious trend: “We know that there are a huge number of people inside the government who are willing to leak … and yet there have been no leaks so far showing any evidence of that kind of collusion, leading one to wonder why that is.”

Transcript below: