[9][42] Managing editor Wyatt Reed, contributor Mohamed Elmaazi and regular freelancer Jeremy Loffredo worked for Russian state media before contributing to website.
[9][5] 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.
[44][45][46][47][48] The Grayzone's news content is generally considered to be fringe,[8][9][10][11] and the website maintains a pro-Kremlin editorial line,[26][49] centered around an opposition to the foreign policy of the United States and a desire for a multipolar world.
[25] 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.
[54] 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."
[8][9][3][4] 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.
[72] 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.
"[9] The Grayzone has published articles intended to discredit researchers and organizations investigating the persecution of Uyghurs, saying that the figure of 1 million Uyghurs in re-education camps is based on "highly dubious" studies published by Chinese Human Rights Defenders and Adrian Zenz, and that those studies cannot be trusted because CHRD receives funding from the US government and Zenz is employed by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Contributor Ajit Singh and Blumenthal called Zenz an “evangelical religious fanatic” who “believes he is ‘led by God’ on a ‘mission’ against China.” Writing in World magazine, June Cheng has defended CHRD and Zenz's research, saying that they used publicly available data released by the Chinese government to estimate the number of Uyghurs in detention, and that The Grayzone exaggerated the extent to which their research was based on a small number of interviews.
[35] 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.
[36][73] 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.
[16][74][75] According to the Brookings Institution in 2023, Grayzone contributors such as Aaron Mate 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.
[81] 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.
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".
Loffredo's article showed the locations where Iranian missiles struck an Israeli air base near Nevatim and the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv.
[1] 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".