I’m probably ponied here or whatever but Greenwald went on Tucker Carlson the other day and called Adam Schiff, quote, “the most pathological liar in all of American politics that I have seen in all my time covering politics”, which is quite an incredible claim in the current climate.
Greenwald’s appearances on Tucker Carlson illustrate the central problem with Greenwald, which is his misunderstanding of the role of a journalist. He thinks the job of a journalist is to disseminate facts and that if what you’re saying is true in some limited way, job done. In reality the job of a journalist is to make sense of the world for people and inform them about what they need to be informed about. The framing of a story, which includes things like WHICH facts are disseminated, is frequently more important than the facts themselves.
There’s a pretty good piece on Greenwald here:
Greenwald also wrote (a few days after his Guccifer 2.0 piece) that “the motive of a source is utterly irrelevant in the decision-making process about whether to publish” . The only relevant question, Glenn asserts, “is whether the public good from publishing outweighs any harm”.
That seems a nice soundbite, but the “public good” of a story’s publication is often precisely the thing that’s contested in regard to the source’s motive – especially with political stories in the run-up to an election! To ignore the motives behind the creation and timing of political stories is, perhaps, to risk turning journalism into a plaything of the powerful. (If I thought Greenwald understood this, I’d conclude he was disingenuous to suggest that Guccifer 2.0’s motives were “irrelevant” to the decision on whether to publish).
Bolded is a really amazing claim. Think about that. We live in a world of information asymmetry, where the intelligence services of powerful states have access to virtually limitless information, while the powerless have access to very little. If you simply report whatever subset of “facts” is provided to you, it’s very obvious you will become a pawn of powerful interests, which is precisely what happened with Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign, something still unacknowledged by Glenn. If you are provided with a subset of facts curated by a powerful interest from a larger pool of information, you frequently lack the context required to decide whether the public good is being served or not.
To bring this back to his appearance on Tucker Carlson, Greenwald is correct that the emails and laptop appear to be legitimate and that it’s quite possible Schiff is full of shit about this “Russian disinformation” thing (although it’s also possible Giuliani actually obtained this data via means other than the laptop). But what people - and certainly Fox News viewers - need to know about this story is that it’s partisan bullshit trying to create confusion before the election. Greenwald himself basically acknowledges that the content of the emails is not really a story:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1318328478287224834
But the reason for this “cone of silence” is that the story is fundamentally bullshit. Contra Greenwald, it is actually the job of journalists to decide this. Take 9/11 conspiracy theory. If I was just to report, without context or explanation, a whole bunch of the “weird facts” at the center of the theorising - the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” stuff - is that job done, as a journalist? Just bukkake the audience with facts and hope they can work out what’s true? Or is my job to decide that the story is bullshit and either make a report explaining why, or not report the story at all? Put another way, what is the most important thing to report about 9/11 conspiracy - a) jet fuel can’t melt steel, which is factually true, or b) the conspiracy story is bullshit?
So the responsible thing to do is to start by saying - the content of the emails isn’t very impressive, this is an attempt to create confusion before the election, this is the latest in a line of ginned-up non scandals created by Republicans, give a couple examples. THEN, fine, you can get into “btw Schiff is a pathological liar”, fine. Say what you like. But of course, if Greenwald took this approach, Fox wouldn’t have him on. He’s only on because he’s willing to limit his discussion to only those facts which Fox are interested in discussing.