Yea there is a lot of overlap between The Intercept and Current Affairs, but I get the feeling that everyone involved gets routinely annoyed by GG’s batshit takes.
David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Yanis Varoufakis, Andrej Grubacic, Cornel West, Amy Goodman.
Thing is that Chomsky isn’t bad at all. His ideas are considered cooky because they’re not in today’s Overton window.
The only thing I can see that Greenwald and Chomsky disagree on is that Chomsky thinks there is a moral imperative to vote for the lesser of two evils like Hilldawg and Biden and Greenwald doesn’t. What else am I missing?
Greenwald doesn’t actually think that Biden/Hillary are lesser evils (or at least doesn’t act like it).
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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.
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Really solid post 
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I would wish horrible things upon Greenwald if I did not believe that there was at least a 10% chance that keeeed, whom I happen to like, is actually him irl.
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One more quote from the linked piece, which I think puts it well (I wish I could write as clearly as this):
The journalistic equivalent of naïve realism is that there exists such a thing as raw, unmediated “news” – as if publishing is a window (whether clear or distorting) onto this objectively pre-existing “news”. This view certainly makes sources’ motives seem less relevant. But news is created and framed by the act of telling (ie publishing) – that’s what distinguishes it from non-news.
The writer gives an example of this message from WikiLeaks to Guccifer 2.0 (aka Russian intelligence) in the runup to the DNC:
if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after […] we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary … so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.
In Greenwald’s theory of journalism, the fact that both Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks have political motives here is “utterly irrelevant”. The job of a journalist is just to check that the information is true and interesting, then you dutifully broadcast whatever you’re provided by the most powerful interests in the world. That’s how we’re going to figure out what’s really going on. It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud like that, but that’s what he’s arguing.
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https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1319131124317278208
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1319132345878876166
relevant
You seem to move quickly from establishing that he doesn’t care about the motives of the source to stating that he doesn’t care about or is happy to promote the motive or narrative that the source has.
They’re not the same thing, and whilst I don’t read much of Greenwald’s stuff then it seems simply not true to suggest he reports whatever facts he happens to find, with no care for his overall narrative or picture of the world.
He does have a narrative he’s trying to establish with his reporting. It’s one where he wants to be able to talk about the corruption of US politics that isn’t subsumed by whether you’re pro or anti Trump and working to remove him from office or not. Indeed, to show the corruption he sees as being concealed by using Trump hatred as a cover.
Now you can run much of your argument against that position as well, it clearly can be (and is) pointed to by people who want to defend Trump and attack Biden. You can claim it’s a harmful narrative to put out in the world at this moment. But then you’re actually taking issue with either the narrative he’s trying to establish or the facts he sees as relevant, not some meta point about journalism and sources.
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He’s even wearing Trump’s bronzing makeup.
Anyway, the guy is purely a careerist nowadays. Going onto FOX and being the Alan Colmes of the station proves it. Everything I see from him screams, “What take will draw the most attention?” Doesn’t matter how stupid it is. If anything, the stupider the better since stupid takes get his name out there.
Also the idea that he’s a journalist is fucking laughable. If the Snowden material didn’t fall into his lap, he’d be less than a blip on the MSM radar. Hell, he initially rejected getting involved because he was too lazy to install encryption software. He’s at best an opinion columnist.
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Well I’m open to alternative explanations about why he’s on Tucker Carlson screaming that Adam Schiff is the most dishonest guy in the universe when Giuliani is the one pushing a plainly partisan story designed to mislead the public. “He thinks getting facts right, rather than telling the public an accurate story, is the job of a journalist” is the most charitable one I have.
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Fair enough. What prompted me to post was to point out that inference and to say that it’s certainly not generally valid. Mostly as I also think that the motive of the source is irrelevant if you take seriously that your own integrity is at stake with what your motive and narrative in publishing is.
I think you might agree that it’s not a general inference, but you do hold it with Greenwald. Hence fair enough. I said later in my post what I take his angle to be, but I don’t want to go too far there as I don’t read most of his stuff and I am not an uncritical fan of his.
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Glenn Greenwald is a clown and took a ridiculous victory lap after Bill Barr did that Mueller memo. He is more than happy to uncritically accept whatever known liars and war criminals like Bill Barr have to say when it fits his narrative. He is absolutely a fraud and should be ignored.
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The standard ought to be
- Is the information true
- Is the information newsworthy
The motives of the source can obviously be relevant to 1 but if the information leaked is true then the motives of the source are, indeed, irrelevant.
Saying that the emails are not earth-shattering is different from saying they’re not newsworthy. They’re obviously newsworthy – establishing “standard sleaze and DC corruption” is certainly a story worth exploring, although in this specific case it’s not establishing all that much new, just filling in some specifics to the fairly well-established broad outlines of Hunter’s sleazy associations.
But obviously Greenwald is correct that the far more important story is the media’s reaction to the story.
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Gren Gleenwald imo
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KEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDD
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Name another reporter with two scoops as noteworthy as Snowden and the Intercept’s Brazil reporting. He’s not a journalist because you hate him. A dangerous standard.
No.