I knew me and my buddy glen would find common ground on this, and for once I was right.
looks like my boy Glenn got into a twitter slap fight this weekend over the circumstances of him meeting his husband.
https://twitter.com/edoswald/status/1274358639986384896
https://twitter.com/hot_takes_maker/status/1274366690118287361
Donât get mad because Glenn pulls solid 9s and you have a literal neckbeard. Bad!
This guy defended Bill Barr relentlessly for a year straight.
1 Like
Always a treat to read Greenwald gushing about his love for Tucker while struggling mightily to find anything bad to say about him.
Note that even here, since Greenwald famously hates liberals, he is signaling that while they might disagree on this issue, ultimately they are on the same side.
Also, âracially divisiveâ lol.
1 Like
No kink-shaming of Greenwald if he has a crush on Tucker Carlson.
A couple minutes in⌠to discuss right wing populism we must first talk about how left wing populism is unpopular and desperately needs right wing populism for it to work.
1 Like
GG isnât stupid, just insane. I donât read his stuff usually because you need to go one or two levels deeper to find the lies. I see the kinship with Tucker, as heâs basically left wing ivy league Tucker.
This whole podcast appears to be an advertisement for Tuckerâs show.
NJR destroying him in this interview now.
Greenwaldâs entire shtick is:
-
Projection
-
Owning the libs
Not shocking he finds so much in common with the right.
1 Like
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 GGâs batshit takes.
David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Yanis Varoufakis, Andrej Grubacic, Cornel West, Amy Goodman.
Thing is that Chomsky isnât bad at all. His ideas are considered cooky because theyâre not in todayâs 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 doesnât. What else am I missing?
Greenwald doesnât actually think that Biden/Hillary are lesser evils (or at least doesnât act like it).
1 Like
Iâm probably ponied here or whatever but Greenwald went on Tucker Carlson the other day and called Adam Schiff, quote, âthe most pathological liar in all of American politics that I have seen in all my time covering politicsâ, which is quite an incredible claim in the current climate.
Greenwaldâs 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 youâre 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.
Thereâs a pretty good piece on Greenwald here:
Greenwald also wrote (a few days after his Guccifer 2.0 piece) that âthe motive of a source is utterly irrelevant in the decision-making process about whether to publishâ . The only relevant question, Glenn asserts, âis whether the public good from publishing outweighs any harmâ.
That seems a nice soundbite, but the âpublic goodâ of a storyâs publication is often precisely the thing thatâs contested in regard to the sourceâs motive â 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, Iâd conclude he was disingenuous to suggest that Guccifer 2.0âs motives were âirrelevantâ 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 âfactsâ is provided to you, itâs 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 itâs quite possible Schiff is full of shit about this âRussian disinformationâ thing (although itâs 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 itâs 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 âcone of silenceâ 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 âweird factsâ at the center of the theorising - the âjet fuel canât melt steel beamsâ stuff - is that job done, as a journalist? Just bukkake the audience with facts and hope they can work out whatâs 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 canât 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 isnât 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 âbtw Schiff is a pathological liarâ, fine. Say what you like. But of course, if Greenwald took this approach, Fox wouldnât have him on. Heâs only on because heâs willing to limit his discussion to only those facts which Fox are interested in discussing.
22 Likes
Really solid post 
1 Like
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.
4 Likes
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 naĂŻve realism is that there exists such a thing as raw, unmediated ânewsâ â as if publishing is a window (whether clear or distorting) onto this objectively pre-existing ânewsâ. This view certainly makes sourcesâ motives seem less relevant. But news is created and framed by the act of telling (ie publishing) â thatâs 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 [âŚ] we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary ⌠so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.
In Greenwaldâs theory of journalism, the fact that both Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks have political motives here is âutterly irrelevantâ. The job of a journalist is just to check that the information is true and interesting, then you dutifully broadcast whatever youâre provided by the most powerful interests in the world. Thatâs how weâre going to figure out whatâs really going on. It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud like that, but thatâs what heâs arguing.
7 Likes
https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1319131124317278208
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1319132345878876166
relevant
You seem to move quickly from establishing that he doesnât care about the motives of the source to stating that he doesnât care about or is happy to promote the motive or narrative that the source has.
Theyâre not the same thing, and whilst I donât read much of Greenwaldâs 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 heâs trying to establish with his reporting. Itâs one where he wants to be able to talk about the corruption of US politics that isnât subsumed by whether youâre 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 itâs a harmful narrative to put out in the world at this moment. But then youâre actually taking issue with either the narrative heâs trying to establish or the facts he sees as relevant, not some meta point about journalism and sources.
1 Like