I read GG’s article on his Substack. Could’ve used some polish certainly but, you know, it wasn’t terrible or unworthy of publication. I suspect there were more conflicts between him and the editorial staff before this.
Anyway, my patience for criticism of him definitely depends on the source, because I have a long enough memory that I can recall the same liberals who cheered Greenwald, Assange, and Wikileaks reporting on George W. Bush’s invasive surveillance programs doing a 180 on all of them when they + Snowden reported on Barack Obama’s invasive surveillance programs. The same people who have been calling anyone critical of Democrats in the last 5 years a Trump lover or a Russian asset.
Anyway, here’s my conclusion. I will not be taking questions
His free speech absolutism is nothing new, of course. When he still practiced law he defended the speech rights of literal neo-nazis. Which was uncontroversial among ACLU-supporting liberals at the time but is less fashionable today.
Let’s take this to the extreme: I am a free speech absolutist. Therefore I will only publish NAMBLA viewpoints from now on, to make a point, about free speech.
Yeah well given this from the email correspondence:
Repeatedly over the past several months, I’ve brought to Betsy’s attention false claims that were published by The Intercept in articles that were designed to protect Biden and malign Trump. Some have been corrected or quietly deleted, while others were just left standing.
IDK about you but this reads to me as “I’ve been an insufferable douchebag constantly back-seat-driving the editor’s job”. Holding the powerful to account by combing through co-workers’ pieces making sure they’re not even the slightest bit unfair to the most powerful man in the world. JOURNALISM. No word yet on whether he performs this same fact-checking service to Tucker Carlson. What do you think?
I was amused by this bit of Greenwald’s second email:
So you have to cast your censorship as an accusation – an outrageous and inaccurate one – that my article contains factually false claims, all as a pretext for alleging that my article violates The Intercept’s lofty editorial standards and that it’s being rejected on journalistic grounds rather than nakedly political grounds.
But your memo doesn’t identify a single factual inaccuracy, let alone multiple ones. And that’s why you don’t and can’t identify any such false claims.
But the complaint of the editor was that the article is misleading in the way that it presents those facts. This is what I said about GG upthread before this happened, that he either doesn’t understand or pretends not to understand that the way one selects facts and puts them together is just as important, if not more so, than the facts themselves. If you have several paragraphs of innuendo that Biden might have appointed the prosecutor to drop the case against Burisma, then the thrust of your article is that Biden might have appointed the prosecutor to drop the case, even if you precede your innuendo with a “there’s no direct evidence of this” disclaimer. It’s very typical of Greenwald to do this and then whine loudly about being misinterpreted, SO UNFAIR, when people accuse him of making the implications that he is very obviously making. I don’t know what the mental pathology is that makes him do this over and over again, but he’s got it bad.
Free speech advocates do address indecency laws? Generally trying to constrain the government from trying to limit the speech of those the government claims are indecent.
But what does it say about me if I choose to spend all my airtime giving NAMBLA a voice, and trashing anti-NAMBLA points of view, ostensibly just to make a point about free speech?
The fuck does that have to do with anything? Maybe Carlson is a principled free speech advocate and maybe he isn’t. I have my doubts, and I never claimed that he was. I claimed that Greenwald is a principled free speech advocate.
Remember when Green Glennwad made it big in journalism by ignoring Edward Snowden’s initial contact because he found basic email encryption too much of a bother? And then how he later got dragged back into the story by the actual competent journalist Laura Poitras only because Snowden still had a crush on him, and not because Glenn’s initial instincts told him it was an important story?
I think it’s important to remember that Glenn had to be spoon fed the biggest (and really only) notable journalist work of his career.
