[nicolasp]

I'm very ambivalent about Greenwald. One the one hand he produced essential work with the Snowden revelations and his exposure of corruption in Brazil. He also makes good points about the moral evil of the Bush/Cheney administrations and Obama's continuation of the war on terror.

But on the other hand it feels like he spends a lot of time attacking strawmen just for the sake of being contrarian. Saying that journalists are authoritarians who want to protect the secrets of the powerful [1] and control access to platforms [2] has a tiny grain of truth in it but is mainly a massive oversimplification that paints a group of thousands of professionals who have a myriad of varying incentives with an incredibly broad brush. He seems to be incapable of nuance in his critique of the journalistic profession, and that renders his message mostly inaudible to me because it feels like it's coming from some form of resentment rather than reasoned arguments.

[1] "Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principal function and purpose—which is what it ought to be if we had a healthy media—but as something to be denounced and condemned."

[2] "[Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general] began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others.

[colordrops]

What bothers me are the hundreds or even thousands of journalists that spout corporate lines, propaganda, and outright lies everyday, and not much is said about them, but with principled journalists like Greenwald, you get these nitpicky judgemental critiques that seem aimed at deriding them.

Yes, Greenwald is not perfect, but he is more objective, honest, and brave than the great majority of journalists out there. It has the flavor of an inorganic smear campaign that has been absorbed repeatedly and unconsciously across social media. It's a common pattern for a post about an anti-establishemt figure to have some positive comments about them, but then some critique inevitably bubbles to the top of thread every time.

[AnthonyMouse]

I think it's clear enough that he's talking about specific journalists in specific enumerated publications and not literally all journalists everywhere. He is, after all, one himself.

[nicolasp]

I'm not convinced that's true. He didn't refer to any specific institutions or subsets of journalists in the quotes I included. Even assuming that he meant to, the examples he cites are CNN, NBC, NYT and WaPo. He also accused editors at The Intercept of censoring him over Hunter Biden stories. That's already a very large group of people to generalize.

He clearly views himself and a handful of others as outsiders, in a crusade against a journalistic profession that he views has wholly corrupted by corporate interests.

[AnthonyMouse]

> That's already a very large group of people to generalize.

On the other hand, it's not that large a number of entities. And the people who work there are constrained by their employers in particular ways, and choose to remain. Here's the article Greenwald quit The Intercept over:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

To the best of my knowledge nothing in it is untruthful. The Intercept demonstrably wouldn't publish it. Which of the other institutions listed do you expect would have? Is there an instance of any of them publishing anything substantively equivalent before the election?

He quotes the NYT there in several places but the articles the quotes are from are minimizing the story and even then the authors became the targets of attack for even discussing it.

[threatofrain]

There are many conservative and international reporting outlets, so where’s the Hunter Biden story already? Is Tucker Carlson secretly owned by the Bidens? What happened to his secret laptop files?

It looks like Glenn Greenwald’s business partners choose not to bet recklessly with the credibility of the publication, and in retrospect they may have choose wisely. The story was entirely under the control of Tucker Carlson and friends, and so would have been The Intercept’s brand credibility. The Intercept is far more vulnerable to missteps than Fox.

First Tucker Carlson kind of lost the files, and now he won’t show anyone the secret computer files because he thinks Hunter Biden is down on his luck, and Mr Carlson just feels so sad about it.

[drewcoo]

You need more hands! I have one telling me that the problem is not all the journos going along to get along so much as the very few companies in charge of the media. And another telling me that those journos have agency thus culpability. And yet another arm reaching for the popcorn and wondering how long this thread can last.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

If you read it as a systemic commentary rather than an individual commentary it makes more sense. Journalists as a system might have a behavior that most journalists done engage in. Nobody consciously thinks “let’s be authoritarian” but they create systems and structures that lead that way anyways. The same way any attack of “group X is Y” could be read as a massive oversimplification painting a huge diverse group with a broad brush. The individuals can create and enable a system of Y entirely unconsciously.

And yeah he totally lacks nuance, but at this point I can’t really care. I’m personally sick of unnuanced comments from “our” side benefitting from reading between the lines while near identical comments from Others with an equal lack of nuance get attacked for it. It would be great if we all were nuanced, but that appears impossible so reading things you disagree with charitably is just a necessity now. This comes to mind https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-things

[Shivetya]

It isn't that journalist see social media as a threat but so do the politicians they report on. Prior to the rise of social media, this should not be simply considered Facebook, Twitter, and like, but all the internet as a whole, we relied on the idea that the press, print, radio, and televised, told us the truth.

However the internet showed this was never true. Yes elements of the media did report the truth but they also produced some stories that were outright fabrications or purposefully did not include information that did not support the narrative; three very big stories that fall under this are the GM pickup fires which were assisted in catching fire, that chemical and biological weapons were widespread in Iraq, and of course Dan Rather's fake National Guard document.

Both the media and the political class help each other. One does it to gain favor and the other does it control the message. The internet took the ability to control the message, the narrative, away from the established media and politicians. It put it back into the hands of everyone.

So Greenwald's assertion is true in many ways. A return to where politicians used the media to control the message is a return to a system which allowed the Iraq war to come to fruition. The claim he makes that the press holds the office of the Presidency to different standards based on the party that controls it is easily provable as well. We never saw a level of press persecution before that occurred under Obama yet all of Trump's rambling diatribe was considered worse? On what planet?

Hell this site is guilty of the same as well. We have people here cheering on the FBI, likely the same that screamed when the same agencies trampled on people they liked. This is the society the old media and politicians gave us, putting us at each others throats and taught to revel in it

[nicolasp]

I mostly agree with you. I just want to point out that the reason Trump was held to a different standard than previous presidents is simply that he lied so much from the start. Journalists from "mainstream media" rightly perceived him as a threat because when called out on his lies he overtly attacked them and encouraged violence against them (arguably resulting in casualties in the Capital Gazette shooting).