[gizmo]

The Guardian has in 200 years only won one Pulitzer, for Glenn Greenwald's reporting on intelligence agency wiretapping and other malfeasance. And what does the Guardian do? They repeatedly malign Greenwald and publish falsehoods about him. See this thread for a typical example: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976

The problem isn't just that the Guardian gets major stuff wrong, and that they don't -- as a matter of course -- acknowledge mistakes. The big, no huge, problem is that they do almost no real journalism whatsoever.

(I can also pick nits about this article that getting global cooling wrong and asbestos doesn't mean anything because those were mundane mistakes that are not indicative of a larger problem, but I'd rather focus on the big picture that The Guardian doesn't do real journalism and the big things they get wrong as a consequence they never acknowledge, not even in articles like these.)

edit: bonus link about how the Guardian silences and fires journalists who tweet sarcastically about sensitive topics. Thread: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359544245238005760

[pmyteh]

Given that the Pulitzers are only given for work that appears in a US publication, that's not terribly surprising. And saying that the Guardian 'doesn't do real journalism' is fundamentally unserious. I have huge problems with their editorial decision-making, and their attitudes to a number of issues I know about and care deeply about. But they are a serious newspaper, doing far better journalism than the vast majority of other papers. In the UK they are one of only a few still making even a pretence of being proper journalists. The fact that they are as reluctant as anyone else to issue mea culpas, and have decided that Greenwald is a crank, doesn't change that.

[koheripbal]

I think it's pretty fair to say The Guardian doesn't do any investigative journalism.

If you look at almost any front page article in the last x years, you will be hard pressed to find anything that isn't purely interviews and sound bytes regurgitated from other sources.

[gizmo]

I'll concede that they occasionally do real journalism, but they also publish falsehoods and they either don't retract/correct at all or quietly edit published articles. Their fact-checking is awful, and you can just see on twitter how they deal with that. To me that's disqualifying, but you do you.

Greenwald's journalism in Brazil has gotten Lula out of prison. Lula is likely to run for president, and that might change future of the country. The impact of the journalism Greenwald does is hard to overstate. What does it tell you about the Guardian that they dismiss him as a crank?

[matthewmorgan]

How absurd, a 200 year old British paper only winning one American award that was only founded in the 20th century.

[collyw]

It started out as a UK newspaper but it has had an international presence for a while now (admittedly a small part of that 200 years).

[GlennS]

This is interesting. I would have said the opposite.

My opinion was that the Guardian is only worthwhile because it occasionally does some very good journalism, and that just about outweighs the pointless bullshit.

I don't really have anything to back that up though, just a general impression from reading it. So it's interesting to hear some evidence to the contrary. I have no idea if the Pulitzer is actually a good measure though.

A point of comparison: look at the Economist, which does basically no investigative journalism, but does produce fairly sensible opinion pieces (of course from a particular viewpoint, often a bit limited in their vision).

[uniqueid]

My impression of Glenn Greenwald is that he is either paranoid, or willing to stoke his readers' paranoia in order to attract attention.

This seems like standard behavior for Greenwald: https://twitter.com/themattdimitri/status/138969371391236917... It's the same refrain as always: 'everyone is out to get me!'

[gizmo]

You misunderstand what's going on here. Greenwald is making fun of people who consider themselves journalists but who spend their days trawling through social media to find things to create outrage drama posts about, instead of doing real actual journalism. The DNC operative thing is obviously not intended literally; it's like calling somebody a lapdog or a bootlicker or an apologist. Note that in that thread the response from the "Bernie-hating worm" was to tattle to youtube and demand the video gets taken down because he "fears for his safety". Good grief.

Glenn absolutely doesn't believe that "everyone is out to get me", but he has, unlike many of his critics, faced very serious criminal charges by corrupt prosecutors, got guns pointed at his face, and he has to live with 24/7 armed guards because people want to shut him up for good. We're not talking about the casual death threats people receive just for being opinionated online, but the kind where they send you pictures of your house, your cars, and of the school your children go to.

Given that context, yeah, I understand why he has contempt for journalists who don't put anything on the line and spend their days on meaningless social media twaddle.

[tidydata]

> My impression of Glenn Greenwald is that he is either paranoid, or willing to stoke his readers' paranoia in order to attract attention.

Maybe it’s both

Glenn has good reason to be paranoid. As someone who read his work for years, I’d say that within the past couple of years his writings have become more and more delusional. He left The Intercept over a fact-checking spat in which his editors were in the right, but he claimed censorship. The issue was over Joe Biden’s son, so a big step down from privacy, surveillance, and the work he did before.

[bavell]

I don't care for Glenn too much but he's better than a lot of the other crappy grifters out there like the tool in the thread you linked to.

[uniqueid]

  but he's better than a lot of the other crappy grifters 

A journalist should neither accuse, without evidence, someone else of being a 'DNC operative', nor claim, without verifying, that that person opposes a particular political candidate. The gravity of slandering someone that way, to me, is self-evident. It doesn't matter if the person he slanders is a saint or a piece of garbage.

If the person whose tweet I linked is truly a 'tool' (and I'm open to that possibility), then Greenwald could just have left it at calling him a 'worm'. That's fair game since it's a matter of opinion.

[bavell]

I agree and disagree. He definitely wasn't very professional in his remarks and could have toned it down but in that clip Glenn said exactly why he thinks that way. And this was on a podcast (i.e. his personal opinion), not an article posted to a news outlet.

The 'tool' even did exactly what Glenn accused him of on that thread, taking short clips of people he doesn't like out of context and disparaging them. Seems to be his MO. Again, I don't love Glenn but overall I feel he's decent and usually does actual journalism instead of playing silly games most of the time.

[uniqueid]

  taking short clips of people he doesn't like out of context and disparaging them

I'm sure Greenwald makes fair accusations at times. The problem I have is with the false accusations.

That said, I'll concede the point to you. For me to continue in an honorable fashion, I would have to listen to the Greenwald episode your comment references, which I was unaware existed. For all I know, in that podcast, he would convince me that both the problem claims are true.

The thing is, I do not want to spend the next half hour (probably longer) listening to a Glenn Greenwald podcast :)

[bavell]

> The thing is, I do not want to spend the next half hour (probably longer) listening to a Glenn Greenwald podcast :)

Can't blame you for that haha, there are better things to do. I'll admit my opinion of him dropped a little seeing that clip in the tweet you linked... just not very professional, even if the other guy may deserve it.

[polskibus]

Who does real journalism in your opinion? BBC ? NYT ? What's focused on facts these days and not on opinions anc clickbait ?