However the one thing I do not get is how he is always complaining about CNN not reporting this or how nytimes is practiced bad journalism going so far as to call cnn fake news, but he never discusses Fox News which is actually the most popular news network by far (record profits this year if 1.5B) and the most obviously bias.
It really weakens his position, and paints him as only a pseudo centrist
And I completely understand this because as a left-leaning person CNN has become an obsolete atrocity of a news network.
I think Joe also mentioned at some point that he used to read and watch CNN a lot (and he implied that he trusted it at the time), so perhaps this is the reason why he's now putting it down.
Fox is just an aberration, I assume we all know they are not reasonable - or at least their opinion parts (and it's mostly opinion).
But the rest of the press ostensibly holds themselves to higher standards.
That said, I don't agree with a lot of what Greenwald has to say either.
Yet this organization sure had an awful lot of blood on its hands with its recent pandemic coverage and yet all I ever hear about is papers like the New York Times. Rogan himself seems to have shown a lot of sympathy for Fox News worst tendencies on this matter. The last time I remember outlets like the NYT having so much blood on their hands was during the Iraq war and that reporting was about a generation ago, AND Fox was even worse than them even back then. Yet all I hear about is the perils of the dastardly MSM and their legions of partisan so called fact checkers.
Actually, I've been reading both sites in the past few months. My rule of thumb is that while each site in isolation is unreadable, whatever they agree on (which is very little) must be the truth!
The internet has a lot to do with this since the value of editorial practices does not exist online in the same sense. Bots and blue-checkmark-people give any story validity on twitter.
United States is perhaps the oldest continuously existing democracy [0], in has existed 244 years, and most of that time (about 200 years) it has been a two-party system. I don't think it's the two-party system that is responsible for the rotting now. Something else is going on.
[0] Well, we can debate how to define a democracy (an interesting and educational debate), and who is oldest still existing depends on the definition. But a good case can be made that it's the US.
Money in politics probably as well.
Democratic traditions in other countries long predate even the existence of the US; it wasn't the first with universal suffrage; it had a troubled history even after that till at least the 1960s, even before we get to any contemporary problems.
I don't know there is a legitimate claimant on the "first democracy" title, or even if we are there yet, but unlikely the US.
So depending on the definition of "country", the oldest existing democracy is either Finland (1906-) or Norway (1913-)?
Finland: Universal suffrage from 1906, as an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire. Independent country from 1917.
Norway: Independent country. Universal suffrage from 1913.
Or maybe, depending on the definition of "suffrage": New Zealand: Women can vote from 1893, women can run as candidates for some positions from 1919, Women can run for all position from 1941.
You don't give much weight for women to be able to be lawmakers themselves? As long as women have the right to vote male candidates to an all-male parliament, the suffrage is universal enough for you?
Clearly, in this case everybody being given that power of determination from 1893 has worked out well for them on the female representation front looking at current stars on the global leadership stage.
Almost every country has some unevenness in apportionment. Outside of some microstates that have only one electoral disrict, by your definition no country is a democracy today.
A concern about removing the Electoral College is candidates won't spend time campaigning in more remote, less populous states. A) We have broadcast media and the Internet, you don't need to spend a lot of time in those states. B) Getting rid of the Electoral College doesn't mean getting rid of the state caucus and primary systems, there would still be plenty of in-state campaigning to win those (though typically not by an incumbent president).
Anyone truly irked by this arrangement is free to move to Wyoming.
Why should people living in a less populous state have more influence on the outcome of an election than people in more populous states (or cities)?
If people living in large cities have more influence it's not because of where they live but because there are more people. More people, more influence; the Electoral College dilutes this principle of fairness.
The problem is that US conservatives, both elites and ordinary voters, have become profoundly radicalized since 1964, and specifically since the Civil Rights Act (Edit: though the underpinnings for this started with McCarthyism and Brown v. Board - it was really the 1964 election that moved this radicalism into the white conservative mainstream, not just the Birchers.)
In that sense things are really similar to Weimar Germany, which was a multiparty democracy in which there were many viable non-Nazi options for conservative voters. Yet German conservatives across the board decided that a Nazi dictatorship was preferable to a democracy where socialists might win. In general it is very difficult to sustain a democracy when 40% of the electorate rejects the concept.
Telling that you’re downvoted, but honestly the Overton window today would give even old Adolph a suntan. 50 years of the Republican party gently transitioning the US to a one-party state, with a spineless Democratic “opposition” content to normalize each new lurch to the extreme.
Democracy doesn’t die in the dark but on top of a stove: like a pot of gently simmering frogs.
I think this is an effect of social media. It rewards the most extreme positions with likes and shares, hollowing out the former core of shared values.
Here is little deeper take of Greenwald:
Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Blowup with the Intercept https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/inside-glenn-greenwa...
Joe is smart but you're right, he does play the nice guy and doesn't ask his guests hard questions - but the format is really powerful.
I watched 2.5 hours (!!!) of Bernie Sanders speak and came to the realization that I don't think I'd seen Bernie speak for more than 5 minutes previous to that - ever. People are supposed to elect national leaders on the basis of sound-bytes, controlled scenarios, ridiculous 'gotcha debates'?
I really don't think you'll find a longer format out there for anyone. It literally takes time to get to know people and the open, conversational format, particularly the length is really helpful. On cable news you get 1 minute if you're lucky, a longer, hurried interview if you're famous.
Many of the 'issues du jour' require some explanation - every unfortunate interaction between police and some assailant that's on the national news has nuance, certainly many of the more theoretical issues have nuance. And public figures, speakers are very often misinterpreted, misquoted.
Not only is there enough time on the format, people are tuning in.
Though you're right to point out Joe is not doing regular journalism by asking the tough questions - he is doing something else, which asking 'un PC' questions which would never get asked in highly politicized or sensitive information systems.
If there is 'editorial bias' on the part of Joe, it's easily circumvented by the guests who have time to answer the questions. Contrast this with most broadcast outlets who design the questions, don't give time to respond, heavily edit the question/response, and shave it down to tiny digestible formats.
Joe Rogan's mere existence is really counter intuitive - if major press outlets were doing their jobs well I don't think he would exist. He's found a credible, if not perfect niche.
The problem is not one Rogan and one show, it's that his style is spreading.
Rogan is smart but lacks general knowledge. Good hosts are very knowledgeable and pretend to know less for the sake of the audience. Rogan can't do that.
Rogan projects sentiments like awe and wonder, but they are not genuine. They are just part of the brand and character.
The end result is that his non-PC stance and alternative viewpoint falls prey to hype, hustlers and pseudointellectuals. He ends up repeating phrases and platitudes and never analyzing them.
That said - I don't think in those specific cases it's that important, I loathe Alex Jones but I'm not sure how important he is.
He doesn't support Anti-Vaxxer conspiracy theories, he's spoken publicly about that, though I'm not sure if he has publicly spoken out against QAnon, he did have an interesting and nuance guest Tim Dillon [1] to explain it in a nuanced and reasonable way.
One thing that's interesting about his guests is that they are not 'communications' people in the classical sense. On the news, you get people in makeup, nice suits, symmetrical facial features and talking points.
I don't think Rogan is the solution to anything, but it's an valid format.
A 'Congressional filibuster' is literally redundant filler used to fill time, often in the middle of the night to literally an empty room with no expectation of an audience or even a coherent message. People literally go up there and read Dr. Seuss out loud.
Find someone having reasonably candid dialogue with Bernie Sanders for 2.5 hours - I don't think it exists.
But that would be besides the point - Rogan's format is consistently an order of magnitude longer than others, it's open and generally unedited - this doesn't exist elsewhere.
As to centrism, I'm not sure Rogan has enough of a coherent ideology to even call him a centrist.
But people who watch Fox News - for the most part - are watching for actual news. They often believe it. They aren't questioning the 'facts'. It isn't even as fake as Tabloids saying "I had an alien baby!".
While Fox is as trustworthy as 'The Onion', 'The Onion' openly states it is satire: Fox News is still claiming news and facts.
Things have changed. Dramatically. And for the worse. Anything and everything is considered news. Relevance and important are not longer relevant; the reporting shamelessly anti-objective. Anyone can at this point call themselves a journalist, without any understanding of the actions and ethics such a title entails. Axe-grinding and whistle-drowning are all too common.
The bottom line: A healthy, proper and transparent Fourth Estate matters. I can't speak for the rest of the world but in the USA the Fourth Estate is in the ICU, and has been for some time now. This is not a diagnosis that is new since Jan 2017.
It legitimately comes down to however you frame a question to someone.
One quite obvious example from the Atlantic: There was a trump speech maybe 2 months ago when trump acknowledged that there has been people in the military complex profiteering from war (and also choosing the lovely words "making our wonderful wonderful bombs" or something along those lines). This is something that the Atlantic has been saying since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But for some reason they chose not to write something along the lines of "trump acknowledges war profiteering" and recapping why some people (probably including the reader base of the Atlantic) believe that war profiteering in the military-industrial complex is bad thing. Instead they chose to angle it like "trump criticises the army. The atlantic supports the troops!".
This is just a small thing that I (a leftist, Marxist Swedish commie-sheeple) saw when doing my weekly skimming of the news on your side of the pond. There is of course a more complex political game going on, but at the same time: is it so hard to understand why someone becomes disillusioned with the media landscape?
But it gets worse. Under the current admin the DoD budget has ballooned to nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Imagine that. The POTUS is able to inflate that budget with nearly zero outrage, and then he turns around and calls out the MIC and again no outrage (about the hypocrisy).
The disconnect - media and public - is flabbergasting. How can this be? In plain sight??
It isn't really a news magazine at all. It's an opinion rag with pundits who range across the ideological spectrum. You will no more find news there than reading the NY Times or Wall Street Journal's opinion sections.
Maybe the most obvious to you, but CNN has always been biased.
“Don’t point out the speck in your brother’s eye when you have a plank in your own”.
We expect more of them. My guess is also that Glenn is centre-left so he probably used to trust NYT and CNN while having ignored Fox News since forever.
Glenn Greenwald postures as a civil libertarian when he wants to attack liberals. He has basically not said a word about Trump’s drone program (which by design is dramatically more lethal than Obama’s policy), and not a word about Trump lawlessly defending convicted war criminals and encouraging more war crimes. This is because Greenwald is a dishonest hack.
As someone who admired Greenwald for years and personally had discussions with him where he (temporarily) changed my mind about things through badgering and gaslighting, I am still very upset that I didn’t see this sooner.
IMHO he cannot be pigeonholed into a neat "right wing / left wing" scheme like that.
My dad is center-right, despises Republicans, and likes Bernie (votes for him in both primaries) but thinks Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib are too radical. In terms of economic policy this makes little sense, but that’s not what’s going on here.
a) “identity politics” is a major movement on the left, rather than a pejorative right-wing term for civil rights activism, and
b) somehow deciding you’re “against” this
is in fact right-wing. It is sort of like people who are against “critical race theory” - with a tiny handful of exceptions (mostly left-liberal quibbles), they are not making an academic argument about the actual subject of critical race theory so much as signaling their opposition that they’re opposed to anti-racist ideology. Criticizing the term “critical race theory” without having read a bunch of sociology is basically telling on yourself.
Specifically for Identity Politics and Critical Race Theory, the main ideological issue I see is qualifying people by their belonging to major groups (often based on race, ethnicity, religion or sex) which results in solutions that go against individual rights/liberties (which I take to be the cornerstone of liberalism). Examples are: not opposing police violence against people but only police violence against black people, supporting discrimination for/against some races (for black / against Asian when it comes to schooling), etc. A lot of these policies would be good if they were instead targeting everybody (or at most class-based (rich/poor) discrimination). A lot of the proposed bad solutions could be better if they were thought-out a bit more (e.g. "defund the police" is particularly bad... instead what you should do is, prevent police buying military gear, stop swatting, ban civil forfeiture, fund (and train) them more, legalize drugs, reduce poverty to reduce crime, ...).
Edit: contrary to my words above, I actually went and read a bit about CRT on Wikipedia... One of the first "Major themes" listed is critique of liberalism. Therefore, I understand why proponents of CRT would want to pain liberals like me as bad ("right-wing"). It's also not surprising that liberals would oppose CRT.
Can you point to a single person with more than, say, 50 Twitter followers, who believes this? Or even said it provocatively? Maybe Farrakhan, but otherwise...? Almost every Black Lives Matter commentator has pointed out that the US police are deeply violent against everyone, even though black people get it the worst. In fact they have used this to build support for the movement, and argue that white Americans' tolerance for police violence against blacks leads to increased police violence overall.
The way you formulated your view is what (actual) critical race theorists would describe as being "high in racial resentment": you're inventing pro-black racists in response to legitimate calls from black people for civil rights reform.
> supporting discrimination for/against some races (for black / against Asian when it comes to schooling), etc
Harvard artificially deflating the number of accepted Asians is a thorny issue, but calling affirmative action "discrimination" is another of these views that are filled with racial resentment. It's not quite as bad as people who suggest that black beneficiaries of affirmative action are somehow unqualified (this is not how affirmative action works and it's disgusting to suggest otherwise), but it's still a pejorative and antagonistic framework of the issue. It also completely ignores why affirmative action exists in the first place: unlike white and Asian children, black children are badly screwed over by racist teachers and racist administrators starting from kindergarten.
> A lot of these policies would be good if they were instead targeting everybody
The reason why critical race theorists criticize this classical-liberal approach is that a wealthy black person still overall has a much more difficult life in America than a lower-middle-class white person. White people have a lot of difficulty understanding this, hence "class not race" movements on the left. But "class not race" in America is a right-wing idea, one that couldn't exist without a racist erasure of black history and black experiences. Bernie Sanders is also a big "class not race" guy and it's a huge reason why there was a such a split in 2016 between socialists and social democrats. And also why a bunch of centrists and center-right folks (like my father) liked Bernie.
> (e.g. "defund the police" is particularly bad... instead what you should do is, prevent police buying military gear, stop swatting, ban civil forfeiture, fund (and train) them more, legalize drugs, reduce poverty to reduce crime, ...)
OK, I also agree that the "abolish the police" framework is poorly phrased. But Black Lives Matter activists have definitely pushed for every single one of these policies, except "more funding" - even if you don't care about police violence, metropolitan police in particular simply have too much damn money. They spend it very badly! But they don't need more money, they need more oversight on how its spent.
> Therefore, I understand why proponents of CRT would want to pain liberals like me as bad ("right-wing")
You are clearly center-right in a lot of ways. Maybe you are more of a social democrat on economics. But suggesting that CRT is anti-white and that Black Lives Matter hasn't actually thought about policy is... just plain racist.
"See? Even this guy on the left thinks they're nuts!"
And who cares if he went on Tucker. Is there a rule that you can’t talk to the “other side”?
And could you expand on your list of “you must say this to be on my good side”? I hear drones, anything else?
Your commentary actually sounds like an attack on everything but what his actual beliefs are.
The New York Times repeatedly claimed there were WMDs in Iraq based on evidence that was fabricated. This helped sell the invasion to the public leading to the deaths of thousands of people. [1]
CNN was caught leaking debate questions in 2016 to the Democrats [2] and falsely linking an innocent man to a fabricated Russia conspiracy and then being forced to retract and roll the 3 journalists involved in the deception. [3]
That's just scratching the surface!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...
[3] https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/06/26/cnn-resig...
Meanwhile the right wing media still hangs on to lies or very misleading reporting/propaganda without consequences. Is there any apology for the WMD reporting by right wing media? Did any fox news staffers got fired for propagating lies (climate change not existing for example)? On the contrary, the very popular Fox news anchor Shepard Smith ended his career because of misleading reports (Clinton + uranium one) spread by fox news.
Claiming they are somewhat similar is plain wrong. Also, it's the classic 'trick' used by self described centrists to normalize right wing ideas when in reality on is clearly more wrong than the other (e.g. Hunter Biden conspiracy vs Trump nepotism).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th... [2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
Is this an adequate punishment for the thousands of families decimated in the US and the Middle East? How many people have to die before it can't be brushed away with "we're sorry"?
>Hunter Biden conspiracy
This is conjecture. The emails have not been disproven. In fact, at least one email has been cryptographically verified using DKIM headers by an independent third party Errata Security. [1] Additionally, both the FBI and the head of the DNI have stated that the leak is not the result of Russian disinformation. [2]
If you have proof that the FBI, DNI and Errata Security are in fact wrong, you need to back up your claims.
>Is there any apology for the WMD reporting by right wing media
You seem to have erroneously accused me of defending Fox News. Please re-read my comment. You'll find I called them a bottom feeder in no uncertain terms.
[1] https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1322007153415200768
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics/fbi-russia-disin...
Out of all the actors who pushed for illegal wars and ignored war crimes, you'd have to be crazy to give the NYT the majority of the blame. If you trust their apology, they've been sloppy rather than malicious.
> The emails have not been disproven.
Just because some parts are true doesn't mean what right wing media makes of them aren't conspiracies. I'm very certain this story will disappear after Tuesday and there won't be any legal repercussions whatsoever.
> You seem to have erroneously accused me of defending Fox News.
You equated them by calling them all bottom feeders when it's painfully obvious that they operate on different value systems and level of integrity.