Glenn Greenwald: ‘Journalists Are Authoritarians’
reason.com
reason.com
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There's the headline quotation right there and I gotta say it does not make a lick of sense to me. Journalists didn't drive this at all.
Obviously true and uncontroversial.
"Some media outlets pursue political agendas from the top down"
Seemingly true in a few places
"Journalists are authoritarians"
Meaningless blanket generalization and definitely false.
You're just parsing it uncharitably. Saying journalists are authoritarians is like saying turtles are slow. The fact that you can find the occasional turtle with a rocket sled and is thereby not slow doesn't really disprove the general principle.
The context also indicates that he's referring to journalists at specific enumerated publications, in which case it might reasonably refer to the entirety of them if the structure of those institutions is pushing out anyone who isn't.
If you want to blame "journalists" or "the media" then blame Greenwald too because he's one of them. Otherwise you have to acknowledge there was wide range of public and professional opinion. And that social media orgs have all done what they felt they had to do to protect their businesses bottom lines.
Greenwald left The Intercept because his editors had the audacity to ask for edits. That's like living in a Gestapo prison as far as he's concerned. So his absolutely paranoid belief that journalistic authoritarianism is directly to blame for private companies taking action to hide incitement to armed revolution is just far-fetched to me.
Another one is: journalists don't like their outlets getting outperformed by some "whackos/conservatives" on facebook, they go directly after facebook and demand that they downgrade those channels and promote theirs. They demand fact checking routines which are then in part outsourced to outlets that share their values.
Advertisers love controversy if they think it will help them sell stuff and don't like it if they think it will alienate their customers, it depends on who the companies cater too.
I think you (and Greenwald) are giving journalists too much credit. They generally write what they think their readers want, advertisers react based on what they think is best for their bottom line.
> Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.
It also sounds like he thinks that illiberal millennials graduated, got jobs as journalists and editors, and now are happy to parrot propaganda from government authorities rather than investigate and report on accounts from whistleblowers.
https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/trump-capitol-facebook-t...
Is there a reason you're painting his critics as so simple-minded? I've seen a lot of seemingly reasonable criticism of him.
But there were a lot of comments in this thread that were literally just saying "Greenwald is losing his mind". No argument, just that.
I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left, unlike the milk-toast "leftism" (or really "centrism" or rightism) of outlets like the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, etc..
This is what bothers people, and they can't take people actually on the left pointing out what hypocrites and right-wingers many liberals are.
This is why Glenn Greenwald gets censored, but I'm pleased to see that he still has the balls to speak truth to power.
There’s a ton I disagree with Greenwood about. But there’s also a lot I agree with. To dismiss him fully because of what I consider his bad ideas would be to also miss out on a lot of good insights.
Well, it’s both false on some points and misleading in much of the rest, in service of a false narrative, like much of Greenwald’s monomaniacal campaign to drive a wedge between the Left and the Democratic establishment [0]; the Espionage Act was not passed primarily to criminalize dissent, and the aspects that were arguably intended for that purpose and definitely misused for it have been largely neutralized by subsequent court decisions narrowing their applicability on Constitutional grounds (as, also, have other aspects of the law that address what is more commonly understood as spying), and were not, in any case, the provisions of the law under which prosecutions were carried out under the Obama Administration.
Now, that's not necessarily insane, if, for one example of a scenario in which it would be perfectly rational, Geenwald’s goal is to advance the interests of common opponents of both the Left and the Democratic Establishment
[0] I have no problem with driving a wedge between the Left and the Center-Right Democratic establishment based on the truth, as a Left-leaning pragmatist I recognize that's the only way to get any drive for progress on Left issues. Doing it based on lies and distortion doesn't create pressure for progress, just division and distraction.
Also his point about Obama having used the Act more than any other president is simple fact.
Over the last couple of years, he has consistently supported Trump, down to echoing Parler administrators' easily disproven talking points that none of their users were involved in the Capitol riots.
It's entirely consistent with his earlier positions that Greenwald opposed Obama/Clinton-era drone warfare, but from his writings, you'd have a difficult time learning how much drone strikes have expanded under Trump.
And finally, since 2016, Greenwald (as well as Assange and Snowden) have essentially turned into full blown instruments of Putinist propaganda (In Greenwald's case including the denial that Russia engaged in Novichok attacks against critics). This is neither a "leftist" nor an "anti-war" position, he simply favors a different bunch of war mongers.
It's honestly too much despite having a strong opinion on the matter.
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...
I can't see how a serious writer would want to be a journalist now anyway, and Greenwald seems to recognize that there is no "back" to go to. What forward looks like for writers is much more interesting.
>> The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom.
It's hard for me to imagine him not understanding why consistently denouncing the legitimacy of print media in an era of conspiracy theory (especially post pizza-gate) may matter.
>> [Facebook and Twitter] had to start censoring…because journalists at CNN and NBC and The New York Times demanded they do so.
I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
>> [Seems to be arguing that millenials care about free speech less because they are coddled]
I'm not even gonna touch that one.
>> They 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. That's just unfortunately the modern-day mentality of the journalist.
If he hadn't slipped the word authoritarian in there, I think this might be the most interesting point of the piece. I think a lot of people, including journalists, scientific journals, textbooks, wikipedia, even HN believe in rating/filtering information on its quality (is it true?, is it divisive?, does it have an agenda?). In fact, the filtering/amplifying of information is the primary job of such platforms.
As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform. We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses. Based on the results of the great experiment (Qanon, Trump presidency, "stop the steal", capitol riots) people want to pull back to the tried-and-true pre-web-2.0 journalism (i.e. gatekeepers).
This is where a good-faith exploration would really be interesting.
>> [Seems to insinuate that the NYT doesn't believe in whistleblowers like Snowden.]
I hope that's not true.
What's the alternative? Traditional media gets a pass for everything wrong they do because pizzagate?
> I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
Not when they've been calling for it since long before the riot. (I'm not sure when it became riots. Was there a second one?)
> As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
And lest we not forget state-sponsored media.
> We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses.
The experiment we tried was a Facebook algorithm designed to increase "engagement" by promoting controversy. That was a Bad Idea.
Maybe time to smash them up instead of appointing them arbiters of the discourse.
It's worth noting that the invention of the printing press caused massive social change in Europe, and was not looked upon very kindly at the time by many.
I think the internet analogy writes itself, and I hope that we maintain the ability of humans to converse about what interests them regardless of how crazy they are.
Just remember kids, words are not actions. I can say that I'm gonna burn Y-combinator down (I don't even know where it is, to be honest) but that is not the same as actually burning down their buildings. I worry that we're conflating these two things too much in terms of what we see on the Internet.
And to be fair, the major driver of the craziness of the Republican party is TV and talk radio, not social media.
Free-speech liberalism are at odds with the political establishment. The liberal camp has been decimated recently with the rise of both the authoritarian right/left.
From my perspective, what is happening in the US right now is somewhat similar to what happened in the Latin American countries in the 60s and 70s.
I'm very happy I discovered https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gives me access to articles written about the same subject from both perspectives. What I think it super interesting is how journalists omit certain facts to further their point of view.
That's fairly meaningless without a comparison of the number of people for whom it could have been applied under Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever.
Was it applied more under Obama than, say, Eisenhower because Obama applied it to cases that Eisenhower would not have applied it to if they had occurred during his administration?
Or were there more people leaking classified information during Obama's time in office than there were during Eisenhower's and that explains why it was applied more under Obama.