On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter? | Hacker News Reader

On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald become something other than a reporter?

washingtonpost.com

91 pointsLibertatea69 comments

Jay Rosen on Greenwald's style of reporting:

>The professional stance that proscribes all political commitments and discourages journalists from having a clear view or taking a firm position on matters in dispute (you can call it objectivity, if you like, or viewlessness, which I like better) is one way of doing good work. A very different professional stance, where the conclusions that you come to by staring at the facts and thinking through the issues serve to identify your journalism… this is another way of doing good work.

>They are both valid. They are both standard. (And “traditional.”) They are both major league. Greenwald operates in the second fashion, but the language we have for this style — calling him a blogger or an advocate, hoping that these shorthands convey what’s different about him — is not very illuminating. “Blurring the line between opinion pieces and straight reporting…” is not very illuminating.

"Politics: none", the first kind of journalism, is a form of persuasion that tries to signal credibility by refraining from taking a view so far as is possible. "Politics: some" is a form of persuasion where you are transparent about your commitments and your judgments of the facts. These both have their advantages, neither is more inherently "journalistic" than the other.

http://pressthink.org/2013/06/politics-some-politics-none-tw...

As Camus said: "le goût de la vérité n'empêche pas la prise de parti" - (the taste for truth does not stop you from having an opinion). I don't understand why this is supposed to be so controversial: newspapers have had opinions for centuries!

Yes you write the story to suit the papers owners political leanings - even the Guardian bashes the BBC (the parent company owns a few low quality commercial radio stations).

Let alone what Murdoch and the DMG et all get up to

Presentation of opinion as fact, and selection of a set of facts that support your opinion, with an accompanying omission of those that don't, is controversial.

Selecting facts and presenting opinions while pretending not to have them is worse.

That's why you need the "taste for truth". It's not controversial in the business world: I am perfectly capable of giving an unbiased presentation of the pros and cons of Git over Mercurial, even though I personally prefer the latter.

I don't understand why this is supposed to be so controversial

Because humans in general have an extreme bias towards believing things they want to believe and not believing things they don't. It is very rare to find someone who truly reports things neutrally and even rarer in a situation where stringent neutrality is not fostered.

I guess other people are free to read whatever they want, but I very rarely read opinion pieces or news from people who I know are firmly on one side or another. They are not usually honestly investigating the facts and more likely trying to sway people to their position. Whilst that is understandable as they are human, and they are not necessarily incorrect, it is not what I want from my news.

Everyone writes with a bias. The difference is whether or not they are honest and open about what their biases are.

I would much rather read pieces by a reporter like Greenwald that makes it clear where he stands, than a journalist that pretends - maybe even to himself/herself - that there is an objective truth they can report.

Everyone writes with a bias. The difference is whether or not they are honest and open about what their biases are.

No, the difference is whether or not the approach their writing aware of, and compensating for, their biases.

There really IS an objective truth to report. The NSA is either collecting certain data or it isn't, and so on. There's a lot of stuff like that.

There's other, speculative stuff, like to what extent if any the NSA is breaking the law.

I'd contend that a reporter who cannot present the facts as facts for fear of being perceived as "biased" or cannot form and state an opinion about the speculative/subjective stuff is kind of subpar.

The point is you want journalists working in an environment where it is expected people stay neutral. Whilst one person will have a bias, you always have other people who read the piece and edit it to keep that in check. That sort of person, even if they are just as biased as independent reporter X, will produce much more balanced work. It's all well and good to say "Oh everybody has a bias" but everybody's bias is not as large as anothers, and doesn't affect their writing in the same way.

That's fine- as I said, you can read what you want. I'm just explaining why a lot of people see it differently.

It's funny how just about everything that comprises journistic 'ethics' is designed to make the megacorporations that own the media more profitable, and how every time the economics of the business change the code of ethics need to be 'updated'.

That's an interesting point, but I think it's difficult for journalists to demonstrate the transparency required for them to be both biased and trustworthy. Factually supporting your view doesn't mean as much when you're the one presenting and interpreting the facts. The Washington Post article has an applicable quote, “Do we know if he’s pulling his punches or has his fingers on the scale because some information that should he should be reporting doesn’t fit [with his cause]?”

Well, the Post gave us nothing at all. I'd rather take slanted information than none.

Please note also that "politics: none" as it is actually practiced is very much political and is inherently pro-government. There are only Republicans and Democrats, they are equal voices in all debates, and anything outside of that frame is fringe and crazy.

Not to mention that something subjectively (or even almost objectively) fringe or crazy immediately becomes exactly 50% true if one major party endorses the view.

This is getting extremely scary that big-name journalists already are now smearing him with accussations of criminalities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU8-cBfgLJA

As context: a lot of journalists haven't been the biggest fan of Greenwald for quite some time. His blog from '05-'10 (might be getting those dates wrong) covered some stuff such as the Valerie Plame affair, which was often criticized for lack of background research.

As further context: Personally, I think its hard to vilify someone who lives with eleven rescued dogs.

Ah, the smear begins.

If you don't toe the line on the Washington Consensus you're not a 'journalist', you're an 'activist'.

Hint: 'objectively' reporting on only the approved message coming out of the government isn't objective at all. I'd take this as yet another warning sign (if more were needed) that mainstream newspaper journalism in America is deeply unhealthy; who needs the likes of Pravda, Izvestia, or TASS if the nominally 'free' press is happy to bend over and distribute your propaganda voluntarily?

Been waiting for it, going to see the Administrations sycophants in the press line up and declare those who don't follow the approved script of somehow being in cahoots with those they report on.

First it was going after the Fox reporter, after all he worked for FOXS NEWS, now we got a few more targets because the government was caught red handed and worse, looks inept in grabbing a single person.

Should be fun to see who sides with who.

You can't make this stuff up. Now journalists are complaining that this "blogger" (as the NYTimes called him) has blown open a huge story that was under their noses the whole time.

But if they reported on it they might have lost their access!

This article is really troubling because there is an understated assumption that 'freedom of the press' is a special right afforded to a class of people - the fourth estate. This is a corruption of the original meaning of the first amendment, bolstered by our american language which refers to the journalistic vocation as 'the press'. The original meaning, rather, is quite literal. The freedom of the press is the freedom for anyone to use technology to disseminate factual information, especially any factual information which is news (time-dependent).

Scary.

Exactly.

I'm curious how people today would characterize Thomas Paine, were we to zap them back in time to report on the founding of the US. I'm sure they would all be toeing the King's line and denouncing people like Paine.

Other reporters, in thrall to the consensus of the ruling classes, are experiencing cognitive dissonance when faced with someone this effective and yet so heedless of the red lines.

This article just shows how compromised the Washington Post is. This is the biggest news story of the year -- a deliberate subversion of the constitution -- and they are clutching their pearls because he is acting like it matters.

Imagine if this were a Russian or Chinese story of this magnitude - isn't this how its press would report the story? Wouldn't we be surprised if the press did not focus on the circus of the affair and failings of the accusers rather than the abusive power of the state.

Would not the US press mock the complete blurring of state propaganda and journalistic ethics?

This is a travesty for an institution that holds a constitutional responsibility as a check on the state. Our press has mostly turned into a deliberate pun - The Peoples Magazine.

This is dumb. Glenn Greenwald's politics aren't the problem, his wild interpretation of the PRISM slides is the problem. He made a serious substantive error based on nothing. Being a reporter is a position of trust- and you probably can't trust him.

Good thing you can read, apply your critical thinking skills, and make up your own mind then. Itsn't it?

I think this diagram I created for you may clarify things: http://i.imgur.com/o870mrh.png

Yes, but- it's my first order preference to be able to trust him.

Greenwald has written a New York Times bestselling book on executive authority, broken a story on his blog about wiretapping that led to front-page stories on most major newspapers in the country, and Russ Feingold read from his blog during the Censure hearings. What have you done?

Um... the "problem" at hand is apparently whether or not Greenwald "is a journalist" and by extension whether he qualifies for the very broad protections of a free press granted by the first amendment.

Your point is what? That because he misread a powerpoint he should be thrown in jail?

The only thing Greenwald has done wrong is be overconfident in his ability to report accurately on technological specifics he doesn't understand. And I don't see how the resultant errors have hurt much of anything.

The main impact of his reporting is to get people out of denial about what they sort of knew anyway, namely that the NSA has access to lots and lots and lots and lots of otherwise-private information. EXACTLY which kinds of information the NSA has, and which kinds it's still a few years away from securing, hardly matter from a public policy standpoint. Little practical harm is coming to innocent people from the snooping right now; the risks to liberty over time are horrific, and so something must be done to rein them in; those things are true under any reasonable theory as to exactly what data the NSA does or doesn't already have.

I suppose it would be better if Greenwald presented evenly balanced quotes and regurgitated propaganda with no analysis. He might be lucky enough to get a job at NYTimes then.

He only has a New York Times Best Selling Book on the Bush Administration and its abuses of power.

Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headline...

We walk a dangerous line when we start playing around with the idea that Greenwald, a journalist, is something other than a journalist. A journalist is allowed to have opinions and causes.

A journalist can engage in activism. There's nothing wrong with performing your work with passion, so why should it be any different for journalists? I get the creeps when I hear people suggest that Greenwald is just an activist and not a journalist. That usually means someone is being staged for oppression (ala Assange).

Members of the US government will suggest anything to get the scandal spotlight off of them and sweep this issue under the rug. To these criminals, the US Constitution has truly become a historical document. They pass secret rulings and laws to justify these constitutional violations in their minds.

No. To suggest otherwise is to attempt to redefine "journalist" in a way that is quite frankly un-American. The Constitution enshrines freedom of the press for exactly this reason.

You see, all the USSR should've done was re-labeled journalists as 'activists' before having them rounded up. All better! Oh wait, they did…

Betteridge's law of headlines strikes again.

It's interesting that the Washington Post is now going to educate us on journalism. Is suppressing information for the government considered journalism these days? I thought the entire idea behind freedom of the press was to act as a check to government power. I don't call what they do journalism, I call it state sponsored propaganda.

Why the defamatory article? Journo's can't have opinions because the Washington post decided so yesterday? On the flipside, why should we trust the wash-post since they clearly have an agenda too?

I think it's becoming fairly clear here that there are two groups of people, each composing about 10% of the electorate.

The first group views terrorism as a magic trump card. Whatever we do to stop terrorism is worth the price we pay. (These folks also tend to believe in other issues as trumping everything else) Most of these folks are plugged into the establishment in some way -- military, legislative, security, and now reporters. For these guys, Snowden is the enemy. The story here is all about him and how we're going to "get him"

The other group of people are technically-inclined folks and, well, libertarian-type weirdos (And I say that as a little-l libertarian). We view the enemy as the ideology that enough is never enough: the enemy is the thought that we should continue collecting and collating data on each American citizen (and the rest of the world) until we have perfect knowledge about everybody. For them, the story is the disaster the first group has created out of the country. Snowden is just an example, a very small piece of a very big story.

80% of folks, however, could care less, as long as Farmville keeps working. What we're seeing in the press is this battle between insiders like Gregory and outsiders like Greenwald for control over the narrative. Is this going to be just another "bad guy on the run" story? Or will it actually have an impact on public opinion?

Short run, I'm not optimistic the 80% are going to see the minutely-studied drones that BigCorp and BigGov are turning them into. But these things have a way of building on each other. The smart move for government here, if it wants to remain legitimate, is to make some major concessions right now while keeping important capabilities intact. It's not an "us or them" posture. But that seems to be what we're going to get.

I just wish the focus would get off of Snowden and Greenwald. Just like Assange before them, once the story becomes about the person and not the issue, the narrative (argument) is lost.

I don't fall into either of those groups and I care deeply. I would never ever call myself a libertarian, but I am deeply disturbed by the direction the world is going in. As the world becomes more extreme, the middle chooses a side. That is the way it has always been. The only question is, have oppressive powers finally "beaten" the game? If not, will they ever? That is yet to be seen.

> I don't fall into either of those groups...

I don't want to speak for you but, given your hackernewsers profile, I think you fall into the "technically-inclined folks" category.

"technically-inclined folks and, well, libertarian-type weirdos"

("technically-inclined folks" ∪ "libertarian-type weirdos")

thanks for clarifying.

80% of folks, however, could care less, as long as Farmville keeps working.

'Could care less' doesn't mean anything.

This comment's a great example of what he's talking about. You're not even worried about Farmville, you're worried about extremely pedantic grammar corrections that most of us got over by the 3rd grade or so.

Good point. My apologies To Mr Markham.

Let's just say that if I had to choose between "real journalists" that take the side of government no matter what, and "amateur bloggers" that try to stand up to government abuses, I'll take the latter, every single time.

The "real journalists" from the mainstream media are a disgrace to their profession these days. Thank god for bloggers who do the real journalists' jobs.

Plus, it's time to focus on what really matters - the act of journalism. Whoever is doing it doesn't really matter.

On NSA disclosures, has Glenn Greenwald just gotten smeared?

So this case is a big case. And it opens up a lot of interesting philosophical questions that are worth exploring. Try not to shout down anything you don't like as "Big government lie/smear campaigns". Conceptually, I believe we want journalists not to be carrying an agenda. Conceptually, I think we understand that bloggers and non journalists do carry an agenda. This helps us filter the information we are receiving. What does it mean for journalism that it took an independent blogger to break it? Does journalism need to look at itself and re-invent itself if it can't break these stories? The fact that Greenwald so obviously and openly has an agenda that he pushes - how comfortable are we with the closed loop information source of Snowden to Greenwald? Do we trust Greenwald would easily present key facts that contradicted the current story if they came to light? These (and more) are critical questions to ask.

Greenwood is not the only reporter in the world, other sources can contradict him if they have clues.

Well given Greenwald seems to concede that it would be a crime for him to "aid and abet" Snowden in his activities that means there is a line between journalist and "something else".

Given Greenwald is a lawyer surely a sensible response to the original question of whether he has broken the law is an explanation as to why he has not. Rather than a series of "you're a journalist, you shouldn't ask me that", "why don't we all arrest Congress for lying?" and "Obama is trying to criminalise investigative journalists".

His being a lawyer is supposed to be a big part of what makes him a good journalist. Given an opportunity to explain what aiding and abetting means in law, and why he hasn't done it, he decided to have a huff. Which is rather unlawerly.

I'm sorry, why would it be his responsibility to prove that he is innocent?

Once it wouldn't have been.

These days you get judged in public long before you reach a court.

My take on it was David Gregory was assuming, in his line of questioning, that Snowden is already a convicted felon so Greenwald is potentially aiding & abetting. Greenwald began his answer by saying Gregory's assumption in his question was flawed - therefore he couldn't be aiding & abetting someone who wasn't convicted of any crime. So while he didn't directly say "No" - he did give a pretty convincing answer by dismissing Gregory's premise from the outset.

He was also making the point that journalists are supposed to disseminate information. Snowden broke the law as he distributed classified materials contrary to his legal access and responsibilities, but Glenn Greenwald has no such legal liability.

David Gregory has forgotten what journalism is. It's not sitting on TV bloviating and collecting a fat paycheck.

Surely the primary difference between Greenwald and journalists who came before him is the existence of social media.

Previously, investigative journalists would privately muse that they were doing a public service. Now they can say as much on twitter. I would be shocked if it were any other way.

This article belongs in an opinion section.

EDIT: I see it's in the "style" section, whatever that means.

Groklaw: opinionated, pro FSF.

Beholden to no one. Enshrining important cases in plain text in the public record. Crowdsourcing prior art and patent busting. Surfacing contradictions in court cases.

In short, they're the gold standard in IP law reporting. And it wouldn't be happening without their passion.

Only as much as the NYT has become a subtle propaganda mouthpiece for the Mil/Ind complex.

But hey if you can't attack the message attacking the messenger works pretty effectively too right?

He has always communicated his own point of view, which I think is fine, even as a reporter. But in the past I feel he has spun yarns and made connections that don't exist for sake of a story and his point of view. That does bug me.

This is probably just an attempt to generate controversy.

Glenn Greenwald has never really been a journalist, he has been a blogger and op-ed writer from the beginning. Of course he has taken a side--that's his job. The fact that he so clearly takes sides is why he was able to break this story in the first place.

Anyway, great journalists throughout history have taken sides. One of the most celebrated moments in U.S. journalism was Edward R. Murrow's "reporting" on Joe McCarthy--which took sides against McCarthy and helped bring him down.

Edit to clarify: Greenwald has never been a "journalist" in the modern conception of a totally impartial stater of facts. Personally I think people with opinions can be journalists too, especially with regard to legal protections for the press.

I wonder if journalists were ever impartial, considering the history of "yellow" journalism and the papers of Horace Greeley and Randolph Hearst and others. Maybe Edward R. Murrow fits that criteria but it seems as I think about it that impartiality has never been a common feature...

Totally impartial stater of QUOTES, actually. 'Facts' implies a journalistic responsibility to call out quotes that are inaccurate, but they very much don't ever do that.

TL;DR- No.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

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