Interview of Glenn Greenwald [video] | Hacker News Reader

Interview of Glenn Greenwald [video]

jonathan-cook.net

168 pointsmickeyben62 comments

In the wake of all this NSA/GlennGreenwald/Snowden coverage, it's been painfully clear how little the press actually functions as investigative journalists anymore. Any large organization (BBC, all US cable news, NYTimes, anything close to this size) is hopelessly broken. They all seem afraid to speak out against the five eyes' governments.

Seymour Hersh calls out the NYTimes (supposedly the best news source in the US) for "carrying so much water" and publishing the Obama administration's press releases[1]. There is no "real" journalism happening on these issues. The NYTimes is too afraid of losing favor with the Federal government, or alienating their lucrative big-business sponsors, so they refuse to dig into even the weakest of tales the Obama administration gives them.

The same is true for the BBC, as seen in this interview. That woman "journalist" regurgitates the governments talking points.

1) http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seym...

The current problem with the BBC is that the current UK government is looking for a chance to destroy the BBC and there have been several significant scandals around the BBC lately, all of which lead it to be significantly more careful that some might like.

That said, I don't think there are many critisims that the BBC hasn't had leveled at it[1], and my personal belief is that it's unfortunate that the disproportionate and (often) agenda fueled critisisms get as much concideration as they do (in short, fuck the Daily Mail).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC

The job of an interviewer is to attempt to refute the interviewee's position as well as possible. In other words, the interviewer should imagine the protestations of their most antagonistic viewer and voice them. This gives the interviewee the opportunity to defend their position, and, hopefully, to attack the common arguments against them.

While true this phenomenon isn't recent. Herman and Chomsky wrote about it in 1988 and discussed examples going back at least to the 1960s.

Ironically, some of the best journalism in the US is found on tax-payer funded PBS (I'm thinking of Frontline and Bill Moyer).

To be fair, most of PBS' funding does not come from the government, but instead by donations from members (via local stations). With that said, I'm glad that there are still grants going to support PBS, as their work is excellent.

Have Glenn Greenwald "leak" some information discussed by Frontline or Bill Moyer and a lot of people will suddenly discover it for the first time.

Related, the interview Greenwald did with David Gregory on Meet The Press a few months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq2nu0a0kGk

Where Gregory asked:

> To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?

Greenwald handles himself well in these situations, and doesn't shy away from showing up fellow journalists.

I was so impressed by Greenwald's ability to keep his calm while being asked such ridiculous questions.

I can't believe this interviewer is quite as stupid as she comes off. So why the bizarre attacks, why act like a Government mouthpiece rather than a journalist?

Some people have an intense desire to be guardians/protectors, but it doesn't come from a place of experience, wisdom and empathy, but fear of change and the unknown.

Experienced and evil leaders keep these "panicked protectors" like Wark in their pocket and deploy them strategically to try to discredit and induce uncertainty to maintain control.

It's likely she doesn't perceive/assess her own wisdom, just her own loyalty. She is, in this sense, completely "domesticated." She actually laps up the fact she's a pet of her government's press.

Ugh, just typing that phrase "her government's press" makes me almost as ill as I felt listening to her desperate, hiccuping interruptions of Greenwald. I hope to hell more and more people learn to perceive interviews like this as the propaganda they are and to discredit those who employ such tactics. Minority/marginalize idealist leaders, here's your window of opportunity.

Yeah she was constantly like "emm...err....uhh..." so annoying.

Am I the only one who thought the headline was suggesting that the one giving the embarrassing interview was Greenwald and not the interviewer?

The headline has now been changed. For the understanding of future readers, the previous headline was "Embarrassing Interview of Glenn Greenwald"

Nope, changing the headline here would be great.

That was my impression as well.

Same here

Glad to see this picking up some publicity. It was so awful it had me was shouting at the television.

The desire to create an adversarial interview without the interviewer having sufficient grasp of the subject to shed any light on it whatsoever. There are valid areas that could have been probed but she wasn't smart or well-informed enough to reach them.

From my limited familiarity with British politics, this is sadly how most of UK public thinks.

Case in point: some of the most egregious privacy violations were done by GCHQ as opposed to NSA, who contracted out the sensitive spying to UK because of lax legal regulations. But can you see any electoral upheaval in UK that would even hold a candle to things happening in US? No MPs protesting, no public protesting - nothing.

Even my UK friends in IT industry, spending all of their time online - are shrugging shoulders saying "but spies spy, that's what they do, what's the big deal". I feel that Kirsty is just reflecting that cultural background.

I don't think Greenwald really understands much about crypto, judging from some of his answers. I am glad the Guardian have real crypto experts looking at the stuff and writing articles now.

It's not really surprising. He's a journalist, not a security engineer. He doesn't need to know much about it as The Guardian probably has people in place to take care of things like crypto.

Lots of conspiracy theorists here.

Note that this clip ends prematurely. The program proceeded with Baroness Neville-Jones, a former Security Minister, to whom Wark posed the following questions, among others:

1) Shouldn't we have been told about this anyway? 2) Did you know this was going on? 3) When Neville-Jones said Snowden's revelations were helping terrorists, Wark said that terrorists obviously already knew that their comms were being monitored 4) What does it matter what the Brazillians are doing at Petrogas? 5) You might be going after terrorists but there are actually lots of parties using these channels for business 6) Do you think there is enough control of these systems? 7) There has been a deliberate undermining by the Security Services of encryption 8) Would you say, because you think there should be a review, that Greenwald was right?

Neville-Jones also looked like she thought Wark's questions were ridiculous. Wark came from both angles and I didn't think she was very biased either way.

Link to the complete 22-minute interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-moGtQFvsVU

Unlike most commenters, I think Greenwald is giving very evasive answers to perfectly legitimate questions. Any operational details about the NSA could plausibly be useful those who are trying to evade surveillance. To me the correct answer is that yes, some details could help terrorists, but only minimally so, and that needs to be balanced against the right of citizens in a democracy to understand what their government is doing. Instead, Greenwald stakes out a completely untenable position that "not one line...could even possibly be said to damage national security."

After he says this, the interviewer brings up the specific detail of metadata collection. Now maybe knowledge that the NSA uses metadata will have little impact on terrorist operations or maybe it will have a lot, or maybe none. I don't know. But if I wanted to know, I'd ask someone who had "very carefully" thought about the national security implications of that publication. Instead, that person changes the subject to other surveillance tools and then says that of course terrorists knew they were being monitored, but with no mention of metadata. That's it? I'd certainly hope that the very careful consideration of national security was more thoughtful than that answer.

It's obvious that Greenwald would rather talk about privacy than national security implications, but even he admits that national security is relevant with his "not one line" comment. He can't have it both ways by claiming that there's no harm to national security, but then treating any question for details as an insult. I see on Wikipedia that he complained that this interview focused "almost entirely on the process questions" but I see that as a natural course for the interviewer to take given his refusal to answer such questions.

If you were the interviewer would you have spent any time, at all, on the substance that he reported on?

If so, you would have been a much better interviewer than she was.

Wow, that was stunning. If those questions really were passed from the British Security Services then they just went out of their way to deliberately threaten his life.

Britain has possibly passed the point of no return. I speak with far too many Brits that see Greenwald and Snowden as the bad guys.

The British press is just too controlled to make a real difference in British politics (flipping between red and blue depending on who visits you before an election on your super yacht doesn't count).

It is this lack of a 4th estate (which Glen is referring to), that is the core if Britain's press issues.

About threats: look up the history of the Hutton Inquiry into the "suicide" of David Kelly over the case for the Iraq war, and the subsequent bullying of the BBC into not questioning the Government line any further.

> The British press is just too controlled to make a real difference in British politics (flipping between red and blue depending on who visits you before an election on your super yacht doesn't count).

And yet it was The Guardian (a UK paper) that played a huge part in breaking the Snowden story, and, IIRC, were one of the primary conduits for the Wikileaks information.

I hate to say this, but the Guardian is now split in two. The UK half is subject to a D-Notice and is under the threat of contempt of court should it publish anything in the UK Guardian newspaper that discusses Snowden and the GCHQ link.

The US part of the Guardian is now the primary reporting mechanism for all of the NSA stories.

Whilst Britain has somewhat a "free and independent press", it is not independent enough to act as a viable 4th estate. Most newspapers are owned by large conglomerates in the UK. These people are very powerful and very rich. They have the power to sway elections. They have done so, and will continue doing so. They also have a shrinking market and profit margin, as online publishing continues to chew into their traditional printed newspaper business. They also have a swathe of new media comapnies who saw the opportunity online way before they did, and as a result they are playing catch up.

On the other side you have the government (of the day) who find it in their interests to maintain the status quo. The relationship between politics and press might be a love-hate one, but above all in Whitehall it is a cosy one.

Cosy relationships are not what the British public (or any real democracy) need (in my humble opinion). They need people like Greenwald, who stick out their necks because they believe in what is right and what is wrong. Above all they believe in liberty. Ironically, they have a mixed relationship to privacy, but in this particular case privacy is being protected rather than being abused.

I applaud Geeenwald and I applaud the Guardian. Without people like these to ask questions and publish the truth we would be in a worse state than we are today.

Do you know who controls The Guardian? They have their own interests. This is some big politics here with major forces involved. Zoom out to see the whole picture in mass media: follow who controls the particular mass media, what they report about, what they don't report about, and maybe you can outline some parts of the Big Game.

Those are awfully vague allusions. If you have something to say and can back it up, then speak your piece.

Perhaps you can enlighten us a bit?

And when this interview had finished, when the cameras had been turned off, when the working day had come to an end, this woman likely forgot about the entire discussion, had dinner at The Ivy, and returned to her home in the West End, with unaffected fame and fortune, only to do it all again the following day.

Haven't seen the video yet, but I've gotta disagree with one part of the preceding article:

> Throughout the interview, Wark abandons even the pretence of doing what journalism is supposed to be about: interrogating the centres of power and holding them to account.

This is not journalism's role. It isn't even close to journalism's role. It is a closet perversion of journalism's role. It is some neo-anarchist's view of a journalist's role. This is not journalism's role.

Journalism's role is to get at the truth and to distribute it as widely as possible. That does not mean you target only centers of power. If that's all you do, you're just as much a schmuck for some other asshole's propaganda, just the difference is, this one can't pay you.

Once again, I haven't seen the video, but making such duplicitous statements about the role of journalism by someone who is fairly respected in the community is not the way to go.

> Journalism's role is to get at the truth and to distribute it as widely as possible.

Many a time, that goal is directly related to what you're objecting to, namely:

>> interrogating the centres of power and holding them to account

Those with power most often have the highest motivation & ability to hide/obfuscate the truth, which is why journalists need to interrogate and confront them to get at the truth.

George Orwell summed it up best: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations"

I would agree, but the "someone else" Orwell was talking about could also be another journalist or the public at large.

No, journalism is not simply printing controversial materials. It does require some amount of investigation and analysis.

Neither did I advocate for a journalism consisting of "simply printing controversial materials" nor one bereft of "investigation and analysis". So you're attacking straw men here.

My comment, as well as Greenwald's publicly stated views, only highlight the frequently adversarial nature of journalism against those in power.

> Journalism's role is to get at the truth and to distribute it as widely as possible.

This is obviously not the case; otherwise mathematicians, social philosophers and scientists — and their publishers — would often be journalists. Instead, there's a huge amount of literature on journalism in society's context. You might start with Robert McChesney. [1]

And which "truth"? News useful for the mother struggling to feed her children, or for elite investors? Part of the system is determining what's covered — and what isn't.

And what's a "neo-anarchist's view of a journalist's role"? Rather, "interrogating the centres of power" is a mainstream, elite myth, probably not far from Lippman's. [2] Do you mean someone like Chomsky, who studied media? He points out that media mainly serves power; propaganda, given that news agencies are generally corporations in the business of selling eyeballs to other corporations. The problem isn't that the media should ask questions of the powerful, but that it cares what they say in the first place. (Acting as stenographers for whatever lies "official sources" offer for public consumption.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._McChesney

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism#Role

You can disagree with it as much as you like, but for most journalists holding the powerful to account is one of their biggest motivators and professional goals. So whether it's a weird perversion or a duplicitous statement about the role of journalism... just FYI it's a very widespread one.

I hope we can all at least agree that it isn't about being a shil for political power.

Well, everyone except this one reporter apparently.

It is. And my definition of journalism was plenty wide. Sometimes journalism has you holding centres of power to account, but by no means is that your modus operandi.

Well, up until now, it's only been the centers of power who have been breaking the law (not to mention the constitution), covering up, lying, and committing perjury - so yeah, they are the ones who journalists should be focusing on.

But sure, let's continue watching TV shows and cheap local news reports about brave police officers arresting drug addicts committing petty crime just to survive and call _that_ journalism.

Yes, because that's exactly what I was advocating, instead of trying to maintain any sort of an illusion of objectivity. Y'know, instead of dashing it out the window and acting as if that in itself was noble.

> Journalism's role is to get at the truth and to distribute it as widely as possible.

I agree. I think the article agrees. Unfortunately the hyperbole distorts the article's message. There's a better description of the problem here -

> This is actually how most Newsnight interviews run: creating the theatre of conflict between journalist and interviewee that conceals the real issues rather than revealing them.

This is a problem with Today (BBC Radio 4 'flagship' news programme) too. They have to maintain "balance", which sometimes means they get to polarised interviewees and have a ding-dong interview. Great entertainment, but not great at getting to the truth.

The notorious example is Paxman, on Newsnight, asking the same question nine times. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00r2912) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI)

Here's a bit of discussion about it. (http://drmatthewashton.com/2011/03/11/great-mistakes-in-poli...)

It's a nice bit of ding dong, but Howard didn't threaten to over rule Derek Lewis. (Although Howard had asked a civil servant if he had the power to overrule Derek Lewis.)

And this bit of theatrics ignores the wider problem - Howard was a fucking terrifying idiot in charge of a monstrous party. When Ann fucking Widdecombe (handcuff to the beds prisoners giving birth) says "there is something of the night" about someone (Howard) you know something is scary.

That was my first thought reading this as well, and I agree that the author couldn't have missed the point about journalism more. As you said, the goal of journalism should be to publish the truth...and journalists should absolutely not be free from criticism by other journalists in the pursuit of that goal.

The article's reaction to the interview, which I did watch, seems to mainly take issue with the idea that anyone would dare question Gleen Greenwald about his coverage. There were some things wrong with the interview, the anchor questions were overall not all that good (particularly follow-ups), but objecting to the very idea of an adversarial interview of someone covering an important story seems exactly the opposite of what journalism should be about.

Basically, if we value journalism at all, we should support the idea of other journalists looking at Greenwald's (or any other journalist's) coverage with a critical eye.

There would be no problem if they would treat Cameron the same as they treat Greenwald.

Having Cameron or Obama be subject to the same type of interview is unthinkable.

Your ideal is a Unicorn, and if it existed, it probably wouldn't be able to find employment as a journalist.

Instead of evenly distributed journalists who are a perfect match for whatever yours or anyone's ideal happens to be, what we get is a group of media organizations with a range of social and political goals, who tend to be staffed with journalists whose ideals are approximately aligned, and also a bunch of schmucks.

Bravo. That's some incredible self control not to just tell them to fuck off and walk out. I feel angry for him just watching it.

Oh, Kirsty Wark.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsty_Wark (see "Controversies" and "Interview Style"

Almost got fired for going on holiday with the Scottish First Minister ( http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/wark-kept-... ), which is about as far from impartial as you can get.

And her husband has his own email hacking crime history: http://journalisted.com/article/3dko

Being quite familiar with Kirsty Wark and Newsnight, my impression of this segment was that she was playing devil's advocate, almost doing Greenwald a favour by allowing him to easily rebut some of the more common charges against his handling of the Snowden leaks.

three things came out of this for me (I saw the Newsnight interview a few days ago)

- Kirsty Wark represents quite well an old guard. Whilst part of the Scottish political Establishment she has acted intelligently and well as a journalist over the years, but it seems that this affair is simply a paradigm shift too far. In that I think she represents most people and most journalists. The government spies on everything online has not had the implications sink in just yet for 98% of the population

- We have had some truly dumb Ministers for Security "The Russians have everything" - really, they can crack AES / whatever in one shot?

- Just how did Snowden protect the data on one or more USB sticks? I am guessing he created a new key, mailed that to Greenwald (snail mail?) and then wiped everything. no point in beating some guy up whilst shouting "tell me the 4096 bytes in order !"

"Comments are disabled for this video."... says it all.

Luckily there's always Twitter: https://twitter.com/KirstyWark/status/385786002456842240

Interesting that the responses on to @KirstyWark's tweet are largely pro-Greenwald, while the responses to @BBCNewsnight's are pro-Wark.

[1] https://twitter.com/KirstyWark/status/385786002456842240

[2] https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/385885262565216256

The positive from this is that it adds such weight to Glenn Greenwald's integrity and ability.

Is this link from the article to the video on youtube-nocookie.com one of those URLs that the NSA infects my computer with via their spyware server?

Here's the standard youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Zvo8N3G94

Wow, Erin Burnett in 30 years!

Amazing restraint on Glennzilla's part, the harder they try to discredit him, the more foolish they look.

Lets not forget that in the UK, if you don't pay a TV licence (if you have a TV) you get fined. Dont pay that fine you get put in prison. Does that sound like a trustworthy and unbias source for news?

With the falling crime rate, and the shaky economy, the weird situation (non payment of tv licence is criminal offence, while non payment of other bills is purely civil) a lot of people go through court for non payment of tv licence.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10256679/T...)

Despite that, not so many people actually end up in prison for non payment. ("In recent years at least 70 people have been jailed for non-payment of fines associated with TV licensing offences.") I strongly agree that prison is not the right place for people who don't pay fines unless there's no other option, and I don't think that prison was the last resort for all those 70 people.

Here's the BBC report (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23792388)

Note that they make a small sneaky claim here:

> Most people who own a television set, or who stream live broadcasts through their computer, must pay the annual charge.

Compare that to the Telegraph wording:

> Anyone who watches television as it is being broadcast must have a valid television licence for their home regardless of whether they watch it on the internet or on a traditional TV set.

You can own a tv with no need to pay a licence - use the set for games consoles or DVD players or some such.

One person going to jail is horrific. Thanks for the links!

Idiotic comment. You only get fined if you are watching BBC produced TV without a license. You have the choice not to.

That's not true. You get fined if you receive ANY broadcast TV without a licence, regardless of if you watch the BBC or not.

That said, I don't see what relevance this has to the topic.

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