The Daily Beast goes after Glenn Greenwald.
Besides obsessively repurposing Greenwald’s complaints about other media personalities—sometimes publishing multiple Greenwald-related pieces in the same day—[Fox News] also creates entire outrage cycles from Greenwald tweets, transforming tiny kernels into the media equivalent of a bag of popcorn….
“I did not see this coming,” said The Nation’s national affairs correspondent, Joan Walsh, who was editor-in-chief of Salon more than a decade ago when Greenwald gave up practicing law to spend five-and-a-half years as a star writer there. “It’s kind of sad. He won awards for us. He was a beacon during those dark days [of the Bush-Cheney military adventures and Barack Obama’s first term]. He was a lovely colleague, he really was. The difference between the cantankerous guy we sometimes had to wrangle with—it wasn’t all roses—and this person? Who’s this?”
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11 comments:
Tim writes:
I've been a fan of Glenn Greenwald for a long time as one of the very few honest lefties out there. His dedication to principle, his willingness to criticize his own side, to call them to account for their own hypocrisies and failures, is an attraction. He occupies the same corner of my brain as Nat Hentoff.
And as we all know, it is standard practice among partisans such as you find in the media to attack the messenger, and to reject fellow travelers when they depart from the approved message.
But there may be something to it here. I subscribe to Greenwqald's email and I have noticed over the past year a determination to go after left-wing targets. There's no particular article he's written that I find fault with, but there is a gleeful determination to his criticism that undermines his value to me as an honest leftist. "Not afraid to criticize the left" has crossed over into seemingly too eager to criticize the left.
Kylos writes:
I would place myself on the right and I have added Greenwald to my regular sources of information. Probably wouldn’t have done that in the Bush or Obama years.
I can’t say what he was like in the past, but my impression of his writing is not that he has has switched sides but that the sides have switched power. Greenwald is unlike most people in that his beliefs don’t change depending on who is in power. That’s probably because even as a leftist, he fully believes that power is a primary source of oppression. I don’t believe he thinks power equates to oppression but that it is necessary for it.
Most people right or left don’t have such a view. Instead, we believe that if only our side is in power, things will be better. Greenwald seems to have avoided that delusion and instead believes that power should always be subject to questioning. I myself have probably been far too malleable on the dangers of power depending on who is in power. His consistency on that is something to aspire to.
I disagree with many of his beliefs, but find him to be a rare person of integrity and want to hear what he says even if I disagree with it.
Temujin writes:
It's hard to get into this without just filling the page with ad hominem attacks. I mean, the Daily Beast and Joan Walsh are two of the least reputable sources for truth in our age. They are party hacks. For the Daily Beast, there are only narratives to maintain. For Joan Walsh, truth is an inconvenience and to be shoved aside for the story. Even if there is no story.
Glenn Greenwald is someone I've been reading for years. He has upset me often over the years. Mainly because I hated that he was often right in attacking those I wanted to believe. Not always, but often. The thing about Glenn, however, is that I never had an issue with his credibility. He seemed to always put the search for truth, the reliance on facts, front and center in his goal. Even if he started out to look for confirmation of a story going one way, if the facts brought him the other way, he would go with the facts. This is unheard of in today's media. Facts? Use them when you can, but often they are inconvenient, and when inconvenient, don't use them.
For Glenn, facts are the story. That he, to his own surprise, has found journalism and the Left to have lost their way makes him a giant pain to the Left. So they do to him what they do to anyone who becomes an apostate: They excommunicate him. But not before trying to destroy him, his credibility, and his life. (as they are trying to do with a load of writers on Substack and other venues who have reached an end point with The Narrative.)
I'll leave it at this: if your life depended on facts, and your choices for information are Joan Walsh or Glenn Greenwald, who you gonna pick?
You should make that decision every day with everything you read. Our lives do depend on facts.
MikeR writes:
This is funny, because Greenwald is unchanged from when I remember him in the early days of George W. Bush's presidency. He was really annoying then and really annoying now, because he was and is completely incapable of nuance. He did not think that the War on Terror justified doing illegal or immoral things, and he does not think that the War on White Supremacists/Russian sympathizers/... justifies doing illegal or immoral things.
He hasn't changed at all; he cares about nothing but a particular set of principles and does not care at all who is the one violating them.
His critics, on the other hand, don't have any principles. They are team players and are upset because he used to work for their team and now he's working against it.
Even though he's "on my team now", I still find his takes on Israel really annoying. But that's fine.
Tom T. writes:
"It seems significant that the criticism is going after Greenwald personally, rather than attempting to address what he's been saying."
Paul writes:
"Joan Walsh: "It’s kind of sad. He won awards for us. He was a beacon during those dark days [of the Bush-Cheney military adventures and Barack Obama’s first term]. He was a lovely colleague, he really was. The difference between the cantankerous guy we sometimes had to wrangle with—it wasn’t all roses—and this person? Who’s this?"
With Matt Taibbi today; and the late, great Nat Henthoff of the Village Voice, one of the spectacularly few consistent civil libertarians, as opposed to leftist partisan hacks, in post-Vietnam American journalism.
Omaha1 says:
"First I'll say that I did not like Glenn Greenwald when he was criticizing Bush II during the Iraq war. In retrospect I concede that he was mostly right and I was mostly wrong. Greenwald's approach has helped me to become more critical of both left- and right-wing media sources. The only reason he is being villified now is that he is criticizing the mainstream media and the Democratic party. I think his criticism of the media is mostly correct, although he does seem to have some personal grudges with former employers. But he and Matt Taibbi are right to condemn the censorship of stories that might reflect badly on the left."
Michael writes:
There should be a George Orwell Award for an honest Socialist/Progressive. The first one probably goes posthumously to Christopher Hitchens, and Greenwald and probably Taibi should get them. And, really, Andrew Sullivan. You couldn't give them out every year, of course, but every now and then someone might qualify.
MikeR writes:
'Tim writes: ...
But there may be something to it here. I subscribe to Greenwqald's email and I have noticed over the past year a determination to go after left-wing targets. There's no particular article he's written that I find fault with, but there is a gleeful determination to his criticism that undermines his value to me as an honest leftist. "Not afraid to criticize the left" has crossed over into seemingly too eager to criticize the left.'
I think he honestly feels that today's left is way scarier than today's right. As do all of us on the right, of course, but coming from Greenwald or Taibbi it means something.
People who might be insurrectionists taking over the Capitol Building is a problem, and the cancellation of civil liberties to combat it is a problem. Democrats feel that the first one is a really big problem and the second is a necessary evil at wartime. Greenwald obviously feels (as do I, of course) that the first is relatively trivial: a protest that turned into a riot that happened to be able to enter the Capitol. The second is risking everything we have, where half the country decided it is at war with the other half.
Jonathan writes:
"Guilt by association has become such a thought-ender for orthodox elites and their courtiers that you can, in their mind, completely defeat someone just by pointing out that the wrong people like them. No actual quality-of-work subject-matter fault need be located (presumably Greenwald's work before was competent as it is now). And the reason the people liking him are themselves anathema is because they in turn were allegedly liked by Hillary-era basket-of-deplorables bogeymen (phantasms of 'supremacists'). Noblesse oblige has now been fully phased out in our elite; their memories are long and their thinking shallow."
MikeR writes:
"Aside from other stuff about political bias etc., maybe someone ought to point out that Greenwald may be the most important journalist of our generation. He has published not one but two incredibly major stories - Snowden and Brazil. Each of them changed the course of the history of that country, each of them involved major personal risk on his part. One may not approve of the stories broken, especially in the Snowden case - though I think a lot of us have migrated to the side where we're really glad he did it. But we're talking doing Daniel Ellsberg, twice."
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