GWB, you mean? Didnt he “win” in 2000 because a conservative SCOTUS stopped a Florida vote count that would have come out favoring Gore? If so, that sure sounds like cheating to me (as well as one of the kinds of cheating that Trump seems poised to try use to “win”).
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He’s not getting all this backlash because he’s “a hothead” or because he dared to criticize the Biden family. He’s getting all this backlash because he’s shown little if any regard for the basic tenets of responsible journalism in pursuing this story.
Remember how Dan Rather got fired from CBS after running a 60 Minutes story based on clumsily forged documents on George W. Bush’s service record? It’s like that, except that Greenwald is an asshole who also supports unrepentant misogynist sex criminals.
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It’s a good instinct to be suspicious of knee-jerk piling-on. The commentariat here certainly does some of that. I don’t think that’s what is happening here though. Greenwald’s latest piece is filled with “red pill” talking points. When you start talking about the mainstream media cabal conspiring to silence “the truth” and taking obviously manufactured evidence from Rudy Guliani at face value, you’re definitely on the alt-right road, at least. Maybe you haven’t yet arrived at Trumptown, but that’s your destination unless you find an exit immediately.
Nobody here loves the DNC or Biden. But as we always say, when the house is on fire, you have to put it out first. Then you can argue about remodeling the kitchen.
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Glenn is either suffering from long term paranoia (understandable) or someone has kompromat on him.
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Something that’s always fun to remember is that Greenwald initially got known as the guy willing to sign up to defend militant white supremacist and terrorist Matt Hale.
Here’s part of a very lengthy Twitter thread on Greenwald’s long-running attachment to the hard rightwing: https://twitter.com/DavidNeiwert/status/1130546716862586881
Greenwald has been an alt-right-friendly libertarian his entire life – we all got duped into thinking he was an uber-leftist because he was briefly hostile to the Bush regime’s torture policies.
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OK I’ve read and reread and pored over Greenwald’s article, and gosh it is poorly written. I really have no idea what he is trying to get at, really. Like a lot of his work, it bogs down on details, elides a lot of context, and kinda disappears up its own butt. I’m not a Greenwald hater by any means, he has done some truly astounding things from time to time. But this ain’t that. And Marcy Wheeler’s annotation is about as incoherent and hard to follow as well; not inaccurate, but disjointed, hard to follow to the point of being cryptic in places, and typo-ridden to the point of being hard to parse (why oh why do people feel compelled to try and use phones and twitter to express complicated ideas in text?)
But underneath it all is the basic fact that the underlying story really is a nothing burger. If you put the worst possible face on it, give Giuliani, Bannon, MacIsaac, Derkach, Pozharskyi, and the NY Post etc credit for being truthful, upstanding and totally honest (hahahahaha), and that Hunter Biden is a sleazy crooked grifter that succeeded in corrupting his father, the story is still a nothing burger. Because the whole conspiracy (which was only to emulate on a rather small scale the kinds of things that the Trump family does completely openly, on a daily basis), totally failed, and in fact Joe Biden never had the power to deliver any of the corrupt goodies anyway. There is no there there, unsavory though the whole thing might be. Nada. Zilch. Zip.
And absolutely nothing that would suggest the world would be better off if Trump is re-elected.
I dunno, Greenwald seems to be stuck on the notion that somebody somewhere might have a idealistic view of Biden as a shining perfect knight in white armor coming to save us, and this intolerable situation must be corrected immediately and ferociously. I’m not sure he’s particularly left or right, he’s kind of an equal opportunity hater, primarily of anybody he suspects might just have clay feet (which we all do of course).
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i’m sorry, are you from earth-3 or earth-2? in the timeline i’ve been inhabiting the candidates who got the most votes in the democratic primaries ended up becoming the nominees. even if you want to blame the clinton nomination on the effect of “superdelegates” she still got more votes in the primaries than the other candidates put together and she beat trump by close to 3 million votes in the general election. as for biden, superdelegates weren’t really even a thing this year and he beat the other candidates for the democratic nomination by a lot. i worked for warren during the texas primary but i’ve phone-banked and phone-canvassed for biden once he became the nominee.
i know i keep saying this but if you want a more progressive party then become part of the party at the local level and get other people with your same mindset involved as well. i suppose one could try to pull the republican party to the left if one were enormously patient and had a masochistic bent but i’ll personally stick to the democratic party.
really? really?!? you haven’t noticed the tendency over the past 30 years of the news media covering democratic administrations 10 times more closely than republicans. seriously, earth-2, earth-3, earth-5 . . . which timeline are you from? who’s on the $20-dollar bill in your timeline? jackson, tubman, or mellon?
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Is this a story about participles or censorship?
So is weeks-long agonizing over journalistic trolling the new both sides?
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Very true. But, lots of promise, mostly disappointment.
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It seems like Greenwald’s article is full of errors, so a decision not to publish it seems absolutely correct to me. However, I’m a lawyer, so the more interesting question is whether, if everything in the article was true (arguendo as we say in the biz), whether it should be published on the eve of an election where we have a chance to throw out the cancer that is Drumpf?
Personally, everything in that article could be 100% true and it wouldn’t move the needle for me one bit on my decision to vote for Biden, but I understand that it could sway the “undecided” vote. Based on what happened in the 2016 election, I would say delay the publication of the article.
While I realize that conclusion seems to somewhat go against modern journalistic ethics, I wonder if the “objective” role of news organizations isn’t just another anomaly of the post-war period? Prior to that, news organizations were much more explicitly partisan, much like their counterparts in Europe. I think it might be inevitable that we return to partisan journalism and perhaps we should embrace that to some degree.
That doesn’t mean that The Intercept shouldn’t endeavor to publish the objective truth. But, if they had reporting that truthfully portrayed Hunter and Joe Biden in a negative way they should weigh when to publish that article against the consequences that it may help Drumpf get reelected. To me the answer would be clear. Wait until after the election.
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Whoa, that’s a slippery slope nobody sensible wants to head down, there are enough issues around jornalistic integrity and trustworthiness, thanks to Murdoch.
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Anytime I hear a new byline or catchphrase in a media report or article, or from a politician, I notice when it starts to get used.
I read many sources of news, and when I start to see the same awkward phrase to describe things, I actually do start to think that news organizations and the people that follow them have some sort of weak collective mind that merely parrots the arguements of others. Phrases like this take over and it’s like hearing “no quid pro quo” or “no collusion” on endless loop for weeks or months, until it becomes near meaningless, I begin thinking people aren’t independently actually researching and reporting anything, just mixing up the manure to shovel it all back in the wagon.
This particular one you used multiple times. I might have even agreed with your argument if you used more varied and intelligent wording.
This particular phase is just asinine to me.
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“[T]he new website he helped found”.
You make it sound like he created the Smithsonian.
The Greenwaldian Institution.
Not in my lifetime. I’d say Obama got a pass on a lot of questionable policy choices. I saw the media yawn and fawn over desert storm and iraquí freedom but i also saw them cheerlead Clinton’s crime bill and welfare reform ( and bombing campaign in Iraq). I don’t see the media ( mainstream) as being ever particularly critical of power whomever wields it. Lots of horse race journalism but not so much critical investigative.
Maybe I missed all those hard hitting pieces about Obama’s drone program, or his immigration policies, or his lack of prosecutions for the recession, but mostly it’s the same kind of knee jerk responses to gop talking points that we see them using in reverse on Trump. Anyhow, I’m not from another planet just making a casual observation. I’m not some huge Greenwald apologist, I just feel like there’s a lot of pile on which seems noteworthy.
I’ve learned my lesson though. I’ll keep my thoughts to myself. Have a good one.
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and presumably you missed the entire 40 year campaign to destroy the clintons starting from the time he was elected as governor of arkansas until hilary beat trump by 3 million votes in the 2016 election including bill’s impeachment. apparently you also missed near daily articles about obama’s “arrogance” and “sense of entitlement” as well.
i’d have liked to have seen more and better coverage of the drone program and immigration issues too but just because the press didn’t cover the issues i thought were most important doesn’t mean they haven’t more closely scrutinized every democratic administration than they have republican ones.
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You mean like how the typical news article in 2020 is pretty much 90+% a listing of other people’s tweets?
So many contributing factors (ie., digital advertising metrics rewarding clickbait; rose-colored glasses regarding the web eliminating the ‘gatekeepers’), but journalism as an institution has so dropped the ball in their takeover by / capitulation to social media, and their collective incompetence in pushing back against the bad actors / intellectual dishonesty therein. (In fact they more often than not amplify the spin / lies ). So disheartening.
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Showed promise and had a couple of really good and well regarded projects, then spectacularly self-destructed under the weight of their own hubris and self-indulgence?
I can’t think of a much better analogy than this.
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I agree that it’s a slippery slope and I’m not advocating it although in my hypothetical I’m not advocating spreading disinformation. If it were up to me journalism would try to remain as objective as possible. But I see it as inevitable because much of the rest of the world has this sort of recognition that their media outlets have a partisan slant (e.g. Le Figaro versus Le Monde or The Guardian versus The Times) and it was also the case in the U.S. for most of our history.
I think the danger is that during the transition from an objective press to a more partisan U.S. we have maintained the assumption that our newspapers take the “view from nowhere” and if we kept that view while these outlets became partisan that would lead to bad outcomes. However, I would guess that news consumers in France and the UK can cope with the understanding that their outlets are partisan to some extent because that’s the expectation and so they can take it into account.
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Meh, the only non-partisan news organization in the US would be public broadcasting (it isn’t, but they at least try), as it’s required by their charter. Most US news outfits tend to try and keep the obvious bias on the opinion pages, but that’s fooling most nobody.
