Like a lot of media “interviews”, the whole point of the interview is to frame the interviewee in a particular way.
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The ONLY things people need to know about Glenn Greenwald are found in these articles:
A Direct Timeline of Glenn Greenwald, His Front Group and the Fugitive Edward Snowden
Glenn Greenwald Promotes Racist, Anti-Government Hate Group
Glenn Greenwald Cheerleads for Russian State-controlled Media
Shorter Glenn Greenwald: The Klan Has Important Points to Make!
Blackmail Backfires: Glenn Greenwald Steps Deeper in His Own Petard
The NSA, FISA, and Glenn Greenwald-Did He Lie To Anyone?
Bin Laden, al-Awlaki and Glenn Greenwald’s Delicate Fifth Amendment Dance
Glenn Greenwald Wets Pants at the Taste of His Own Medicine
Please let’s all not fall for (and be further brainwashed by) this media whore, who’s not even a real progressive.
[Furiously shuffles papers]
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Well said. I think Rob and others may not be familiar with Newsnights’s “editorial style”. People tune in to Newsnight to see highbrow fights. That’s the way the ratings work for it. They deliver a spectacle of argument rather than actual rational debate. I watched this and agreed that much of what Wark was saying was probably rubbish, but that the whole performance was on a par with many other such interviews I’ve seen on that program over the years.
The net effect of seeing it leaves you feeling that they grilled him, he fought back well, and so you’ve just seen some “good TV.” This is also probably why I don’t have a TV in my house any more though…
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Not taking a stand one way or the other on Greenwald, but: seven articles, all from the same source, all but one written by the same person, are the “ONLY” things people need to know about the man?
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Pretty much, if they show how much of a fraud he’s been all along.
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I think I need to know a little more about Greenwald than the rantings of a person that has obviously never heard of a logical fallacy.
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For those who don’t have time to watch the video, here’s the abridged version:
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Those links are so crazy they’ve got to be out of the Illuminatus Trilogy. RIght? Did I get the in-joke?
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I agree with others who note that one person or site is generating all those articles. I have been following Greenwald for a while in articles, back to Salon. I don’t know all of his associations, I won’t pretend to know everything about him, but he is absolutely correct on this issue. I find it difficult to believe that he instigated the theft of documents, unless you can provide hard evidence. Right now, that site looks like it has a hard-on for him, I’ve never heard of it, and so I can’t say I have any faith in it. Actually I will say I have more faith in Greenwald at this time. He is on the righteous side of this particular issue.
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The comments on that site are also instructive. They claim to be “true Scotsmen progressives” ™ but some of the comments allowed to persist talk about the Left in the third person with other commenters agreeing. If there were some comments that offered dissent, I might be less inclined to wonder how many of their own critics they deleted. I’m not saying they’re necessarily Right Wing trolls themselves, but they sure seem to feed them.
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Even Greenwald thought the interview is worth watching because she covered the Government’s bullet points so well:
Nonetheless, her choice of focus ended up highlighting many of the
most important conflicts about how journalism is understood, and is
worth watching for that reason:
The NSA debate is as much about journalism as surveillance | Glenn Greenwald | The Guardian
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Why do they set up the female journalists for suicide missions?
As far as I can tell, that is the very core of the establishment media’s strategy.
Every story is about the actors. Did they break the law? Did they do harm? What will they do next? etc.
Not a word on the content of the leaks revealing the depths of depraved hypocrisy in which our governments are engaged. No mention of the dangerous and undemocratic steps taken against all of us in the name of terrorism.
Just the dramatic tale of proud nails awaiting their time under the hammer…
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That’s exactly it. Greenwald happens to be worth his salt, so he will take on any tormentor, spectacle-maker, honest debator, what-have-you, as much as he wants, on his own terms. He will happily steamroll anyone, even friendlies, like we saw in the Bill Maher clip. It’s a kind of stridence that’s endearing, “I’m not going to talk about my bedroom.”
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Odd - Greenwald didn’t sound mean to me - he sounded like he was responding seriously to the points that were raised, and pointing out some facts about US involvement in the Middle East. I don’t watch Bill Maher much these days, but he can be pretty flip about things…
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[quote=“BadProfessor, post:37, topic:11467”]
Just the dramatic tale of proud nails awaiting their time under the hammer…
[/quote] First they came for the 12d’s…
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The topic of BBC interviewing style has been covered in the other comments, but I (in the US) listen to the BBC news on the radio fairly regularly (it’s on late at night on many NPR stations) and the somewhat adversarial interviewing style is striking, and sometimes uncomfortable to listen to.
But by making the interviewees defend themselves over every little thing, it forces them to really say what they mean and minimizes BS answers. And when the interviewee doesn’t have a non-BS response or is evasive, it’s much more obvious than with softer interview approaches (like are often heard on NPR). They don’t explicitly editorialize, but they make it very clear through the way they interview a person whether or not a person is full of shit. The interviewees are forced to fully reveal their intention (especially if it is to BS people).
Of course in this case, Greenwald knows what’s up and is in the right and is not full of shit, and as he himself said, the interview showed that really well - it allowed him to give some very good answers covering many of the major points of the story. An equivalent interview from someplace that isn’t so adversarial would not have been as good for Greenwald - not even popular left/progressive interviewers like Jon Stewart.
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To be fair, whenever Glenn debates anybody, he tends to make them look bad.
