I'm very ambivalent about Greenwald. One the one hand he produced essential work with the Snowden revelations and his exposure of corruption in Brazil. He also makes good points about the moral evil of the Bush/Cheney administrations and Obama's continuation of the war on terror.
But on the other hand it feels like he spends a lot of time attacking strawmen just for the sake of being contrarian.
Saying that journalists are authoritarians who want to protect the secrets of the powerful [1] and control access to platforms [2] has a tiny grain of truth in it but is mainly a massive oversimplification that paints a group of thousands of professionals who have a myriad of varying incentives with an incredibly broad brush. He seems to be incapable of nuance in his critique of the journalistic profession, and that renders his message mostly inaudible to me because it feels like it's coming from some form of resentment rather than reasoned arguments.
[1] "Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principal function and purpose—which is what it ought to be if we had a healthy media—but as something to be denounced and condemned."
[2] "[Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general] began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others.
What bothers me are the hundreds or even thousands of journalists that spout corporate lines, propaganda, and outright lies everyday, and not much is said about them, but with principled journalists like Greenwald, you get these nitpicky judgemental critiques that seem aimed at deriding them.
Yes, Greenwald is not perfect, but he is more objective, honest, and brave than the great majority of journalists out there. It has the flavor of an inorganic smear campaign that has been absorbed repeatedly and unconsciously across social media. It's a common pattern for a post about an anti-establishemt figure to have some positive comments about them, but then some critique inevitably bubbles to the top of thread every time.
I think it's clear enough that he's talking about specific journalists in specific enumerated publications and not literally all journalists everywhere. He is, after all, one himself.
You need more hands! I have one telling me that the problem is not all the journos going along to get along so much as the very few companies in charge of the media. And another telling me that those journos have agency thus culpability. And yet another arm reaching for the popcorn and wondering how long this thread can last.
If you read it as a systemic commentary rather than an individual commentary it makes more sense. Journalists as a system might have a behavior that most journalists done engage in. Nobody consciously thinks “let’s be authoritarian” but they create systems and structures that lead that way anyways. The same way any attack of “group X is Y” could be read as a massive oversimplification painting a huge diverse group with a broad brush. The individuals can create and enable a system of Y entirely unconsciously.
And yeah he totally lacks nuance, but at this point I can’t really care. I’m personally sick of unnuanced comments from “our” side benefitting from reading between the lines while near identical comments from Others with an equal lack of nuance get attacked for it. It would be great if we all were nuanced, but that appears impossible so reading things you disagree with charitably is just a necessity now. This comes to mind https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-things
It isn't that journalist see social media as a threat but so do the politicians they report on. Prior to the rise of social media, this should not be simply considered Facebook, Twitter, and like, but all the internet as a whole, we relied on the idea that the press, print, radio, and televised, told us the truth.
However the internet showed this was never true. Yes elements of the media did report the truth but they also produced some stories that were outright fabrications or purposefully did not include information that did not support the narrative; three very big stories that fall under this are the GM pickup fires which were assisted in catching fire, that chemical and biological weapons were widespread in Iraq, and of course Dan Rather's fake National Guard document.
Both the media and the political class help each other. One does it to gain favor and the other does it control the message. The internet took the ability to control the message, the narrative, away from the established media and politicians. It put it back into the hands of everyone.
So Greenwald's assertion is true in many ways. A return to where politicians used the media to control the message is a return to a system which allowed the Iraq war to come to fruition. The claim he makes that the press holds the office of the Presidency to different standards based on the party that controls it is easily provable as well. We never saw a level of press persecution before that occurred under Obama yet all of Trump's rambling diatribe was considered worse? On what planet?
Hell this site is guilty of the same as well. We have people here cheering on the FBI, likely the same that screamed when the same agencies trampled on people they liked. This is the society the old media and politicians gave us, putting us at each others throats and taught to revel in it
> Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general, from the beginning was not to censor. They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians
There's the headline quotation right there and I gotta say it does not make a lick of sense to me. Journalists didn't drive this at all.
Yes they did. For 4 years they blamed and attacked FB and Twitter for letting trump win. The pressure was enough. Enough for these platforms to disable private messaging of bad Biden news story links. Whether you think it was true or not, it’s insane that these platforms did this 2 weeks before an election.
I wouldn't use the word Journalist but... There are 1001 pieces of outrage-porn every day about how someone said a bad thing on some socials media and what will BiGTeCH do about it.
One form of how this works is something along the lines of: activist journalist find something on the platform they don't like, they write about it, go after the advertisers and try to lump them into it like "Look at what disgusting views you're funding with your money, are this the views your company represents?". Advertisers don't like any controversies so they threaten the platforms to pull their money, platforms establish measures to please the advertisers.
Another one is: journalists don't like their outlets getting outperformed by some "whackos/conservatives" on facebook, they go directly after facebook and demand that they downgrade those channels and promote theirs. They demand fact checking routines which are then in part outsourced to outlets that share their values.
I'm pretty sure that Facebook, Twitter etc. have absolutely no will to engage themselves in politics, at least openly. They'd be perfectly happy to focus on technological issues and ways to make more money through advertising. Very reluctantly they had to acknowledge their role in the political debate and start taking decisions, because people were asking them to. And people mostly repeat the opinions and views they've read in the press.
Are you sure he’s not referring to how journalists are continuously calling for censorship? For example, a headline from the outlet he just left:
> Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump
The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.
It also sounds like he thinks that illiberal millennials graduated, got jobs as journalists and editors, and now are happy to parrot propaganda from government authorities rather than investigate and report on accounts from whistleblowers.
"I'll give you just one example, which is press freedom. Under Obama, as I'm sure you know, the Espionage Act of 1917--one of the most pernicious laws we have on our books;
it was enacted under Woodrow Wilson, and it was designed to criminalize dissent from U.S. participation in World War I--was invoked against whistleblowers and sources, like
Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and a dozen others, more under Obama than every other prior president combined. It ended up being three times more prosecutions under
the Espionage Act for our sources as journalists than all previous presidents, including Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever you want to pick. And the press said almost
nothing."
I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left, unlike the milk-toast "leftism" (or really "centrism" or rightism) of outlets like the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, etc..
This is what bothers people, and they can't take people actually on the left pointing out what hypocrites and right-wingers many liberals are.
This is why Glenn Greenwald gets censored, but I'm pleased to see that he still has the balls to speak truth to power.
> I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Well, it’s both false on some points and misleading in much of the rest, in service of a false narrative, like much of Greenwald’s monomaniacal campaign to drive a wedge between the Left and the Democratic establishment [0]; the Espionage Act was not passed primarily to criminalize dissent, and the aspects that were arguably intended for that purpose and definitely misused for it have been largely neutralized by subsequent court decisions narrowing their applicability on Constitutional grounds (as, also, have other aspects of the law that address what is more commonly understood as spying), and were not, in any case, the provisions of the law under which prosecutions were carried out under the Obama Administration.
Now, that's not necessarily insane, if, for one example of a scenario in which it would be perfectly rational, Geenwald’s goal is to advance the interests of common opponents of both the Left and the Democratic Establishment
[0] I have no problem with driving a wedge between the Left and the Center-Right Democratic establishment based on the truth, as a Left-leaning pragmatist I recognize that's the only way to get any drive for progress on Left issues. Doing it based on lies and distortion doesn't create pressure for progress, just division and distraction.
What’s worse, the last couple years have developed a full on meme of enlIGhTeNed CEnTrisM as an easy dismissal. You call out any hypocrisy and the knee jerk response is “how could you even begin to think both sides are the same, that’s so idiotic” without really caring that pointing out hypocrisy is not saying everyone’s the same. Reaching the level of meme, you don’t even have to think about what you’re responding to! What’s sadly hilarious is that you see the same meme... on both sides.
There’s a ton I disagree with Greenwood about. But there’s also a lot I agree with. To dismiss him fully because of what I consider his bad ideas would be to also miss out on a lot of good insights.
> Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left
Over the last couple of years, he has consistently supported Trump, down to echoing Parler administrators' easily disproven talking points that none of their users were involved in the Capitol riots.
It's entirely consistent with his earlier positions that Greenwald opposed Obama/Clinton-era drone warfare, but from his writings, you'd have a difficult time learning how much drone strikes have expanded under Trump.
And finally, since 2016, Greenwald (as well as Assange and Snowden) have essentially turned into full blown instruments of Putinist propaganda (In Greenwald's case including the denial that Russia engaged in Novichok attacks against critics). This is neither a "leftist" nor an "anti-war" position, he simply favors a different bunch of war mongers.
They didn't address any of the very specific and long form claims that he made in his article about his exit. Seems like long winded ad hominem attack against him.
Can you keep a professional job in media if you believe public institutions are corrupted and you bring that standard to your work? You can write, you can be popular on social media, and you can even get the odd freelance gig, but if you align yourself against real power itself, I think he's saying you cannot be an employee, editor, or producer.
I can't see how a serious writer would want to be a journalist now anyway, and Greenwald seems to recognize that there is no "back" to go to. What forward looks like for writers is much more interesting.
Whether you agree with the government response to covid or not, I think it’s fair to say it was authoritarian. Journalists generally took the position that more rules and restrictions were necessary and often applauded the strongest government responses from other countries. For that reason alone, it would seem there is an authoritarian bend.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments, flamewar-style comments, or personal attacks to HN. It's exactly what we're trying to avoid on this site, and you predictably provoked a flamewar. Maybe you don't owe Greenwald better but you definitely owe this community better if you're posting here. No more of this, please.
I happen to think Glenn is right about a lot of things, so if your claim that he has lost his mind is true, what falsifiable prediction would you propose as a way to determine if it is the case?
Twitter does have the affect on people to go crazy. I think your wrong about Glenn he is correct. Just look up the facts. Glenn gets more respect the more you study him.
Journalists love Twitter, and I don't think it's possible to spend any significant amount of time on there without losing your mind. Is it just a Glenn Greenwald issue, or something with all journalists? I wish there was a way to get decent quality news from people who stay away from its influence. I've never met a person in real life who acts like the people on blue checkmark Twitter do.
I'm genuinely of the opinion that Greenwald was compromised somehow right around the time of the Snowden revelations. Before then, he was an acerbic jerk writing with moral clarity about the persistent overreach of the US security state. His writing had crunch and specificity, and his targets were all over the political map.
But post-Snowden, he took a hard partisan turn. He'd enter regular tiresome disagreements where really the only argument was over who was being more hyperbolic or hypocritical. And he... ignore stuff you're really expect he'd care about. He spent years flogging the media for overemphasis of Russian interference because it was a "crazy conspiracy theory" but I swear he never once said a peep about Q. Really, if you knew nothing about the guy's history and just read his 2016-20 writing, you'd just figure he was an oddbally high brow Trump fan.
And very notably: this was true ONLY in his writing about US policy. His Brazil stuff was widely regarded (by others -- I don't speak Portuguese nor am I an expert on Brazilian politics) as just as good (and acerbic) as his earlier work about the Bush administration.
Maybe it's just branding. Maybe he figured he'd do better career-wise selling his work into a right wing market than he would continuing to criticize everyone. But... that doesn't sound right to me, because he's not exploiting typical right wing audiences nor using right wing platforms to do it.
I follow him on twitter too. I don't see what's wrong with him. Some people complain he isn't "balanced" i.e. 9/10 of his criticisms are aimed at comparatively "good guys" i.e. liberals, while he rarely talks about conservatives. But I think that's perfectly fine, his niche is feeling a void left by hyper-partisan mainstream media- not everybody have to be expert on everything.
Another possibility... everyone else is loosing their minds and ushering an authoritarian pseudo-communist state in the United States. Glenn sees it, and is trying desperately to warn us.
I happen to agree with Glenn on most things, in fact I think most people do. Probably <10% of the US is on Twitter regularly. Everyone off Twitter thinks the world has lost their minds.
I'm reading this hoping for good points, but I mostly am seeing weak arguments. Also the title is baity.
>> The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom.
It's hard for me to imagine him not understanding why consistently denouncing the legitimacy of print media in an era of conspiracy theory (especially post pizza-gate) may matter.
>> [Facebook and Twitter] had to start censoring…because journalists at CNN and NBC and The New York Times demanded they do so.
I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
>> [Seems to be arguing that millenials care about free speech less because they are coddled]
I'm not even gonna touch that one.
>> They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others. That's just unfortunately the modern-day mentality of the journalist.
If he hadn't slipped the word authoritarian in there, I think this might be the most interesting point of the piece. I think a lot of people, including journalists, scientific journals, textbooks, wikipedia, even HN believe in rating/filtering information on its quality (is it true?, is it divisive?, does it have an agenda?). In fact, the filtering/amplifying of information is the primary job of such platforms.
As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform. We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses. Based on the results of the great experiment (Qanon, Trump presidency, "stop the steal", capitol riots) people want to pull back to the tried-and-true pre-web-2.0 journalism (i.e. gatekeepers).
This is where a good-faith exploration would really be interesting.
>> [Seems to insinuate that the NYT doesn't believe in whistleblowers like Snowden.]
I think he is completely right. Journalism today looks more like advocacy.
Free-speech liberalism are at odds with the political establishment. The liberal camp has been decimated recently with the rise of both the authoritarian right/left.
From my perspective, what is happening in the US right now is somewhat similar to what happened in the Latin American countries in the 60s and 70s.
I'm very happy I discovered https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
It gives me access to articles written about the same subject from both perspectives. What I think it super interesting is how journalists omit certain facts to further their point of view.
> I'll give you just one example, which is press freedom. Under Obama, as I'm sure you know, the Espionage Act of 1917—one of the most pernicious laws we have on our books; it was enacted under Woodrow Wilson, and it was designed to criminalize dissent from U.S. participation in World War I—was invoked against whistleblowers and sources, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and a dozen others, more under Obama than every other prior president combined. It ended up being three times more prosecutions under the Espionage Act for our sources as journalists than all previous presidents, including Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever you want to pick. And the press said almost nothing.
That's fairly meaningless without a comparison of the number of people for whom it could have been applied under Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever.
Was it applied more under Obama than, say, Eisenhower because Obama applied it to cases that Eisenhower would not have applied it to if they had occurred during his administration?
Or were there more people leaking classified information during Obama's time in office than there were during Eisenhower's and that explains why it was applied more under Obama.
[+] [-] nicolasp|5 years ago|reply
But on the other hand it feels like he spends a lot of time attacking strawmen just for the sake of being contrarian. Saying that journalists are authoritarians who want to protect the secrets of the powerful [1] and control access to platforms [2] has a tiny grain of truth in it but is mainly a massive oversimplification that paints a group of thousands of professionals who have a myriad of varying incentives with an incredibly broad brush. He seems to be incapable of nuance in his critique of the journalistic profession, and that renders his message mostly inaudible to me because it feels like it's coming from some form of resentment rather than reasoned arguments.
[1] "Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principal function and purpose—which is what it ought to be if we had a healthy media—but as something to be denounced and condemned."
[2] "[Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general] began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others.
[+] [-] colordrops|5 years ago|reply
Yes, Greenwald is not perfect, but he is more objective, honest, and brave than the great majority of journalists out there. It has the flavor of an inorganic smear campaign that has been absorbed repeatedly and unconsciously across social media. It's a common pattern for a post about an anti-establishemt figure to have some positive comments about them, but then some critique inevitably bubbles to the top of thread every time.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewcoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
And yeah he totally lacks nuance, but at this point I can’t really care. I’m personally sick of unnuanced comments from “our” side benefitting from reading between the lines while near identical comments from Others with an equal lack of nuance get attacked for it. It would be great if we all were nuanced, but that appears impossible so reading things you disagree with charitably is just a necessity now. This comes to mind https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-things
[+] [-] Shivetya|5 years ago|reply
However the internet showed this was never true. Yes elements of the media did report the truth but they also produced some stories that were outright fabrications or purposefully did not include information that did not support the narrative; three very big stories that fall under this are the GM pickup fires which were assisted in catching fire, that chemical and biological weapons were widespread in Iraq, and of course Dan Rather's fake National Guard document.
Both the media and the political class help each other. One does it to gain favor and the other does it control the message. The internet took the ability to control the message, the narrative, away from the established media and politicians. It put it back into the hands of everyone.
So Greenwald's assertion is true in many ways. A return to where politicians used the media to control the message is a return to a system which allowed the Iraq war to come to fruition. The claim he makes that the press holds the office of the Presidency to different standards based on the party that controls it is easily provable as well. We never saw a level of press persecution before that occurred under Obama yet all of Trump's rambling diatribe was considered worse? On what planet?
Hell this site is guilty of the same as well. We have people here cheering on the FBI, likely the same that screamed when the same agencies trampled on people they liked. This is the society the old media and politicians gave us, putting us at each others throats and taught to revel in it
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
There's the headline quotation right there and I gotta say it does not make a lick of sense to me. Journalists didn't drive this at all.
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snicksnak|5 years ago|reply
Another one is: journalists don't like their outlets getting outperformed by some "whackos/conservatives" on facebook, they go directly after facebook and demand that they downgrade those channels and promote theirs. They demand fact checking routines which are then in part outsourced to outlets that share their values.
[+] [-] Udik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yunesj|5 years ago|reply
> Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.
It also sounds like he thinks that illiberal millennials graduated, got jobs as journalists and editors, and now are happy to parrot propaganda from government authorities rather than investigate and report on accounts from whistleblowers.
https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/trump-capitol-facebook-t...
[+] [-] Ozzie_osman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left, unlike the milk-toast "leftism" (or really "centrism" or rightism) of outlets like the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, etc..
This is what bothers people, and they can't take people actually on the left pointing out what hypocrites and right-wingers many liberals are.
This is why Glenn Greenwald gets censored, but I'm pleased to see that he still has the balls to speak truth to power.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
Well, it’s both false on some points and misleading in much of the rest, in service of a false narrative, like much of Greenwald’s monomaniacal campaign to drive a wedge between the Left and the Democratic establishment [0]; the Espionage Act was not passed primarily to criminalize dissent, and the aspects that were arguably intended for that purpose and definitely misused for it have been largely neutralized by subsequent court decisions narrowing their applicability on Constitutional grounds (as, also, have other aspects of the law that address what is more commonly understood as spying), and were not, in any case, the provisions of the law under which prosecutions were carried out under the Obama Administration.
Now, that's not necessarily insane, if, for one example of a scenario in which it would be perfectly rational, Geenwald’s goal is to advance the interests of common opponents of both the Left and the Democratic Establishment
[0] I have no problem with driving a wedge between the Left and the Center-Right Democratic establishment based on the truth, as a Left-leaning pragmatist I recognize that's the only way to get any drive for progress on Left issues. Doing it based on lies and distortion doesn't create pressure for progress, just division and distraction.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
There’s a ton I disagree with Greenwood about. But there’s also a lot I agree with. To dismiss him fully because of what I consider his bad ideas would be to also miss out on a lot of good insights.
[+] [-] microtherion|5 years ago|reply
Over the last couple of years, he has consistently supported Trump, down to echoing Parler administrators' easily disproven talking points that none of their users were involved in the Capitol riots.
It's entirely consistent with his earlier positions that Greenwald opposed Obama/Clinton-era drone warfare, but from his writings, you'd have a difficult time learning how much drone strikes have expanded under Trump.
And finally, since 2016, Greenwald (as well as Assange and Snowden) have essentially turned into full blown instruments of Putinist propaganda (In Greenwald's case including the denial that Russia engaged in Novichok attacks against critics). This is neither a "leftist" nor an "anti-war" position, he simply favors a different bunch of war mongers.
[+] [-] jagger27|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BelenusMordred|5 years ago|reply
It's honestly too much despite having a strong opinion on the matter.
[+] [-] DennisP|5 years ago|reply
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...
[+] [-] colordrops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
I can't see how a serious writer would want to be a journalist now anyway, and Greenwald seems to recognize that there is no "back" to go to. What forward looks like for writers is much more interesting.
[+] [-] nbzso|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goalieca|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seventytwo|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pohl|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] poxwole|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] op03|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] gfodor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snicksnak|5 years ago|reply
what do you mean by that. From my perspective, Gleen Greenwald has remained consistent with his views, the news media just went entirely insane.
[+] [-] chishaku|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soloninja|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eplanit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 99_00|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DC1350|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papaf|5 years ago|reply
Is this something he said in the interview or on Twitter? Do you have a particular quote?
[+] [-] cbozeman|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
But post-Snowden, he took a hard partisan turn. He'd enter regular tiresome disagreements where really the only argument was over who was being more hyperbolic or hypocritical. And he... ignore stuff you're really expect he'd care about. He spent years flogging the media for overemphasis of Russian interference because it was a "crazy conspiracy theory" but I swear he never once said a peep about Q. Really, if you knew nothing about the guy's history and just read his 2016-20 writing, you'd just figure he was an oddbally high brow Trump fan.
And very notably: this was true ONLY in his writing about US policy. His Brazil stuff was widely regarded (by others -- I don't speak Portuguese nor am I an expert on Brazilian politics) as just as good (and acerbic) as his earlier work about the Bush administration.
Maybe it's just branding. Maybe he figured he'd do better career-wise selling his work into a right wing market than he would continuing to criticize everyone. But... that doesn't sound right to me, because he's not exploiting typical right wing audiences nor using right wing platforms to do it.
Something happened to Greenwald c. 2013-14
[+] [-] shihab|5 years ago|reply
I follow him on twitter too. I don't see what's wrong with him. Some people complain he isn't "balanced" i.e. 9/10 of his criticisms are aimed at comparatively "good guys" i.e. liberals, while he rarely talks about conservatives. But I think that's perfectly fine, his niche is feeling a void left by hyper-partisan mainstream media- not everybody have to be expert on everything.
[+] [-] lettergram|5 years ago|reply
I happen to agree with Glenn on most things, in fact I think most people do. Probably <10% of the US is on Twitter regularly. Everyone off Twitter thinks the world has lost their minds.
[+] [-] coffeefirst|5 years ago|reply
This isn't to say he's not right about some things, but this interview is 20% paranoid delusion.
[+] [-] TedShiller|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zug_zug|5 years ago|reply
>> The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom.
It's hard for me to imagine him not understanding why consistently denouncing the legitimacy of print media in an era of conspiracy theory (especially post pizza-gate) may matter.
>> [Facebook and Twitter] had to start censoring…because journalists at CNN and NBC and The New York Times demanded they do so.
I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
>> [Seems to be arguing that millenials care about free speech less because they are coddled]
I'm not even gonna touch that one.
>> They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others. That's just unfortunately the modern-day mentality of the journalist.
If he hadn't slipped the word authoritarian in there, I think this might be the most interesting point of the piece. I think a lot of people, including journalists, scientific journals, textbooks, wikipedia, even HN believe in rating/filtering information on its quality (is it true?, is it divisive?, does it have an agenda?). In fact, the filtering/amplifying of information is the primary job of such platforms.
As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform. We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses. Based on the results of the great experiment (Qanon, Trump presidency, "stop the steal", capitol riots) people want to pull back to the tried-and-true pre-web-2.0 journalism (i.e. gatekeepers).
This is where a good-faith exploration would really be interesting.
>> [Seems to insinuate that the NYT doesn't believe in whistleblowers like Snowden.]
I hope that's not true.
[+] [-] todipa|5 years ago|reply
Free-speech liberalism are at odds with the political establishment. The liberal camp has been decimated recently with the rise of both the authoritarian right/left.
From my perspective, what is happening in the US right now is somewhat similar to what happened in the Latin American countries in the 60s and 70s.
I'm very happy I discovered https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gives me access to articles written about the same subject from both perspectives. What I think it super interesting is how journalists omit certain facts to further their point of view.
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
That's fairly meaningless without a comparison of the number of people for whom it could have been applied under Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever.
Was it applied more under Obama than, say, Eisenhower because Obama applied it to cases that Eisenhower would not have applied it to if they had occurred during his administration?
Or were there more people leaking classified information during Obama's time in office than there were during Eisenhower's and that explains why it was applied more under Obama.