Possibly still irked that I said he was smug in his self-righteousness in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict, Charles P. Pierce links to me disapprovingly to argue that the vessel that is Glenn Greenwald can be filled with shit as far as he is concerned so long as it keeps pumping out revelations from the Snowden files. Is that how we are on the left now? What is that? Some vestige of the old vanguard reasserting itself? The mainstreaming of Lyndon LaRouche’s standards for journalism? Did Leo Strauss have secret liberal disciples? When did it become okay for “reporters” to libel people and sensationalize stories and selectively omit relevant facts and grind axes?
There may very well be a degree of sheer defensiveness in Greenwald’s critics, and some attack Greenwald to protect the president. But most of us are normal left-wing people who are critical of the press when they get the facts wrong, especially when it’s transparently deliberate. Let’s take the president out of it for a minute and stipulate that some of the information that Snowden divulged is deeply troubling. Let’s further stipulate that we might make some progress in protecting people’s privacy and getting better oversight as a result of the debate and scandal that Snowden’s revelations created.
It isn’t a logical argument to say that we are benefiting from these leaks so all the reporting on the leaks is good, solid reporting. In truth, lousy, hyped, hyperbole allows the government to hit back and undermine its critics. And you can’t blame that people on the left, who are not part of the government, for pointing out that shitty, hyped, hyperbole is being produced on a regular basis by Glenn Greenwald. It’s the exact same standard we used against David Broder, and still use against everyone from Glenn Beck to David Gregory. We see bullshit; we call bullshit.
Are we going to abandon that standard now because we like the underlying facts that aren’t hyped and distorted? “Hey, we’re really getting somewhere with these lies, maybe no one should notice that we’re lying.”
That’s the operating principle of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer. Is that what we are now? A mirror image of Rush Limbaugh?
When I hear people argue that talking about Greenwald is a distraction from the real scandal, I feel like asking if talking about Judith Miller was a distraction from the real scandal. Shitty reporting is shitty reporting, and if you are going to tolerate it when it suits your purpose then you lose the right to complain about it when it doesn’t suit your purpose.
