Tag: glenn greenwald

Selective Stenography

Glenn Greenwald, writing a sort of response to yesterday’s NYT Ombudsman piece (in which he wondered whether NYT journalists should challenge the “facts” they are presented when working stories), really nails the MSM’s ongoing stenography problem. It’s not so much that MSM journalists dutifully and uncritically write down (and then print) what they’ve been told, but that they only do so on behalf of those already in a position of power (be it economic or political):

…there is one important caveat that needs to be added here. This stenographic treatment by journalists — of simply amplifying what someone claims without any skepticism or examination — is not available to everyone. Only those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems are entitled to receive this treatment. For everyone else — those who are viewed as ordinary, marginalized, or scorned by America’s political establishment — the exact opposite rules apply: their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.

[…]

The most damaging sin of this stenographic model isn’t laziness — the failure to subject false statements to critical, investigative scrutiny — although that is part of it. The most damaging sin is that it’s propagandistic: it converts official assertions and claims from the most powerful into Truth, even when those assertions and claims are baseless or false. This stenographic model is the primary means by which media outlets turn themselves into eager spokespeople and servants for the most powerful factions: the very opposite of the function they claim, with increasing absurdity, to perform.

Yep. Read the whole thing.

Selective Stenography

Jomentum Agonistes

Greenwald on the Joementum farewell tour:

Support for all those violent and illegal acts just isn’t something we hold against someone, and it’s certainly not going to preclude someone from being a “Democratic hero.” Indeed, even Lieberman’s false claim – repeated just yesterday – that we found evidence that Saddam was developing WMDs (while patronizingly calling Arianna Huffington “sweetheart” after she disagreed) won’t interfere at all in these admiration rituals, even (especially) in Beltway Democratic circles.

And that’s the paragraph that qualifies as “faint praise.” Read the whole thing.

Jomentum Agonistes

Wait, MTP is up for Reelection?

Man: I listen to Meet the Press and I think a lot of people in the room, we end up turning it off, because during the election season, you’re letting politicians get away with softball answers and you’re not really forcing the conversations.
David Gregory: Sir, sir, you know what, with all due respect, I don’t know which program you’re watching because every week—I’m not going to get in a debate with you—I ask about taxes, I ask about how you pay for taxes, […] And by the way sir, I’ve also dedicated the program to talking about education and about reform as well.
Man: [but, but, but]
David Gregory: No, sir, I get the last word here, you asked the question. Just because people don’t listen or don’t take action behind it is not something I can directly control.
Man: I like the fact that you ask them [these questions], but you know, when we hear the answers they seem to be soundbite answers.
David Gregory: You know what sir, you know where your recourse is—Election Day.

Old News

Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.

Memo to all assignment editors still employed in the American media apparatus: If you posit that Wikileaks file dumps are inevitably “old news” and thus nothing worth covering, then why aren’t you asking yourself the question that clearly follows: why were those 400,000 documents of “old news” classified in the first place? Where’s an ongoing series about reflexive, pervasive classification and its poisonous impact on any ostensibly free society?

For the American Republic to operate, we ought to expect that a smallish filing cabinet will ultimately be full of the truly dangerous secrets that must be kept. Nuclear bomb designs, the plans for the invasion of Normandy beach next year, and other sensitive documents of that sort are all that should be in there. Instead, “our” government routinely classifies everything, almost certainly still including many aspects of the Normandy beach invasion of 1944. How is a citizen supposed to know anything about the operation of their government? How is a citizen supposed to understand the wages (or even benefits) of these secret decisions, carried out in secret, reported on in secret, and then bundled away inside of another secret which might, just might, show up in heavily redacted form 50 years later, only to be greeted as “old news” by a media all too eager to please its governmental “adversary.”

The answer, of course, is: they are not supposed to.

Step one in any national recovery, any reemergence of sensibility and civic attention is going to have to be: no more blanket secrecy. Period. It’s very easy to know what should be classified as secret in a democracy, and that’s almost nothing. Classification as a general tool (and an inevitable bulwark used to hide the rampant lawlessness of administrations from both parties) obfuscates the outcomes of our own often poisonous and self-defeating policies, the very ones many of us claim to hold dear (while knowing next to nothing about them), and it has got to stop.

Old News

What Can’t Be Allowed

Today’s installment of What Greenwald Said:

The double standard in our political discourse – which tolerates and even encourages anti-Muslim bigotry while stigmatizing other forms – has been as beneficial as it has been glaring. NPR’s firing of Juan Williams threatened to change that by rendering this bigotry as toxic and stigmatized as other types. That could not be allowed, which is why the backlash against NPR was so rapid, intense and widespread.

Read the whole thing.

What Can’t Be Allowed

What They Won’t Tell You

I’ve heard at least a half dozen media reports on the boom in “anonymous” campaign financing, mostly of the “a pox on both houses” variety, e.g. utterly misleading. Then there’s this email that was sent to Glenn Greenwald in reference to a bit of crap logic from David Brooks:

There are 435 House seats, and 37 Senate races being run.

Average Cash on Hand for Democratic House Candidates: $430,153
Average Cash on Hand for Republican House Candidates: $376,720
Average Cash on Hand for Democratic Senate Candidates: $2,937,267
Average Cash on Hand for Republican Senate Candidates: $2,998,816

So, the average House race has less than $1 million cash on hand to spend for advertising in the last month, between both candidates.

The average Senate race has less than $6 million between the two.

So, let’s say that Rove and his $60 million wants to target 30, close house races, and 10 close Senate races.
He could spend $3 million each on the 10 Senate races, DOUBLING the amount candidate spends.
He could also spend $1 million each in the House races, and effectively spend 3 TIMES more than the candidate.

Just $60 million is a HUGE amount targeted at just a few races.

And of course the “chamber of commerce” is spending even more than that.

And, of course, the vast majority of all this class of contribution is going straight into GOP pockets. Not that anyone would ever deign to mention it.

What They Won’t Tell You

Accountability Free?

Have to disagree with Greenwald’s take on Obama meeting Condoleeza Rice:

Still, the fact that Obama is not only shielding from all accountability, but meeting in the Oval Office with, the person who presided over the Bush White House’s torture-approval-and-choreographing meetings and who was responsible for the single most fear-mongering claim leading to the Iraq War, speaks volumes about the accountability-free nature of Washington culture and this White House.

Actually, I think it’s a positive sign that says that something about Obama realizing just how dim his administration’s prospects for passing the new START treaty through the Senate really are (which we’ve touched on before). As the Democratic majority in the Senate stands right now, they’d need at least 8 GOP votes in an environment in which it’s hard to see where even ONE GOP vote would come from.
After November I think it’s pretty clear they’ll need even more than 8. The only way to get those votes is to paint the GOP into a rhetorical corner, and to get as many GOP All-Stars as possible on board right now to help with said painting. If that means taking a meeting with Condi to get her onboard, then so be it. Prosecuting her for whatever her involvement was (or wasn’t) with the Darkside policies of Bush/Cheney strikes me as far less pressing than greatly reducing the likelihood of total (or even partial or substantial) extermination of the human race. The fewer nukes sitting around the better, and seeing as we have approximately a zero percent chance of ever prosecuting Cheney or any of the other prime movers, much less Rice (who is certainly associated with but not clearly even for these policies), then I’d call that a fairly good trade to make. But then, that’s just me. Guess I’m not shrill after all.

Accountability Free?

If the GOP wins the House, the probability that this “liberal-overreach” narrative will be Beltway CW is roughly 100%

Glenn Greenwald, basically right but forgetting that this will be the narrative if Dems hold the House but lose seats, lose no seats, or win every seat contested in 2010. This IS the narrative. Period.