Greenwald has really fascinated me the past decade. He was on track to being one of the most prolific reporters on the planet, and he has gone really down this weird victimhood "censorship" path.
Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.
I've been watching him closely for several years and it seems the mortal sin he committed was his failure to join the Russiagate bandwagon. In the end that was clearly the correct choice, but the liberal media no longer tolerates anyone who has the audacity to undermine their chosen narrative.
I don't think it's fair to say it was the correct choice. It was a choice, and one he was allowed to make, but it was one of many options.
You say "the liberal media no longer tolerates anyone who has the audacity to undermine their chosen narrative". Isn't that what I'm talking about? He founded the org. Do you think "the liberal media" got together and decided to censor him? Or do you think people just weren't buying what he was selling? I don't get how you can accuse the liberal media of anything in this situation... it's not like he works for MSNBC or CNN.
There doesn't need to be some grand conspiracy among liberal journalists in order for them to engage in the partisan censorship he describes. It's clear that most of them believe supporting the "correct" candidate is far more important than publishing the truth.
Linking to an article by Greenwald about how Greenwald was right all along is pretty spurious, to say the least. Even more so when there are plenty of non-Greenwald sources, like the ones involved in the Special Counsel investigation, which state exactly the opposite. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/04/complete-...
> It's absolutely fair and the Mueller Report proved Greenwald was right all along
So says... Greenwald.
He's doing a classic strawman: claiming that the "Russian interference" claim was that the Trump campaign co-ordinated with Russia. Outside some fringe beliefs that isn't the claim: instead it was that Russia interfered in the election which was exactly what the report found.
It found Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC, stole the emails and disseminated them via DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks.
In regards to involvement of Trump campaign personnel, Greenwald conveniently leaves out the multiple mentions of Paul Manfort (pg 52-55) which the Republican-led intelligence committee confirms "One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer."
It's ironic that Greenwald would do what he claims other publications do: only publish material which confirms his views.
You think (and to be honest, I agree with you) it was clearly the correct choice. If you ask anyone from the MSNBC/NYT/CNN/WaPo's audience (substantial amount of people), they will say it was clearly the wrong choice.
My conclusion is the opposite. The Mueller report was heavily redacted, and misrepresented by AG Barr - precisely because it is so damning. Trump got impeached by congress over the Ukraine scandal later on, again enlisting foreign help. Trump asked a foreign power to help him against a political opponent - the Ukraine facts are not in dispute. Trump's campaign took multiple meetings with Russians bearing emails, and multiple members of his campaign are now in jail. These two facts are also not in dispute.
Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't." So Mueller has admitted that Trump obstructed his investigation, and several members in Trump's circle have gone to jail for _lying to the FBI_.
Not to mention the fact that Mueller's investigation clearly found that Trump's campaign was in contact with Russian agents, knew they favored Trump's campaign, and "welcomed" their help (i.e., foreign interference). This is what the public understands as "collusion". However, "collusion" is not a legal term, "conspiracy" is and has a higher bar of proof. So yes, Trump colluded with Russia, we just couldn't prove that they explicitly conspired since Trump's circle lied for him.
> Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't."
I always found that statement to be bizarre and offensive. You don’t prove someone innocent. You prove someone guilty. Trump doesn’t need Mueller’s exoneration, and a statement like that speaks volumes, to me anyway, about the mindset of the person making it.
> Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”
They got Don Gotti, Nixon, and countless other criminals on obstruction. But when the Senate and AG are fully loyal to the president, it suddenly isn't an indictable offense.
> As Mueller himself concluded, a reasonable debate can be conducted on whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation with corrupt intent. But even on the case of obstruction, the central point looms large over all of it: there was no underlying crime established for Trump to cover-up.
> All criminal investigations require a determination of a person’s intent, what they are thinking and what their goal is. When the question is whether a President sought to kill an Executive Branch investigation – as Trump clearly wanted to do here – the determinative issue is whether he did so because he genuinely believed the investigation to be an unfair persecution and scam, or whether he did it to corruptly conceal evidence of criminality.
> That Mueller could not and did not establish any underlying crimes strongly suggests that Trump acted with the former rather than the latter motive, making it virtually impossible to find that he criminally obstructed the investigation.
If you were innocent of a crime would you really just sit back and watch the government waste $35 million investigating you?
"If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."
From the Executive Summary:
"Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
It is a lie to suggest that there was "no evidence"; Mueller himself in a public statement literally said there was merely "insufficient evidence" to rise to the bar of conspiracy, contradicting your quote.
> "If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."
Expecting them to prove a negative in a conspiracy case is laughably absurd. Mueller said that there was not only insufficient evidence for all claims, there was zero evidence for many of the others.
> Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't." So Mueller has admitted that Trump obstructed his investigation
There's a pretty big excluded middle between "We can say with authority that X obstructed" and "We can exonerate X of obstructing".
(Which is not to say that details in Mueller's report don't tend to support the conclusion of obstruction, but Mueller saying that they could exonerate doesn't equate to saying that Trump did obstruct.)
Mueller also said that, if the President did hypothetically obstruct justice, _he would not be able to bring charges_. That is Congress's job, he said.
So, let's say Mueller found ironclad evidence of obstruction. What would he have done? He told us that he would have said exactly what he did. He does not believe it was in his power to bring charges, only present evidence. And then he said "if we could say that the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so." He's speaking like a career lawyer because he is one; he can't outright tell Congress to bring charges.
> There's a pretty big excluded middle between "We can say with authority that X obstructed" and "We can exonerate X of obstructing".
Mueller was following Justice Department policy - he can't even say he thought a crime was committed, despite mountains of evidence, because the department's policy is it will never prosecute the president, so they can't indict, and thus won't ever accuse.
The president could murder someone on live television and department policy would be to say "Doesn't look like anything to me."
It means evidence backing up Greenwald's controversial position was still not checked out. The fact that the centerpiece of a story could be "lost" before it was even studied would show that Greenwald was jumping the gun.
He has no access to the evidence but he is making very preliminary bets.
News agencies outside of Fox / NY Post haven't been able to study the evidence on a developing story, and Tucker Carlson has yet to reveal critical evidence.
Glenn Greenwald's own editor is telling him not to make preliminary bets. What's so surprising here?
i think what greenwald is basing is story on is all in the public domain. i think tucker is prone to hyping stuff so these documents probably don't add much.
> Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”
$35 million wasted on an investigation that started with a FISA warrant based on a phony report (Steele Dossier) commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
who defines what is misinformation and by what standard? it seems any opinion that doesn't conform to mainstream ideologies are now labeled as misinformation.
the whole point of his article he published is you don't shut down opinions and works of other journalists just because you don't agree with it as an editor.
Misinformation is factually-incorrect information that is spread to push an agenda.
That's no so hard.
A news organization has a responsibility to find out if the news they are reporting is factually correct, and if it's important.
If they can't verify the facts, then they may just publish the people's claims, but again, the matter of importance comes in -- is the fact that someone is making the claim important? If someone in power says a lie about COVID, that may still be worth reporting, because the fact that a person in power misled is, itself, important. But if some rando political operatives push an unverifiable story, the fact that they are claiming it isn't itself a story, unless the facts are true.
I do think it _is_ hard as in: it is very hard to find out the truth.
“Misinformation is factually-incorrect information that is spread to push an agenda.
That's no so hard.”
Given enough power you can make look any “fact” as the truth. This has been accomplished a couple of times in the past. I.e. the war against Iraq started with the “fact” that there are mass destruction weapons. All mainstream media supported this “fact” when the war began. Turns out later there was no mass destruction weapon. Publicly admitted by the US government. So a “fact” for one person isn’t a “fact” for the other because both have a different perception of truth. But again, given enough power, you can manufacture consent and thus manufacture a “wrong truth”.
By way of example, his description of PRISM was factually incorrect to the point of making the people who read his articles more misinformed than people who hadn't. There is nothing ideological in what is a statement of fact and what is not, and Greenwald gets in trouble on that basic point.
OK so if journalists have to get 100% of what they say accurate then 99% of what we see reported today are "factually incorrect" and there won't be anyone left in the profession. Same goes with your point saying more opinion leads to more misinformation.
if that meant that we had to force the slate clean and start over with proper journalistic standards, i'd kind of be okay with that. if it also means that we could eliminate network talking heads opinion shows from being listed under a News banner, i'd be even more okay with it.
Greenwald's description wasn't 99% accurate. It was barely 5% accurate. The only thing accurate in it was that some program called PRISM exists. Every statement he made about what it does was wrong, which he could have avoided if he merely talked to someone computer literate or used his status as a journalist to call the people involved. The NY Times, CNET, and pretty much the rest of mainstream media got it correct and correctly identified PRISM as a non-story while focusing on phone metadata, which was questionably legal post-Carpenter.
> Same goes with your point saying more opinion leads to more misinformation.
I didn't say that more opinion leads to misinformation. I said nothing about opinion at all.
or how about stuff that just can't be, you know, VERIFIED? Unless you take Tucker Carlson at his word and that this proof did exist, he just lost it. Oops.
Greenwald seems to have gone way off the deep end, what the heck happened???
The Biden campaign nor Hunter Biden have never discredit the material. The fact that I really do want Biden to win does not make Glenn’s piece factually incorrect. I prefer Biden despite this shady story. Still, I commend Glenn for taking a very hard decision for the sake of his integrity.
By "discrediting" it, the only thing you do is ensure that it'll make it another 24 hours in the media circus (and then there will be another claim that you have to refute or face claims that "but this time they didn't refute it!!!"). That game can be repeated ad nauseam, never leaving you off the hook and keeping the subject matter at the front of minds of everybody.
So maybe they never discredited it because they stopped jumping through every hoop that their opponents (Trump or otherwise) hold up for them?
We will never know how much of his "prolific" career was actively stunted by him being censored by both editors and an overall "feel-good"/left-wing bias in society and the news-industry.
With enough people being brave enough to stand up like this, we will finally start noticing truly how many people and their opinions have been silenced. Every additional brave person lets others see that they are not alone, that their opinions are reasonable and not hateful or fringe or unaccepted, and that they can once again speak freely in an open society.
I find it hard to believe this comment is anything but gaslighting.
Did you actually read his resignation? The editors are refusing to publish a story unless he removes all sections critical of Joe Biden. How in the world is this playing the victim card?
The conversation regarding censorship is getting disgusting at this point. Censorship should be the main focus of ANY and EVERY journalist, full stop. The profession cannot coexist in a world with censorship. It undermines every single thing about honest, transparent reporting.
What Glenn’s whiny rant leaves out is that it wasn’t just the Intercept that refused to run the Hunter/Ukraine/China BS: reporters at the NY Post and Wall Street Journal both refused to put their names on the story. The NY Post had to use a producer on Tucker Carlson’s show, while the WSJ ran the story as an op-ed since the reporters again refused to tarnish their reputation (they also ran a story from the actual reporters rebutting the allegations)
Editorial judgment and criticism is part of free speech. It is not just about broadcasting the president’s re-election propaganda as loudly as you can. And the idea that Glenn Greenwald can be trusted rests entirely on his 2007-2015 work, and ignores how disgraceful, craven, and just plain pathetic he became in 2016. Anyone who appears on Tucker Carlson’s show simply should not be trusted.
Edit: to clarify, the editorial you linked seems to be a real editorial that said “these questions need to be investigated” - the op-Ed I linked to presented itself as divulging new information. In 99.9999999% of cases this would be an odd use of an op-ed, but it appears to have been the only option since the reporters refused.
It is also worth noting that WSJ has a unique and well-known dichotomy between “brilliant, hard-hitting reporting” and “unbelievably hackish Joe-Rogan-level opinions.”
Who determined it was misinformation? Nobody on the Biden campaign has said that the emails are false. The media has just decided that it's "Russian misinformation", which is increasingly looking more like a justification for not investigating valid news that may paint their preferred candidate in a badl ight.
This right here is a masterclass on how you can still technically be saying "facts", but by cherry picking and bending words make it seem very different from what it actually was. This kind of deception honestly makes everything this person says worthless to me.
This is the news site that broke the Tara Reade rape allegation against Biden this spring. To me, this makes me think there's more to this story. You have no problem dropping a rape allegation story days after Biden is the presumptive nominee (with numerous follow-up articles), but apparently are "censoring" critical comments about Biden from GG's articles?
Without knowing what's in there, it's really hard to make a call on that information alone.
This could be anything from "Hey, the source for this information is notoriously unreliable and doesn't meet our standards" to "He can't publish this because then Trump might win and that's not worth the cost". One is a very valid reason to refuse to publish something, for the other, the ends don't justify the means and he's right to be upset.
The story he's referring to has so many holes in it that it's more of a mesh than a woven cloth. Maybe a lace. There isn't much to it except criticism of Biden. Removing criticism of Biden just makes it threadbare and tawdry.
The theory here is that Hunter Biden, for some reason, flew 3,000 miles away from his home to drop off some devices with unencrypted sensitive data for repair and data recovery at a place where the owner couldn't identify him positively because he's blind, and then just forgot them. The shop's surveillance camera footage for the time period in question got wiped clean even though there's footage from before and after.
And instead of just deleting the data and moving on with life, the owner held on to it for a year (no one does this) and then somehow (we still don't know how) it ended up in the hands of Rudi Giuliani. And we can't see it except for a couple of screenshots from imessage, but we're told it's damning. It got mailed to Tucker Carlson but somehow got lost in the mail.
You just used a collection of logical fallacies to poke holes in the story while avoiding the question of Joe Biden being corrupt and indebted to foreign adversaries.
Why did Hunter Biden get +$50,000/mo. salary from a Ukranian energy company that Joe Biden had dealings with during his time as VPOTUS? Why did Hunter Biden get $1 billion windfall from China just days after visiting Beijing with his influential father?
Why do Donald Trump's children have top secret clearances that they're ineligible for and work in the White House with him? Why does Donald Trump owe foreign banks nearly a billion dollars? Why did two banks forgive millions of dollars of loans against Donald Trump and then have bankers directly responsible for forgiving the loans receive positions within his administration? Why hasn't Donald Trump divested himself of his holdings in his companies as required to by the Emoluments clause? Why has the federal government paid Trump properties over a billion dollars for secret service and other agents to stay there?
Until you can answer all of those questions with reasonable explanations that aren't "because he can" then I don't want to hear another word out of you about Hunter Biden -- who has had no role in the Obama/Biden administration and will have no role in the Biden/Harris administration.
Jared Kushner - one of those supposedly unqualified family members, and one that the media has enjoyed throwing rocks at for years now - brokered multiple peace deals in the middle east, something that decades of establishment political and foreign policy figures have been unable to accomplish with little critique from the media.
What Kushner did disassembled something like 30 years of UN effort in the region. He enabled an alliance between two bullies who could agree on a couple of things, and will now use that alliance to beat the shit out of people that disagree with them, to the detriment of, say Palestine.
This "accomplishment" is the equivalent to smuggling some dinosaur embryos to a south american island in a cryogenic cylinder disguised as shaving cream. It's not so much that career diplomats COULDN'T do it, it's that they understood why they SHOULDN'T do it.
Sure, there isn't an expectation of privacy. But that implies that the property is Hunter Biden's in the first place and that there's an intact chain of custody of evidence if there are misdeeds, which there isn't.
Again, this looks exactly like every other KGB/FSB misinformation operation.
What leads you to believe that he was trying to spread misinformation? The suppression of criticism leveled against Joe Biden or any other individual in public service is a grave danger to democracy. I commend Mr. Greenwald for standing up to censorship.
Please entertain the possibility for a moment, whether you agree with it or not, that this story was indeed planted by a foreign nation for the specific purpose of manipulating our election. Do you then believe that it is responsible to willfully help spread it and blast it all over every social media site? Aren't you doing the foreign nation's bidding then?
If you do agree there, then where would you draw the line for blocking such information being spread? Is the fact that the reporter at the singular publication in all the the US willing to report on it didn't want their name on it worry you? The fact that the only evidence comes from some random Trump supporting repairman in some random state not worry you? The fact that unreliable (self-exposing to 15yo) people such as Giuliani are attached to the story not worry you? What about our own intelligence services saying that foreign nations have been trying to use said person to manipulate our election?
There was a time when journalists cared about the truth, and what the truth requires is the disclosure of facts and objectivity. The proper way to publish this is to describe the evidence, and the reasons as to why the evidence may be falsified, and do continual reporting as the story develops to keep the public informed how likely or not the information is false.
The alternative of suppressing it based upon supposition and a "gut check" says very, very clearly: we don't trust the public to make up their minds, or, worse, we think this might be true but it would run counter to our interests if people knew about it. Saying something like this is "misinformation by the Russians" when it is not denied nor has evidence been presented as such is what we used to call "believing in conspiracy theories." Sometimes conspiracy theories are true, and the facts prove them. But journalists shouldn't make publishing decisions based upon conspiracy theories without evidence supporting those theories.
In any case, both of those behaviors run counter to the principles of journalism, which is predicated on the idea that preferring to share imperfect information, accurately described, is ultimately what leads to an informed citizenry, even if some of that information turns out to be misleading or wrong in the end.
> There was a time when journalists cared about the truth
Which is exactly why no other publication has yet backed up this claim, because they cannot verify the truthiness of it. If anything, it's NYP that did not care about the truth and only about the fact that it would be a "win" for their side.
Caring about the truth and not spreading misinformation from foreign nation is one and the same.
OK, so that would mean it was fair to delay reporting on it until it was investigated. Has any investigation happened? Are the media reporting on how they chased down leads to confirm or deny the report? What about the claims of "misinformation from a foreign nation", have journalists gotten to the bottom of that beyond just repeating what the "intelligence services" have said?
So far, the "investigation" by the media sources who suppressed the story literally seems to be to not even ask if the evidence is real from those who it's targeting, and to just run with the idea that there's plausible deniability so it must be false. As if there'd be anything other than plausible deniability in a real corruption scandal.
Your world makes sense, but only if "cannot verify" means "tried and failed" not "didn't try and suppressed based upon the assumption it was invalid", as is the publicly stated methodology taken by the Washington Post.
Yes, the FBI has looked into it and have yet to find any credible source. I also assume every reporter from every publication is investigating it too.
> Are the media reporting on how they chased down leads to confirm or deny the report?
The media never reports on the process of chasing leads and inconclusive stories (which is exactly what NYP did). They only post once they have the actual facts.
> by the media sources who suppressed the story
First off, it's the social media site that suppressed the story, not other publications. Secondly, not reporting something until you have it confirmed is not "suppressing" a story, it's actual journalism.
> as is the publicly stated methodology taken by the Washington Post.
The FBI admitted today Hunter Biden and his associates are under an active criminal investigation. The article you are replying to is literally about the media suppressing the story
They don’t seem to apply this rigor to stories that are engineered to make the orange one look bad... the NYT “anonymous” piece, the hit job re: Trumps taxes, dishonest articles about border separations (who built the cages?), etc., etc. it’s become clear that the media is absolutely biased to the core. This coming from a 2x Obama voter.
That is not generally how journalism operates. Remember "Rathergate"? Would it have made the slightest bit of difference if CBS had inserted the disclaimer that "Of course we can't be 100% sure these docs are legit but we'll keep investigating."?
I don't remember the story well but certainly more self-skepticism, disclosure of facts, and rigorous investigation will always reduce the chance of humiliation and harm.
To a degree. My point though is that major journalism outlets, while they certainly screw up from time to time, don't run with major stories and be "We think this is true but maybe it isn't. We'll keep you posted."
> My point though is that major journalism outlets, while they certainly screw up from time to time, don't run with major stories and be "We think this is true but maybe it isn't. We'll keep you posted."
Right; they will run with "Someone else is reporting/claiming this, but we have been unable to confirm it. We'll keep you posted." And while the difference in terms of the impression on the reader/viewer may be subtle, there is an important distinction between running the unconfirmed story directly as news (or the thing Greenwald apparently suggested of an outlet running dueling news stories on the same issue from different journalists as news.)
Not to mention the use of the term "confirmed" has completely changed in modern times. Now, the press puts out a story that an anonymous source said X, and then another press outlet "confirms" it - and in this sense, the use of the word "confirm" means "we also asked the anonymous source and they told us the same thing." This is a trick: "confirming" a story used to mean that actual journalism was practiced, where the liklihood of the claims were vetted and determined to be likely true, given multiple independent sources or other evidence. It used to take time and effort to "confirm" stories, that was the job of a journalist, now the term is just used to artificially bolster anonymous claims by having a second talking head talk to the same person as a way to "confirm" the other media source wasn't lying that they existed, or something.
Fair enough. If another credible outlet is reporting it, they'll probably run it with the disclaimer that the NYT (or whoever) is reporting something but we haven't ourselves been able to verify A, B, and C claims. If it's a claim on a conspiracy site? Or someone has just come to them with an accusation they're unable to verify? Unlikely.
> There was a time when journalists cared about the truth
There have always been journalists who cared about the truth, but there has never been a time when that was generally dominant over the business, political, etc., interests of publishers, who have always been, for the entire history of journalism (which has been entirely embedded within the capitalist age), very deeply intertwined with those of the capitalist ruling class, of whom publishers, especially of major, highly-visible media outlets, are generally a part.
There is no easy answer here, and I think the best is to allow things to play out with all the information out there for people to make an informed decision on. We need the entire collective effort of the media industry and journalists to poke, prod, piece together and corroborate the details being presented. Leak the data dump to 4chan even, see what they find. Who knows what holes everyone might find, or what additional pieces of the puzzle they might unravel with such a collective effort. Right now it just kinda seems like they're trying to discredit rather than investigate, which is why it's a huge story and why it's being picked up on by the right so much.
Is there any evidence that it was planted by a foreign national? We don't censor based on gut feelings that something was planted by a foreign national.
This argument can be made for nearly every piece of political journalism... you're only supporting this suppression because it helps your preferred candidate.
What matters is whether the story is true or not, not who planted it. If China digs out more on Trump taxes or business dealings, I'd want to see that, as well.
Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.