Friday, August 23, 2013

On Greenwald's Identity as a Journalist with A Question for Journalists Who Get Paid To Be Journalists And Those Who are Journalists ITOM

How much of the coverage of the Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras story treats them as if they are objective reporters of their own roles in the story?  

 I'd guess less than 5% of what I'm seeing in the alleged news treats them as entirely interested parties involved in the story, not to be taken as objective sources of information.   In the blog blather and, from what I've seen of the putrid twitter chatter, I'd guess the figure would be less than 1%.  Far less than 1%. 

The standards of journalism in this story are self-discrediting, if nothing else.  This is a band wagon, it is pack journalism exactly of the same species we decried when it was Clinton's sex life and the war mongering that went on in the Bush II regime and in the selling of the First Gulf War during the Bush I regime.  

I asked about the use of statements by Snowden and Greenwald about their own activities, treating those as if they were actual reporting of fact instead of statements by two people who have made themselves principle parts of the story and who are entirely self-interested in how it is seen.  The response was that I was some kind of NSA "Obamabot".   Which is what passes as legitimate thinking by the Snowden-Greenwald cult.   Of course I wouldn't trust the NSA or the Obama administration to report on themselves, I wouldn't trust anyone to report on themselves or on issues they have a direct interest in.  A self-interested party should never be trusted to report on themselves.   UPDATE:  THAT INCLUDES JOURNALISTS.  

Greenwald, by his statement that he would publish information Snowden gave him to punish the British government for detaining his partner should have removed himself from the profession of journalism, definitively.  That is one of the baldest acts of journalistic malfeasance, explicitly and arrogantly announced by the malfeasant, in recent years.   Others have been discredited by doing far, far less.   

I've even seen people call statements by Snowden, while in both China and Russia "reports" and even more bizarrely, "reporting".  Apparently the supernatural transference of the mantle of journalism that came to include David Miranda last weekend, now also includes Edward Snowden.  At least for a good deal of the college educated public that blathers on like that online.  With how his statements are treated by professional journalists, perhaps that's an understandable if delusional belief. 

For more on journalistic malfeasance in this story,  I'm finding Joshua Foust to be unusually thoughtful, even when I don't entirely agree with him. 

Update:  From what I'm told, apparently the Eschatwittersphere doesn't like me saying that journalists aren't reliable sources of reportage concerning themselves and that His Holiness Glenn Greenwald (HHGG from now on) using his perch at The Guardian as a means of getting revenge on behalf of his partner is going way past what should be considered journalism.  I don't expect it will keep me up tonight.  

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