Today at Slate.com, Isaac Chotnier interviews journalist
Glenn Greenwald, who has written many a story based on information revealed by
Wikileaks – and provides evidence that while Slate may occasionally publish
something that makes me roll my eyes, they are very aware of that increased
rarity in national media: balance.
So to follow up on what I wrote yesterday about Slate’s
pearl-clutching over revelations via Wikileaks that the Democratic National
Committee worked hard to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination, Slate offers
this, via Greenwald:
[A]s a journalist, if there is material that is in the
public interest that’s available to report on, I don’t think it should be a
process that the journalist engages in to wonder whether or not the motives of
the person who made it available are sufficiently pure to report on it, or
whether the person who did it had some ulterior motive. If the material is in
the public interest, and has been made available—regardless of how it has been
made available, obviously once the authenticity is confirmed—the obligation of
the journalist is to report on it, period.
Now, obviously, there are separate newsworthy questions
about who did the [DNC] hack, and the reasons for it, and what the implications
are that also ought to be journalistically examined. But in terms of the
content of the material itself, whether it has been stolen by a whistleblower,
or hacked by an adversarial government for nefarious ends, or for fun by some
hacker, I ask one question: Is it in the public interest? And if the answer is
yes, that’s the end of the inquiry.
Chotnier goes on with more traditional pearl-clutching,
ironic in an industry that reveled in the leaks that brought the presidency of
Richard Nixon to its knees, but Greenwald continuously and successfully knocks
down Chotnier’s arguments. He also comes close to calling linking Trump to the
Russians McCarthyism.
The entire piece is worth a read. Watch out for f-bombs, if
that offends you.
(Again, I’m neither a Trump supporter nor a Clinton
supporter. I’m just interested in this topic as it applies to my hobby of
reading about Richard Nixon. That these modern claims so closely parallel
Nixon’s Watergate scandal, and the fact that the national media is
pearl-clutching because the Democrats are the victims this time around, is
fascinating to me.)
Greenwald also chides the media for existing in their own
echo chamber, a la Pauline Kael (‘I live in a rather special world. I only know
one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my
ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.')
here’s what Greenwald says:
[I]f you are someone who wants to stop Trump or Brexit, your
goal should be to communicate effectively with the people who believe it is in
their interest to support Trump or Brexit. I think in general there is no
effort on the part of media elites to communicate with those people and do
anything other than tell them that they are primitive, racist, and stupid. And
if the message being sent is that you are primitive, racist, and stupid, and
not that you have been fucked over in ways that are really bad and need to be rectified,
of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from
the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit
won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.
Greenwald rightly criticizes the national media for
remaining squarely in the “you’re primitive, racist, and stupid” camp, without
doing anything more to communicate with the “primitive, racist, and stupid”
people who support Trump. I’ve only seen one major news outlet even attempt to do
what Greenwald recommends. And that outlet is Buzzfeed. So goes the state of
our national media.
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