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Monday, February 10, 2014

New Glenn Greenwald site launches

Glenn Greenwald, who has done so much to reveal the abuses of the NSA, has launched a new website that will focus on further NSA revelations and then expand to cover other issues. It should be a useful site for people interested in civil liberties issues. Check it out here. 

4 comments:

fyreflye said...

Thanks for the link. With Ezra Klein quitting the Washington Post for a new startup and Bill Keller leaving the NYT
for the same, the abandonment of the mainstream paper media for the internet has become too obvious a trend not to notice.

Bobby Campbell said...

"Our longer-term mission is to provide aggressive and independent adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues"

Adversarial journalism! There we go. Now I get it.

His reporting of the NSA/Snowden story seems obviously heroic and above reproach, but previous to that he seemed to be working from pre-conceived narratives. Not that I thought he was usually wrong! But that his methodology was boilerplate. His POV seemed oppositional by default. (essentially a faith-based vs. evidence based criticism)

And what he seems to be saying is, yes, that is exactly what I am doing. And I say fair enough!

To analogize, if a sports reporter started a web site called "The Chicago Cubs Suck," he's going to be right 80% of the time, and hailed for excellence in accuracy, but on those weird days when the Cubs actually win one, that site might not be the most reliable source for the Cubs news of that particular day.

But I guess what he's saying w/ the above is that it's not his job to tell the "truth" about the Cubs, it's his job to provide the POV that they suck.

And I can certainly see the value of that as part of a healthy mediasphere.

Go Phils!

fyreflye said...

Greenwald is trained as a Constitutional lawyer and is now a journalist specializing in civil liberties issues. In the years I've been following him he's seen his job as pointing out, explaining and criticizing governmental abuse. Unfortunately, he's had plenty to criticize in the past nearly 15 years. You can call that boilerplate; I call it watchdogging.

Bobby Campbell said...

@fyreflye Exactly, yes!

I meant to point out my own mistaken interpretation of his role.

Once I saw that he calls what he does "adversarial journalism" I felt that it resolved my previous criticism, and gave me a new appreciation for his work.