Politico's Passive Aggressive Attack On Glenn Greenwald: 'History. Or Journalism. Or Treason. Or Something'

Journalism

from the oh-really? dept

Politico is known as the snarky DC-based publication that seems to thrive on considering itself part of the infamous “church of the savvy,” where reporting on the play-by-play of the horse race of politics is more important than exposing the truth. However, it apparently has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to Glenn Greenwald. A bizarre “profile” of Greenwald by Michael Hirsh tries to make the argument that Greenwald has “peaked” mainly because Politico appears to really, really, really want that to be true. Of course, as Jay Rosen pointed out, this is hardly the first time that Politico has asserted that Glenn Greenwald was over as a story. The site did so back in July of 2013, just a month after the first Snowden revelations, claiming “the new cycle has moved on” and “Greenwald doesn’t seem to have any more big revelations up his sleeve.”

Of course, in the 14 months since that was published, Greenwald has broken numerous huge stories about the intelligence community (many much bigger than the original stories), including how the NSA/GCHQ abused the information they had to destroy reputations, plans to infect millions of computers with malware, how the NSA has an internal blog where an analyst brags about “hunting sysadmins” at powerful companies, how the NSA has recorded every phone call in a couple of countries, and how the FBI spied on prominent Muslim Americans. And much more. Plus he wrote a book. But, you know, no more big revelations.

The new piece from Hirsh has this perfectly ridiculous line about Greenwald, which shows the level of misguided “snark” in the article:

The rest is history. Or journalism. Or treason. Or something.

What is it? Who cares? We’re just calling the horse races, and this Greenwald guy is a distraction, apparently.

This sort of tone is found throughout the piece, including this bizarre line:

Will there be many more Snowdens to come, based on Greenwald?s ?model?? Perhaps. But it?s more likely that Greenwald Inc. has already peaked.

Of course, this comes just weeks after it was recognized (even by Politico!) that The Intercept is working with a new leaker who is clearly not Snowden, because the terrorism watchlist guidelines that Greenwald’s The Intercept published came out after Snowden had already fled.

But, why bother with facts when the goal is to smear Greenwald as an also-ran?

There are many more problems with the piece, starting with the idea that anyone can even measure whether someone has “peaked” or not. But the whole thing has no facts in it, but just appears to be Politico’s wishful thinking that this pesky outsider might just fade away.

Filed Under: glenn greenwald, michael hirsh, politico
Companies: politico