"What Have Snowden and Greenwald Got to Do With Gandhi?" (Advocacy Journalism)

[KoKo]

What Have Snowden and Greenwald Got to Do With Gandhi?
by Subhankar Banerjee

As you can see, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald have much in common with Gandhi. They are voices of conscience speaking truth to power.

Did Gandhi and Young India practice “advocacy journalism”? You bet, they did. His distaste for mainstream media was so strong that on June 19, 1946 he made a naughty remark about the Indian newspapers: “If I were appointed dictator for a day…I would stop all newspapers.”

Glenn Greenwald is also practicing advocacy journalism, as Matt Taibi pointed out in the Rolling Stone on Thursday. Taibbi made an assertion that NBC’s David Gregory had a “brain fart” when he asked Greenwald: "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you be charged with a crime?" It may sound funny to you today, but in time, his assertion will find its place in serious history books on journalism. Greenwald’s journalism has shattered the orthodoxy of his field. Today, the corporate media will continue their smear campaign against Greenwald, as if he is running for the US Presidency, and we should dig up his dirty laundry. In the years to come though, there will be—Columbia School of Advocacy Journalism (or something similar elsewhere). Students and scholars will be debating about “comparative advocacy journalism”—across practitioners: Taibbi or Greenwald; across mediums: Goodman or Greenwald; and across time: Gandhi or Greenwald.

It remains to be seen if the courageous work of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald will inspire us to fight for a more just society.

There is a glimmer of sunshine. On Thursday, The New York Times published an op-ed “The Criminal N.S.A” by two legal scholars, Jennifer Stisa Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and Christopher Jon Sprigman, professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

While it is necessary to brand the NSA activities exposed by Greenwald and Snowden as criminal, the entire unjust cruel fossil-fueled plutocratic system of the US Empire needs challenging—to ensure the survival of human and nonhuman inhabitants of this Earth.

“But you’re hopeful?” the journalist asked during Gandhi’s first television interview, on April 30, 1931. Gandhi responded: “I’m an optimist.”

MUCH MORE than I Could SNIP at:


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/30

[KoKo]

1. ...the other view...to answer the Greenwald Skeptics

[sabrina 1]

3. Skeptic is probably a kind word. I think the effort is to try to suppress the truth and

.whoever is orchestrating the smear campaign, knows he is telling the truth.

[sabrina 1]

2. Gandhi under the bus, or do we have a train now. Matt Taibbi also, and make room for those

two legal scholars also. It's getting lonely on the Cheney/King/Fleischer side of this. Everyone who is anyone is under the train.

Great article. History sorts all of these things out. Every hero was a 'traitor' to the authoritarians of their time.

[JI7]

4. Gandhi is dead

you act like it was gandhi who compared them to himself.

look at the world net daily idiots talking about how snowden is a fucking martyr. and you have paul, palin .

[arely staircase]

6. what?

I don't think Gandhi has commented on this. Probably won't.

[arely staircase]

5. It's not about Snowden

unless you think he's totally Gandhi.