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From Tom Paine to Glenn Greenwald, we need partisan journalism
By Jack Shafer
I would sooner engage you in a week-long debate over which taxonomical subdivision the duck-billed platypus belongs to then spend a moment arguing whether Glenn Greenwald is a journalist or not, or whether an activist can be a journalist, or whether a journalist can be an activist, or how suspicious we should be of partisans in the newsroom.
...
Greenwald’s collaborations with source Edward Snowden, which resulted in Page One scoops in the Guardian about the National Security Agency, caused such a rip in the time-space-journalism continuum that the question soon went from whether Greenwald’s lefty style of journalism could be trusted to whether he belonged in a jail cell. Last month, New York Times business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin called for the arrest of Greenwald (he later apologized) and Meet the Press host David Gregory asked with a straight face if he shouldn’t “be charged with a crime.” NBC’s Chuck Todd and the Washington Post‘s Walter Pincus and Paul Farhi also asked if Greenwald hadn’t shape-shifted himself to some non-journalistic precinct with his work.
...
In the 1960s, the best opinionated, fact-based journalism appeared in such books as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1963), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965). The lefties at Ramparts magazine broke stories on Michigan State University fronting for the CIA (1966), the use of napalm in Vietnam (1966), and the CIA funding of the National Student Association (1967). Later revelations in the early to mid-1970s by the New York Times and the Washington Post (and others) about the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and intelligence agency abuses were, at their root, as partisan as any of the NSA investigations Glenn Greenwald has contributed. Remember, as Christopher B. Daly recently pointed out, Daniel Ellsberg chose to leak the Pentagon Papers to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan because he 1) trusted Sheehan from their years in Vietnam, and 2) had recently read a long essay-review Sheenan had written for the paper’s book section titled “Should We Have War Crime Trials?” As Daly writes, “Three months later, Sheehan wrote the first front-page article in the series that became known as the Pentagon Papers.”
...
My paean to activist and partisan journalism does not include the output of the columnists and other hacks who arrange their copy to please their Democratic or Republican Party patrons. (You know who you are.) Nor do I favor the partisan journalists who insult reader intelligence by cherry-picking the evidence, debate-club style, to win the day for their comrades. Click and read a few of the articles I cite above and then ask yourself: Where would we be without our partisan journalists?
complete piece:
...
Greenwald’s collaborations with source Edward Snowden, which resulted in Page One scoops in the Guardian about the National Security Agency, caused such a rip in the time-space-journalism continuum that the question soon went from whether Greenwald’s lefty style of journalism could be trusted to whether he belonged in a jail cell. Last month, New York Times business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin called for the arrest of Greenwald (he later apologized) and Meet the Press host David Gregory asked with a straight face if he shouldn’t “be charged with a crime.” NBC’s Chuck Todd and the Washington Post‘s Walter Pincus and Paul Farhi also asked if Greenwald hadn’t shape-shifted himself to some non-journalistic precinct with his work.
...
In the 1960s, the best opinionated, fact-based journalism appeared in such books as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1963), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965). The lefties at Ramparts magazine broke stories on Michigan State University fronting for the CIA (1966), the use of napalm in Vietnam (1966), and the CIA funding of the National Student Association (1967). Later revelations in the early to mid-1970s by the New York Times and the Washington Post (and others) about the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and intelligence agency abuses were, at their root, as partisan as any of the NSA investigations Glenn Greenwald has contributed. Remember, as Christopher B. Daly recently pointed out, Daniel Ellsberg chose to leak the Pentagon Papers to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan because he 1) trusted Sheehan from their years in Vietnam, and 2) had recently read a long essay-review Sheenan had written for the paper’s book section titled “Should We Have War Crime Trials?” As Daly writes, “Three months later, Sheehan wrote the first front-page article in the series that became known as the Pentagon Papers.”
...
My paean to activist and partisan journalism does not include the output of the columnists and other hacks who arrange their copy to please their Democratic or Republican Party patrons. (You know who you are.) Nor do I favor the partisan journalists who insult reader intelligence by cherry-picking the evidence, debate-club style, to win the day for their comrades. Click and read a few of the articles I cite above and then ask yourself: Where would we be without our partisan journalists?
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/07/16/from-tom-paine-to-glenn-greenwald-we-need-partisan-journalism/
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