2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy Glenn Greenwald relentlessly attacks Hillary Clinton — even if it helps Donald Trump
Glenn Greenwald thinks something weird and dangerous happens to the American media during a presidential election.
Things get way more polarized than they typically are. And way more tribalistic. Everything gets interpreted through this lens of, Which side are you helping, and which side are you on? says Greenwald, a co-founder of the investigative news site the Intercept who is best known for breaking Edward Snowdens revelations about the National Security Agency, in an interview.
Greenwalds fear of a polarized press bubbled to the surface earlier this month during a bitter debate about the correct amount of scrutiny owed to the Clinton Foundation. After a handful of mainstream news outlets devoted huge amounts of time and resources to covering the foundation, a slew of liberal writers reacted in disgust. To them, the barrage of negative press about Clinton and the foundation wasnt just misleading it was actively dangerous, wrongly implying that Clintons potential conflicts of interest were remotely as worthy of our attention as Donald Trumps endless parade of horribles. (The New York Timess Paul Krugman articulated this perspective in a widely shared column titled Hillary Clinton Gets Gored.)
Greenwald is not a fan of Donald Trump. But he is a dogged critic of Hillary Clinton, a more than occasional defender of Trump from charges that hes a Russian cats paw, and deeply skeptical of the liberal conventional wisdom that the mainstream press has done too little to put Trump under a microscope. He and his colleagues at the Intercept are sufficiently relentless in these stances that to many liberals who used to cheer his excoriations of the Bush administration, he may even look like hes rooting for Trump.
http://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12853236/glenn-greenwald-trump-clinton
https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/776623679664971776
Way too charitable on Glenn, but brings up some critical points...
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