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Comment by conistonwater | Hacker News Reader

The title is a bit clickbaity, and I think Greenwald sometimes lets his politics get the better of him, but I think he makes a perfectly valid point here: it is not only difficult, but also impossible, to reconcile Washington Post's past reporting, together with their own claims of that reporting being in the public interest, with that editorial.

That said, I'm not sure I buy the explanation that it's about "protecting access". There are many cases where groupthink developed on its own just fine (like maybe the support for the Iraq war way back when), so it could be narrow self-serving interest, but it could also be incompetence. And don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, and so on.

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> Greenwald sometimes lets his politics get the better of him

Sometimes? That's his whole raison d'etre. He's a political campaigner in all but name. One may or may not like his politics, but let's not pretend that he's a dispassionate observer.

There's nothing wrong with that. I'll let Will McAvoy of Newsroom (Aaron Sorkin) answer that for you. Take a look at one of the first season's episodes.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I'm just expressing surprise that someone seemed to think that Greenwald wasn't always extremely political.

"Let's not pretend" implies it's a purposeful deceit, not a mistake.

Why does it need to be deceit? People can be a bit short sighted when it comes to proponents of their own particular ideology.

I neither suggested that conistonwater was lying, nor that there's anything wrong with Greenwald being an activist, just that we should openly acknowledge the latter.

I'm just saying what your wording implies. "Pretend" means they are trying to "make it appear that something is the case when in fact it is not."

When my kids pretend to do things, they are under no illusions that anyone believes it to be true.

When we say that people pretend something is true, we're usually implying that they're choosing to believe in their own myth, not that they're trying to deceive others.

Support for the Iraq War did not develop on its own, it was the result of an extensive and sustained PR campaign by the Bush 43 administration.

You have an outdated expectation of Greenwald; he is an outspoken opponent of "the view from nowhere."

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