Hacker News Reader

Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I paid for Salon.com back when he was a journalist there. I am a paying subscriber of The Intercept because of Greenwald.

But, it drives me crazy that he is unwilling to discuss the real details of the Russian involvement that Sarah Kendzior and Andrew Weissmann have been talking about, namely that financial records were withheld from the investigations, and that is where the real evidence lies.

He keeps trying to say there is a media conspiracy (but it is the wrong conspiracy: the conspiracy is to sell clicks). Greenwald seems to be stating there was only smoke and no fire in the investigations and that Trump is entirely a victim here. There is a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise that Greenwald never seems to talk about and it diminishes his arguments.

Have I missed that discussion?

View on HN

Greenwald is someone who often asks for verifiable proof. Is there real proof or is it people saying there is proof? Can you _link_ the proof he ignores so we criticize him for ignoring the _verifiably true things_? I have multiple examples of where he seemingly ignores stuff he doesn't want to talk about for one reason or another but that's where I've personally failed in the past.

I was very critical of Greenwald for quite some time after championing him for his work with the the Snowden revelations but once someone on Reddit asked me to see if there was actual real proof for the things I thought Greenwald was deliberately ignoring, I understood a bit more what he's about.

I think many people are so used to having the media cheer for "their team" while criticizing "the other team" 100% of the time that they completely forgot what journalism is supposed to be.

Beyond the Trump point, I think there is a very real concern being raised by Greenwald that the supposed fourth estate has suddenly uncritically been parroting the words of "their team", verbatim. While this may have become more apparent recently given all the political change and even COVID coverage, there is a history of this happening, most crucially in the run up to the Iraq War before everyone turned against it.

But if you take Iraq as an example, the corporate media has always been a consensus building machine. The danger then when it is presented as a monolith arbiter of the truth, is that if you accept the news as default "true", then any bad actor can start pushing the population in an unhealthy direction for society.

The opposite also has issues: If you accept the media as default "false", then what to believe? What is actually true outside of your own lived experience?

I see Greenwald's concern less about Trump or the politics of the day, and more about the sad lamentation of the death of his profession. The destruction of belief in institutions is increasing at a quicker pace, and that doesn't leave us as a society in a good place. And lecturing/hectoring people about "don't believe fake news, THOSE OTHER GUYS are wrong" doesn't work, because you often turn the page, and encounter something you know to be the opposite of what is being presented from that same media source. Gell-Mann Amnesia again and all that.

> The opposite also has issues: If you accept the media as default "false", then what to believe? What is actually true outside of your own lived experience?

Everybody else's experiences?

You point about the Iraq war (if that is what you were referring to), sums up how I perceived what happened at the time. However with a few hours digging it wasn't too hard to turn up primary sources - UN inspector reports and other information on what was happening inside Iraq's political elite. Suffices to say it didn't match the consensus the media had built amongst themselves.

The same was true for Russiagate. Lots of smoke but after waiting for a while and the media fanned it furiously, but no fire appeared. It's true there were no retractions have forthcoming - but are there ever?

Which brings us to the demise of 4th estate. You are worried about the demise of institution that manufactured a false justification for a war, or Russiagate on one side and the emails on the other? I didn't give up on them because they put themselves behind paywalls. I gave up on them because there are better sources of news.

But how are we supposed to access everyone else's experiences in a reliable way if not through the media?

> no fire appeared

do you mean, despite denying witness access, Fifth Amendment invocations, and all the convictions, no proof of direct involvement of trump?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com