Letters to the Editor
GlennGreenwald
Published Letters: 2221 Editor's Choice: 18
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lemucdutex:
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't have the time to efficiently check this out, but wasn't ABC News just as big a cheerleader for the Iraq "war" as all the rest of the corporate media?
He said a couple of times that Peter Jennings was out there prior to the war aggressively questioning the administration's WMD and other claims and that ABC News wasn't really guilty of gullibly passing on those claims. I don't recall what Peter Jennings said or didn't say about any of that, but I highly doubt that ABC News was some stalwart challenger of prevailing WMD and Iraqi threat orthodoxy, or else that would have received a lot more attention.
But as I said, that's his claim, and I don't (yet) have facts I can point to in order to say it's true or not true.
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"Flack"
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yep. He's just an ABC flack, not an editor or producer: Corporate Communications Senior Vice President, Jeffrey Schneider. He's paid to blow smoke and not really say much (but kind of figures he'd demand that GG hype the Peabody... huh?)
I think that's an articificial distinction. He's not just a "flack" - he's one who works and, by all appearances, has long worked for media companies. His job is to defend the work of journalists, and what he was saying in the course of doing that is completely consistent with what the journalists themselves say when defending their work. That is how they think.
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Harrington:
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But I didn't notice in your post that you put it to Schneider the way you stated it to us: (1) that Americans lack the trust that he assumes they have, and (2) the reason they lack that trust is because a full-on media campaign made up of lies attributed to anonymous sources is one of the reasons we're in Iraq right now.
Maybe you did have this conversation and you're reprting his responses without the specifics of your questions, but I would really be interested to hear someone - anyone - from the mainstream media comment on these two issues.
I did explain my views on those matters. I wasn't purporting to recite a transcript or a blow-by-blow of the conversation. I wanted to fairly convey what he said and then draw what I thought were the appropriate conclusions. I wanted to make sure I got full replies to the questions that I thought needed to be asked on this specific story -- that was my first priority -- but there was definitely a give-and-take on these broader issues.
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itsandy:
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe it's not so problematic. It's exactly the mindframe of the people who founded this country. It led them to create a magnificent system of oversight and checks and balances. So maybe that scepticism is the antidote this country needs.
This is a good point. I agree -- and frequently argue -- that a very vibrant dose of scepticism is critical. And you're right -- the virtue of such scepticism is a key principle on which the country is founded. But scepticism is different from full-scale distrust, an affirmative belief that these institutions are corrupt and unreliable. That, I think, is corrosive in a lot of ways.
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Hankest:
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paul, i don't know if "Monicagete" made people distrust the media more. But Glenn Greenwald went out of his way to claim the "key reason" there's currently such a high level distrust, wasn't poor reporting in general, but the poor reporting/dissembling that lead us into the Iraq debacle. He made that claim, he should back it up.
That is a complete distortion of what I wrote. I most certainly did not say that "the key reason" for media distrust is the pre-Iraq-war reporting. What I said is this:
And at least one key reason for that distrust is both clear and compelling. Many Americans who more or less did trust the judgment of the country's most respectable media outlets were severely betrayed, when they supported an invasion of a sovereign country based exclusively on patently false claims that were uncritically though aggressively disseminated by the American press.
I didn't make any claims about its being the Number One reason (as you falsely suggested), but only wrote that among "many Americans," the mistrust they have of media reports was heightened significantly due to pre-Iraq-war reporting.
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Hankfest:
[Read the article: National journalists believe you should trust them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]On what do you base the fact that a "key reason" Americans distrust the media is due to the dissembling nonsense that got us into the Iraq occupation?"
That is still a misquote. I said the media's pre-Iraq-war reporting is a source of press mistrust for "many Americans." That is indisputable from reading the blogosphere alone. One of the principal complaints about the American media in the liberal/anti-Bush blogosphere is its failure to report critically on the administration's pre-war claims. I wasn't making any representation about what percentage of Americans believe that or where it ranks on the list of causes. I simply said that is true for "many Americans," and my source is what I see and read every day.
Do you actually question or dispute that premise?