My Wednesday column begins like so:
I’m going to put it all out there and let the chips fall where they may: I’m increasingly convinced that Glenn Greenwald’s reporting on the NSA story is tainted by his well-known agenda, leading him to make broad claims for the purposes of inciting outrage. Yes, this is only a theory. But there continues to be a growing number of questions key to the NSA surveillance story that remain unanswered by Greenwald.
Greenwald has flat out refused to offer any sort of revisions or clarifications on his reporting, even though many of the questions have come from other publications and other NSA sources. And that strongly indicates to me that he’s sticking with his reporting and refuses to shed any more light — transparency, if you will — onto some of the rough edges that continue to be uncovered by various other outlets, including CNET, TechCrunch, TPM, The New York Times, ZDNet, the Los Angeles Times and so forth.
Why are these clarifications so important? Greenwald’s reporting is being presented as hard news, not in the format of his usual journo-activist Glennzilla screeds. There ought to be a very clear wall of distinction between these two areas, and those distinctions ought to be made clear to readers. Fox News Channel, for example, has notoriously blurred that line, even filling its newscasts with agenda-driven stories that sound like hard news, with the accompanying “fair and balanced” slogan, but that are in reality carefully selected based on how they’ll play to the decidedly unbalanced conservative Fox News viewership.
Likewise, Greenwald may have been deliberately vague in some areas and deliberately misleading in other areas as a means of feeding his agenda, which includes but isn’t exclusive to upending the left-right paradigm, safeguarding civil liberties and his stated goal of generating public debate about domestic surveillance and the reach of our national security apparatus. And if he’s exaggerating aspects of this story to suit his agenda, he ought to come clean about it. At this point, some of the information that we’ve learned and which he hasn’t clarified is collectively pushing some skeptics to draw that conclusion, including me.
In order to demonstrate the story’s veracity, there are nagging questions that ought to be answered. [READ ON]