4 ms·

While certainly Greenwald's article could have been improved, this was an opinion piece and it seems clear that his editors wanted not just greater clarity but

• hluska 6y ago
  Matt Taibbi's article is complicated, but I'd like to draw attention to one paragraph: > In the last few weeks I’ve heard from multiple well-known journalists going through struggles in their newsrooms, with pressure to avoid certain themes in campaign coverage often central to their worries. There are many reporters out there — most of them quite personally hostile to Donald Trump — who are grating under what they perceive as relentless pressure to publish material favorable to the Democratic Party cause. Greenwald’s story mirrors some of these stories, but his is more striking than some others on a few levels. This is absolutely chilling. That aside and back to the original article, let me deal with two pieces of feedback from the editor that would have improved the article: 1.) Talk about the laptop genesis story in the context of what Giuliani and others were doing in the Ukraine. The laptop story is pretty wacky and deserves some actual coverage just to add context. 2.) Talk about how few media outlets have access to the hard drive and how that is one of the excuses given for less widespread coverage. From here, I think Greenwald could have moved to these points: 1.) The Biden family has never denied the authenticity of any of these materials. Is that because there are so many materials that they don't want to get into the game of confirming some and denying others? Or is it because this is all true? 2.) This certainly does not make Hunter Biden look good and all of his future business dealings call for far greater scrutiny, particularly if his father wins the election. Granted, it makes Hunter Biden look so poor that his odds of getting hired to slang french fries are pretty low, but still...if he gets hired to slang french fries, watch the subsidies for the potato farmers. 3.) If this is a Russian disinformation campaign, they sure don't have the A team working on it. And we go back to #1. 4.) What does it say about the state of journalism that nobody will cover the emails unless they have entire copies of the hard drive?? Has the career of journalism become so utterly fucked up that journalists aren't willing to cover something unless they can find their own career making exclusive angle?? Are news organizations so toxic that if they can't justify getting their front end team working on a fancy scrolling background, they'll kill investigative journalism???
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    I like that people think that every major newsroom in the country can be involved in a politically motivated conspiracy to shape the narrative, but don't even bother to consider the possibility that a couple of overt Left-wing anti-Democratic-establishment political activists selling unverifiable stories. that exactly fits the ideology of their long-time overt activism might just be doing the same thing. Sure, the universal mass-media conspiracy the Greenwald-Taibbi axis is pushing is more “shocking, if true” than the idea that they are doing the same kind of narrative-shaping that they are trying to point fingers elsewhere about. But it's not more likely to be true.
    • _8ljf 6y ago
      At this point in time, it’s a fair assumption that anything the Titular Right accuses its enemies of doing, is what it’s doing itself. Even that notorious house of flaming liberals, the Wall Street Journal, concluded the Hunter Biden thing is nonsense. See also: Swift boating, Obama is a sekrit Kenyan Muslim with fake birth certificate, and so on. It’s the Roger Stone 101. Meantime, the Trump family kleptocracy is nuts-deep in its graft on the taxpayers’ dime and the fanbois don’t raise so much as an eyebrow because calling that out just isn’t exciting or self-serving enough. This is how democracy dies, drowned beneath addlepated addicts grasping at their next fix and just don’t care about anything else.