The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald on What’s Wrong (and Right) With the Media
Glenn Greenwald: "Once corporations started — Westinghouse and CBS, now Disney and ABC, and all of that,
and journalists started becoming corporate employees instead of
journalists, the ethos of a corporation is completely different from
what a journalistic ethos is supposed to be. When you work at a
corporation, being controversial or offending and alienating people is
the worst possible thing you can do. You’re supposed to fit into
authoritative structures, you’re supposed to kind of please the power
structure that exists. If you’re a corporation that has a lot of
dealings with the government, the last thing you want is your media
division alienating government officials by being aggressive toward them
or alienating them or offending them. So the whole mentality of being
at a big corporation is to me the antithesis of what a real journalistic
ethos is supposed to be, and I think that’s fundamentally changed
journalism for the worse by making it seek out these kinds of
uncontroversial postures"
"But the same people who advocated the Iraq War, if you look at the
Sunday shows to see who is being asked to opine on foreign policy, it’s
the same people who were so radically wrong in everything they said
about Iraq. Or if you look at who the economic gurus are, they’re the
same people whose policies in the ’90s and then into the Bush
administration led to that economic collapse."
