While Glenn Greenwald and Camille Paglia catch us up on the increasingly hateful and dangerous language emanating from conservative talk radio–including Mark Levin show substitute host Andrew Wilkow repeatedly calling a gay man a "vile sodomite" and Limbaugh sub Mark Davis joking about the murder of top Democratic officials–there are other signs the genre is growing increasingly desperate in the midst of dwindling conservative and GOP fortunes. Take Monica Crowley, the Fox News contributor and talk radio host. While the former assistant to the disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon may not be the most hateful in the nation's vast toxic lineup [...]
May
09
2009
NYT Names 'Harsh Tactics' as 'Torture' — by Chinese
By 3 Comments
Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site's lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was "Tortured in a Chinese Prison." Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer's ordeal–"kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door…handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air"–to be "a major editorial breach" for the paper that so agilely dances around the T-word when reporting on U.S. actions: So that's torture now?… [...]
May
02
2009
And Now, From the 'Hard Left': Ronald Reagan
By 3 Comments
In his latest Salon blog entry (5/1/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald displays his find of "a perfect illustration of how severely our political spectrum has shifted in the last two decades and how depraved and extremist our political and media classes have become"–one quote of the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer rebutting those who "believe you never torture. Ever": Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. . . . The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to [...]
Apr
28
2009
NYT, ABC and Waterboarding: An Update
By 3 Comments
We noted recently that a New York Times story about the waterboarding of two Al-Qaeda detainees included a bit of media criticism. The Times mentioned that in 2007, ABC featured an interview with former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who claimed that "Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew." This would be hard to square with what we now know–that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. The Times pushed the story further on today's front page, with Brian Stelter putting the focus squarely on that 2007 ABC report and the effect it had [...]
Apr
26
2009
Torture Memos Bring Out True Allegiances of MSM
Writing at Salon (4/23/09, ad-viewing required) of how the "sheer criminality" of George W. Bush-era torture, "really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates," Glenn Greenwald is thoroughly unsurprised by their behavior as "media stars are forced to address it": Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses–things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions and accountability when they abuse their power. To Greenwald, This remains the single most notable [...]
Apr
22
2009
On the Rare Journalistic Habit of 'Thinking Independently'
On the occasion of the first annual Izzy Awards from Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media, the son of progressive journalism icon I.F. Stone, Jeremy Stone (Consortium News, 4/1/09), describes Stone's most journalistically valuable quality–"his capacity for thinking independently"–along with its rewards and consequences: In the McCarthy era, because he spoke in defense of Jeffersonian principles, people were afraid to be seen with him. When he supported the rights of Palestinians, Jewish institutions would not invite him to speak. And when the National Press Club refused to serve his black guest lunch, he quit the club, isolating himself from [...]
Apr
22
2009
Unaccountability: 'A Trans-Partisan Religious Tenet of Beltway Culture'
By 1 Comment
Blogging from his regular Salon perch (4/20/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald notes that the public wants to investigate U.S. torture (that's what the polls tell us), but: These facts about public opinion are virtually always excluded from establishment media discussions, and those who advocate investigations and prosecutions–the view held by large percentages, if not majorities, of Americans–are virtually never heard from. That's because the belief that elites should be exempted from all consequences when they break the law is as close to a trans-partisan religious tenet of Beltway culture as it gets. Consider yesterday's Meet the Press panel discussion of [...]
Mar
10
2009
On Pundits' 'Unhinged Notion' of the U.S. as 'Human Rights Arbiter'
By 2 Comments
In his regular Salon feature (3/10/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald is having a hard time stomaching corporate media pundits' righteous "lectures to other countries": The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt today condemns the Obama administration generally and Hillary Clinton specifically for "continu[ing] to devalue and undermine the U.S. diplomatic tradition of human rights advocacy." Hiatt is angry that on her trips to China, Egypt and Turkey, Clinton failed to issue sufficiently stern and condemning lectures about those countries' human rights abuses. The depths of the fantasy world in which our political elite reside–and their complete lack of self-awareness–borders on pathological. While [...]
Mar
05
2009
Greenwald and Goodman Earn New I.F. Stone Award
By 1 Comment
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media has decided to give its new Izzy Award (3/4/09) "for special achievement in independent media" to Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, specifically lauding the "two pillars of independent journalism" for "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception and controversial issues": Week after week, in meticulously documented and detailed blog posts, [Salon's Glenn Greenwald] skewers hypocrisy, deception and revisionism on the part of the powers that be in government and the media…. With devastatingly crisp arguments, Greenwald has inveighed against torture and defended constitutional rights for all, whether [...]
