Joe Rogan Experience #1556 – Glenn Greenwald

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rcLsoIKgA

by remarkEon • 6 years ago

107 97 6 years ago

trollied• 6 years ago

He’s also done the Lex Fridman podcast this week.

His sudden appearance on two high profile podcasts seems eerily convenient, almost as if they were timed to coincide with his planned resignation.

macinjosh• 6 years ago

No, really? Public figures go on media outlets when they have something to talk about!? /s

The man is going off on his own as an independent journalist of course he is going to promote himself.

MisterBastahrd3• 6 years ago

He's doing the same hissy-fit resignation nonsense that Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan did. There's a lot more money to be made by charging people directly without having an editor to tell you to validate your claims and cut out your editorialized nonsense than there is as an actual journalist. He wants to be the Perez Hilton of politics. He cut his teeth in the business with opinion blogs, got his big break precisely because people felt comfortable leaking things to him BECAUSE of his opinion pieces, and has never been comfortable just reporting news.

syspec• 6 years ago

I enjoy most JRE episodes, this one as well.

However the one thing I do not get is how he is always complaining about CNN not reporting this or how nytimes is practiced bad journalism going so far as to call cnn fake news, but he never discusses Fox News which is actually the most popular news network by far (record profits this year if 1.5B) and the most obviously bias.

It really weakens his position, and paints him as only a pseudo centrist

originalvichy• 6 years ago

I’m not from the US but I can see that this is yet another effect of two-party politics rotting your country. Centrists and pseudo-centrists are giving outright lies more weight by trying to be ”balanced and not biased”. Giving weight to someone’s lies just because they are led to believe that truth is always in the middle. This leaves all editorial responsibility to the reader. And when the reader sees that a media source is not publishing a story that they are violating their responsibility to give the unfiltered ”truth” to the masses so that they can decide its truthiness. A media source not being just a printer of statements beccomes a weakness.

The internet has a lot to do with this since the value of editorial practices does not exist online in the same sense. Bots and blue-checkmark-people give any story validity on twitter.

sampo4• 6 years ago

I’m not from the US but I can see that this is yet another effect of two-party politics rotting your country.

United States is perhaps the oldest continuously existing democracy [0], in has existed 244 years, and most of that time (about 200 years) it has been a two-party system. I don't think it's the two-party system that is responsible for the rotting now. Something else is going on.

[0] Well, we can debate how to define a democracy (an interesting and educational debate), and who is oldest still existing depends on the definition. But a good case can be made that it's the US.

ojnabieoot5• 6 years ago

While the two party system does have problems they tend to be vastly overstated (and are much more difficult to solve than the complainers want to acknowledge).

The problem is that US conservatives, both elites and ordinary voters, have become profoundly radicalized since 1964, and specifically since the Civil Rights Act (Edit: though the underpinnings for this started with McCarthyism and Brown v. Board - it was really the 1964 election that moved this radicalism into the white conservative mainstream, not just the Birchers.)

In that sense things are really similar to Weimar Germany, which was a multiparty democracy in which there were many viable non-Nazi options for conservative voters. Yet German conservatives across the board decided that a Nazi dictatorship was preferable to a democracy where socialists might win. In general it is very difficult to sustain a democracy when 40% of the electorate rejects the concept.

inglor_cz4• 6 years ago

I live next to Poland. They have a multiparty democracy and a serious turmoil in the streets now, because their polarization problem mirrors the American one very closely.

I think this is an effect of social media. It rewards the most extreme positions with likes and shares, hollowing out the former core of shared values.

xupybd2• 6 years ago

Fox's bias are well known and have been known about for a long time. Complaints about CNN are more common because CNN's bias is new. At least to the point that it has impacted it journalism so deeply.

evgen2• 6 years ago

It is not bias at CNN, it is that the conservative media and pundits have spent so long working the refs that people who do not know any better assume the bias exists and continue to parrot the point.

0xy2• 6 years ago

They all deserve equal criticism, there is no scale of bias because they're all bottom feeders.

The New York Times repeatedly claimed there were WMDs in Iraq based on evidence that was fabricated. This helped sell the invasion to the public leading to the deaths of thousands of people. [1]

CNN was caught leaking debate questions in 2016 to the Democrats [2] and falsely linking an innocent man to a fabricated Russia conspiracy and then being forced to retract and roll the 3 journalists involved in the deception. [3]

That's just scratching the surface!

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...

[3] https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/06/26/cnn-resig...

zapnuk2• 6 years ago

The NYT apologised for their Iraq war coverage [1]. The people involved in your [2] and [3] got fired/resigned, and acted on their own.

Meanwhile the right wing media still hangs on to lies or very misleading reporting/propaganda without consequences. Is there any apology for the WMD reporting by right wing media? Did any fox news staffers got fired for propagating lies (climate change not existing for example)? On the contrary, the very popular Fox news anchor Shepard Smith ended his career because of misleading reports (Clinton + uranium one) spread by fox news.

Claiming they are somewhat similar is plain wrong. Also, it's the classic 'trick' used by self described centrists to normalize right wing ideas when in reality on is clearly more wrong than the other (e.g. Hunter Biden conspiracy vs Trump nepotism).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th... [2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...

schwartzworld• 6 years ago

I'm not a Joe Rogan fan but I share this opinion. Fox News isn't fake news because it isn't news at all. it's literally just a propaganda network. NYT is supposed to be a higher standard.

As to centrism, I'm not sure Rogan has enough of a coherent ideology to even call him a centrist.

Broken_Hippo• 6 years ago

Sure, when you know the "news" is all fake, it is easy to call it not news.

But people who watch Fox News - for the most part - are watching for actual news. They often believe it. They aren't questioning the 'facts'. It isn't even as fake as Tabloids saying "I had an alien baby!".

While Fox is as trustworthy as 'The Onion', 'The Onion' openly states it is satire: Fox News is still claiming news and facts.

Ataraxy• 6 years ago

The vast majority of people don't have a coherent ideology.

It legitimately comes down to however you frame a question to someone.

vixen99• 6 years ago

(Fox) 'It isn't news at all'? You mean you watch it regularly and can therefore vouch for its zero news content? Why would you want to do that and if you don't, how can you make such an evidently uninformed comment? What's the difference between propaganda and literal propaganda?

apta2• 6 years ago

The same applies to CNN and other channels if we're going to be honest.

bjoli• 6 years ago

From across the pond I have the feeling that fox news is a lost cause, whereas liberal media seems to, at least officially, hold journalistic integrity as a high priority and actually believe what they say.

One quite obvious example from the Atlantic: There was a trump speech maybe 2 months ago when trump acknowledged that there has been people in the military complex profiteering from war (and also choosing the lovely words "making our wonderful wonderful bombs" or something along those lines). This is something that the Atlantic has been saying since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But for some reason they chose not to write something along the lines of "trump acknowledges war profiteering" and recapping why some people (probably including the reader base of the Atlantic) believe that war profiteering in the military-industrial complex is bad thing. Instead they chose to angle it like "trump criticises the army. The atlantic supports the troops!".

This is just a small thing that I (a leftist, Marxist Swedish commie-sheeple) saw when doing my weekly skimming of the news on your side of the pond. There is of course a more complex political game going on, but at the same time: is it so hard to understand why someone becomes disillusioned with the media landscape?

chiefalchemist2• 6 years ago

It wasn't only The Atlantic that ignored that. I didn't see a single media outlet acknowledge it. Not a single "friend" on FB or Twitter called it out. Not since Eisenhower had the MIC been recognized by a POTUS like that, and the reference wasn't ignored; it wasn't even recognized. That's highly disturbing.

But it gets worse. Under the current admin the DoD budget has ballooned to nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Imagine that. The POTUS is able to inflate that budget with nearly zero outrage, and then he turns around and calls out the MIC and again no outrage (about the hypocrisy).

The disconnect - media and public - is flabbergasting. How can this be? In plain sight??

MisterBastahrd3• 6 years ago

The Atlantic isn't "liberal media."

It isn't really a news magazine at all. It's an opinion rag with pundits who range across the ideological spectrum. You will no more find news there than reading the NY Times or Wall Street Journal's opinion sections.

tomp4• 6 years ago

Same as Israel is criticised more often for (minor) human rights abuses than Syria for major ones.

We expect more of them. My guess is also that Glenn is centre-left so he probably used to trust NYT and CNN while having ignored Fox News since forever.

ojnabieoot5• 6 years ago

Glenn is right-wing and always has been. And he doesn’t ignore Fox News now - he’s one of Tucker Carlson’s most frequent guests!

Glenn Greenwald postures as a civil libertarian when he wants to attack liberals. He has basically not said a word about Trump’s drone program (which by design is dramatically more lethal than Obama’s policy), and not a word about Trump lawlessly defending convicted war criminals and encouraging more war crimes. This is because Greenwald is a dishonest hack.

As someone who admired Greenwald for years and personally had discussions with him where he (temporarily) changed my mind about things through badgering and gaslighting, I am still very upset that I didn’t see this sooner.

dandanua• 6 years ago

He is rich, and Trump's gang is targeting rich people before anything else. Rich people know (or feel) this, so they collaborate, consciously or not.

fastbluewave• 6 years ago

I think one point of defence for this would be that it's so obvious that Fox is biased, that it need not be mentioned.

I think Joe also mentioned at some point that he used to read and watch CNN a lot (and he implied that he trusted it at the time), so perhaps this is the reason why he's now putting it down.

jariel4• 6 years ago

It's funny but true.

Fox is just an aberration, I assume we all know they are not reasonable - or at least their opinion parts (and it's mostly opinion).

But the rest of the press ostensibly holds themselves to higher standards.

That said, I don't agree with a lot of what Greenwald has to say either.

TheOperator• 6 years ago

I laughed at the Truth of this. Fox News honestly doesn't even register as a legitimate news organization for me most of the time. I actively avoid using them as a source. It's like getting upset over supermarket tabloids.

Yet this organization sure had an awful lot of blood on its hands with its recent pandemic coverage and yet all I ever hear about is papers like the New York Times. Rogan himself seems to have shown a lot of sympathy for Fox News worst tendencies on this matter. The last time I remember outlets like the NYT having so much blood on their hands was during the Iraq war and that reporting was about a generation ago, AND Fox was even worse than them even back then. Yet all I hear about is the perils of the dastardly MSM and their legions of partisan so called fact checkers.

willio58• 6 years ago

I’ve heard episodes where he shits on fox. I think he focuses more on liberal news outlets because he actually leans liberal himself.

And I completely understand this because as a left-leaning person CNN has become an obsolete atrocity of a news network.

9HZZRfNlpR• 6 years ago

He voted for Bernie, he's definetly on the liberal side. He complains about CNN because he felt it used to be his news network so to speak.

refurb2• 6 years ago

”and the most obviously bias.”

Maybe the most obvious to you, but CNN has always been biased.

“Don’t point out the speck in your brother’s eye when you have a plank in your own”.

paulpauper2• 6 years ago

I think it is implied that he thinks both are bad

friendlybus• 6 years ago

Rogan isn't political. He just pretends to be for money.

nabla92• 6 years ago

Rogan is not doing journalism, or serious interviews trying to get into bottom of anything. It's just a show and content creation. He is just going with anyone who comes into his show.

Here is little deeper take of Greenwald:

Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Blowup with the Intercept https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/inside-glenn-greenwa...

jariel4• 6 years ago

By giving interesting people a large, open, unconstrained platform and plenty of time to speak, he's going 'way deeper' than most of the mainstream press.

Joe is smart but you're right, he does play the nice guy and doesn't ask his guests hard questions - but the format is really powerful.

I watched 2.5 hours (!!!) of Bernie Sanders speak and came to the realization that I don't think I'd seen Bernie speak for more than 5 minutes previous to that - ever. People are supposed to elect national leaders on the basis of sound-bytes, controlled scenarios, ridiculous 'gotcha debates'?

I really don't think you'll find a longer format out there for anyone. It literally takes time to get to know people and the open, conversational format, particularly the length is really helpful. On cable news you get 1 minute if you're lucky, a longer, hurried interview if you're famous.

Many of the 'issues du jour' require some explanation - every unfortunate interaction between police and some assailant that's on the national news has nuance, certainly many of the more theoretical issues have nuance. And public figures, speakers are very often misinterpreted, misquoted.

Not only is there enough time on the format, people are tuning in.

Though you're right to point out Joe is not doing regular journalism by asking the tough questions - he is doing something else, which asking 'un PC' questions which would never get asked in highly politicized or sensitive information systems.

If there is 'editorial bias' on the part of Joe, it's easily circumvented by the guests who have time to answer the questions. Contrast this with most broadcast outlets who design the questions, don't give time to respond, heavily edit the question/response, and shave it down to tiny digestible formats.

Joe Rogan's mere existence is really counter intuitive - if major press outlets were doing their jobs well I don't think he would exist. He's found a credible, if not perfect niche.

chme2• 6 years ago

Most people only complain out of frustration about stuff they care about it.

neilsense3• 6 years ago

He's a liberal so he just assumes everyone knows Fox News is nonsense. His worry is that the liberal media outlets are practicing their own forms of lying.

wil4213• 6 years ago

Joe Rogan is probably more of a pseudo everything than anyone else. He will also ignore reality and loves conspiracy/fantasy stuff.

op03• 6 years ago

Glenn Greenwald needs an achievable goal otherwise all that persistence and energy he has is going to be squandered. Lot of it has been already.

His frustrations have been building, if not overflowing, and social media just enjoys/encourages the wastage of those energies. Sad to watch.

paulpauper2• 6 years ago

Much of his criticism is focused on the overreach of the US government, but another problem is private sector having too much control , such as tech censorship. The private sector, unlike the public sector, has far fewer avenues for redress of wrongs. try restoring a terminated reddit, fakebook, twitter or YouTube account. The public sector at least has some accountability, which you do not see in the private sector. Civil lawsuits are very expensive, arbitration is not that effective, etc.

inglor_cz4• 6 years ago

It took our ancestors a lot of time and effort to build redress avenues into governments.

I think we have to do the same with Big Tech.

And the Divine Right of Kings absolutist party has made a comeback in the "they are private companies, why dont you start your own Google" crowd.

hluska3• 6 years ago

This isn’t entirely on topic with this thread, but I’ve been shocked by HN’s base reaction to this article. Calling reasonable edits censorship is akin to calling a code review censorship, yet who among us doesn’t participate in code reviews???

Greenwald was not censored, rather he refused to be edited. That’s not journalism, that’s a personality cult. “Journalism” only works when journalists and editors work together - journalists go off, get excited and follow a story; editors keep them connected to publishable truth and article sized bits of context.

Speaking as a former publisher who has edited my share of complex pieces, Greenwald’s original article was poor. He had, I believe 2k words to tell a story, but he chose the wrong 2k words.

testrun• 6 years ago

Wrong according to whom?

neilsense3• 6 years ago

Not sure how your team is doing code-reviews, but they shouldn't be changing the message of the PR, rather just help clean it up.

tmotwu2• 6 years ago

It's misleading to say the editor was asking to change the message. The opposite: it's clear to me Greenwald did not clearly communicate the intended narrative of his piece, so the editors thought the article lacked focus.

It's like telling Greenwald, hey you added functionality that was not originally part of the design doc. That's fine and all but now test coverage is diminished. Heres a few tests to consider so you could strengthen the robustness of the code. To say editors were overstepping their bounds is silly.

Greenwald went on a morning show yesterday morning. He admits his journalistic philosophy is unconventional; he started off as a blog and was recruited into media. That's fine. I build a few side projects in my free time and I love it because there's so much freedom on how to structure your code. Greenwald feels the same way about writing his pieces, so he will feel right at home in the blogger universe.

whamlastxmas2• 6 years ago

It's a bit rich to claim he wasn't censored when it was demanded, in violation of his contract, to also not run the story anywhere else.

I strongly disagree that the edits were reasonable and I find it to be a huge red flag in your stance that you completely dismiss this.

mk4p• 6 years ago

How is that censorship if he signed a contract saying he wouldn't publish for any other outlet?

Haven't you worked for companies that disallow you from working for anyone else without prior approval?

jml7c5• 6 years ago

Is there any evidence that they actually stopped him from running it elsewhere, or that they actually refused to publish it? The start of the editor's memo specifically states that they are "comfortable with publishing". And he did publish it elsewhere (on Substack). So both claims are weak.

It seems like he was looking for an excuse to bail from The Intercept, and this was it.

nkurz• 6 years ago

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 a different opinion. Using the code review analogy, the editors wanted not just cleaner code, but an entirely different result. As the author of the spec (his own opinion) Greenwald felt this was unwarranted. Had they restricted themselves to helping him better express his preexisting opinion, I don't think he would have "refused to be edited".

How do you feel about Matt Taibbi's defense of Greenwald's actions? While "censor" might not be the right word, Taibbi seems to agree with Greenwald that the editors' pushback went far beyond editing for clarity: Finally, when an editor lays out “suggestions” about things that might “help” a piece “be even stronger,” it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-on-his-resigna...

(I've seen your comments in the other threads, and appreciate your insight)

hluska3• 6 years 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???

insickness• 6 years ago

Why was it poor? What about it was inaccurate? Just because you don't agree with the message, doesn't make it poor.

evgen2• 6 years ago

Two frauds, one show.

hintymad2• 6 years ago

Wow! I can understand that people downvote this post. But flagging it? It really shows who you are. Anything that challenges your narrative must be gone. Now I get it.

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

Is there a way to unflag it like "counter flag" or something?

Is Glen Greenwald really that controversial on HackerNews? I thought that this crowd would be most receptive to him after he helped Snowden expose the egregious misconduct of the U.S government. What is going on with this community?

hintymad2• 6 years ago

The left (not the liberal, mind you) has moralized everything. So, they naturally want to censor aany opinion that does not agree with their view. It is, after all, for our own good, and it is only the left who can define what good means.

apta2• 6 years ago

That's the far left for you. They claim to be the manifestation of anti-facism, yet we see the full ostracizing and "cancelling" of anyone who dares hold a different opinion.

Joe Rogan Experience #1556 – Glenn Greenwald

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