The fourth estate in focus
Glenn Greenwald
Not long after Glenn Greenwald broke the story about the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in The Guardian, he chafed when the American media questioned whether he was a journalist without even defining the term. In his 2014 book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Picador), Greenwald writes that at the time, a New York Times profile conferred on him the dismissive and “non-journalistic title” of “blogger.” An investigative journalist and a former constitutional lawyer, Greenwald cofounded the online publication The Intercept in 2014 with investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill and filmmaker Laura Poitras (who made the documentary feature Citizenfour about Snowden). He is joined in conversation by author and editor Tom Engelhardt on Wednesday, Sept. 27, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center as part of the Lannan Foundation’s In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series.
Greenwald is the kind of journalist who connects news-cycle dots into meta-stories so we can better understand how our institutions, such as the government and its many agencies, truly operate. In his 2011 book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (Picador), he points out, for instance, the extent to which then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was wedded to Wall Street while he oversaw the government’s no-strings-attached bailout of the same Wall Street bankers whose recklessness had precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. Greenwald relied on a New
York Times investigation to reveal that when Geithner was president and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, from 2003 to 2009, he dined regularly and was close friends with the very people whom he was tasked with regulating. In the book, Greenwald confirms all the things a close reader of the news might suspect: how deeply entrenched a company like Goldman Sachs is in the government; how routinely, and lucratively, its employees use the revolving door between the public and private sector; and that it reaped billions of dollars in profits in 2009, soon after taxpayers had bailed out the firm. In the same period, as Greenwald points out, ordinary Americans, especially those in the lowest income bracket, faced a daunting unemployment rate.
In that regard, not much has changed. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was a partner in Goldman Sachs. Today, more than ever, close ties seem to trump meritocracy. Trump’s senior advisor is his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, as the
Times reported, met with a Chinese multibillionaire about a joint real-estate venture last November, a few months after Trump accepted the Republican National Committee nomination for president on the platform of, among other campaign promises, being tough on the Chinese.
In With Liberty and Justice for Some, Greenwald makes the larger point that the rule of law does not seem to apply equally to the elite and the common American. In addition to pointing out how government officials at the highest levels get away with breaking the law, he gives examples of powerful citizens such as the hedge fund manager, Martin Joel Erzinger, who was not charged with a felony after he severely injured a bicyclist in a hit-and-run episode in Colorado.
In the first chapter of No Place to Hide, Greenwald tells the riveting story of his trip to Hong Kong to meet Snowden and the day-by-day account of how he broke that now-famous story. The reader feels Greenwald’s anxiety as he writes up the NSA stories — he worked on four at once — and his frustration while Janine Gibson, the British editor of the U.S. edition of The Guardian, confers with the paper’s lawyers about what the risks are of publishing the piece, and whether it is necessary to run the story by the U.S. government beforehand (it is). Greenwald gets so impatient, he almost sends Gibson a terse message blowing off his contract with The Guardian, but he softens his tone at the last minute. Soon after, his editor calls with good news: The story will be published that day.
“Whoever broke this story first would play the predominant role in how it was discussed and framed, and I was determined that this would be The Guardian and me,” Greenwald writes. “For this story to have the effect it should, the unwritten rules of establishment journalism — designed to soften the impact of revelations and protect the government — had to be broken, not obeyed.” Greenwald’s convictions are formidable, and he follows through — he honors Snowden’s choices and he rails against fear-based media, whom he asserts repeatedly are too cozy with the government. In 2014,
The Guardian U.S. and The Washington Post won a joint Pulitzer Prize for their “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency.”
It is amusing to read about Greenwald’s work habits, at least during the Hong Kong trip. He not only wrote up multiple stories at once — admittedly, this was the scoop of a lifetime — he also only got two hours of sleep every night, and that with the help of sleeping aids. He spent his mornings at a local television studio, being interviewed by American media. Much of the rest of his days were spent in Snowden’s hotel room, and he wrote at night.
Soon after his NSA stories began to appear, Greenwald writes that the “establishment media” joined the chorus call that he be prosecuted for his role in the Snowden affair. That is when they also questioned whether he was a journalist. For some time after that, Greenwald did not enter the U.S., worried about what steps the government intended to take against him and whether they might arrest him.
“The theory of the ‘fourth estate’ is to ensure government transparency and provide a check on overreach, of which the secret surveillance of entire populations is surely among the most radical examples,” Greenwald writes in No Place to Hide. Instead of fulfilling that role, he contends that the political media in the U.S. “has frequently abdicated this role, being subservient to the government’s interests, even amplifying, rather than scrutinizing, its messages and carrying out its dirty work.” Whether or not journalists from The New York Times and The Washington
Post can be lumped wholesale into Greenwald’s categorization is arguably an open question.
What is clearer, after last year’s tumultuous election, is that today, perhaps too many wear the crown of media pundit. So many feed off news headlines and opine on them that the chorus of voices can grow into a cacophony where contradictions abound and real insights are not easy to come by. The kind of investigative journalism Greenwald practiced when he went to Hong Kong has become something of a rare art. Of course, Greenwald himself, in some ways, is now a media pundit who responds to and analyzes news headlines.
Print newspapers have coped with subscription problems in the digital age in ways that have not benefited journalism. Earlier this year, the Times warned its staff about cuts in its newsroom, and followed up in June with significant cuts to its editorial department. With smaller newsrooms in general, and a greater reliance on freelancers, on-the-ground journalism sometimes gets replaced by articles that, say, simply quote Trump’s tweets. It is cheaper and faster to surf the internet and quote tweets than to rely on sources a journalist has taken the time to speak to in person or over the phone. Perhaps on-the-ground journalism is no longer as realistic in the Trump administration, which has at least once threatened to gut the White House press room. Greenwald is a product of a century that has been an uncertain one for journalism. One of these days, we may need to redefine who or what a journalist is. Greenwald, in any case, has succeeded in becoming a household name in liberal American circles without being a bona fide member of the establishment media he has such little patience for.