NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

To be perfectly clear, he was using it to refer to citizen-surveillance which is patently nefarious.

> Greenwald is ascribing a lot of intent that he can't back up.

Those of us who suffered her social media account while it was public have the context to know that his characterization isn't far off. More importantly though, this isn't about her, but rather about the broader trend of policing ideological transgressions and passing it off as "journalism".

Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency.

> And that's what's dangerous about them: the filter got removed from broadcasting. People like to talk about filters like they're bad things, but that's not true. They're in fact a vitally necessary function to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (for instance: what is peer review? Answer: a filter). when you don't have filters, ideas spread in proportion to how quickly they can multiply, which isn't a good thing, because a lot of fast-spreading ideas are akin to cancer, and do nothing except weaken or kill the host.

I certainly don't dispute that filters can be good things. I have an issue with such an important filter being operated by a single entity (or a small handful of entities with aligned interests and who act in concert, for those inclined toward pedantry) who is not beholden to the public. Note that "peer review" isn't one guy determining what is going to be considered "science" this year; rather, it's distributed by its very nature. We should strive for social filters that are similarly robust, and distributing the curation among many smaller parties is the most obvious way to go.

> If Twitter's to avoid killing its host, it needs an immune system to filter out those cancerous ideas.

Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading.

First-rate journalism highlights the subject's corruption or bad behavior with such persuasive and overwhelming evidence that the audience generally judges the person or organization under discussion to be a mendacious object of derision.

That is an accurate characterization of the journalism on the Snowden leaks that Greenwald won the Pulitzer for. E.g., the story on NSA spying on Petrobras.

Second-rate journalism simply cuts out the middle-man and casually derides the person directly for an audience that is drooling to see that person taken down a peg. E.g., "Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do."[1]

I have no idea why Greenwald insists on using techniques of second-rate journalism in his op-eds-- op-eds which quite obviously also include a lot of background research. But I find his consistent use of second-rate journalism steers his rhetoric in directions that directly mislead the reader.

E.g., when AOC tweeted about WSB, Greenwald alleged that she wanted to "claim these Redditors as their own," as he wrote in one of his articles. That's a mischaracterization of what she did, and apparently those Redditors agree with me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_...

The responses there are a lot of fun to read-- lots of riffs, some surprising agreement, some reasonable disagreement. But as far as I can tell, nearly every default-visible comment there understood that she was uttering a relevant and common refrain from her political platform, not attempting to "claim" the users of WSB as current or even future social democrats. Politicians do this all the time-- e.g., Bernie Sanders did when as a presidential candidate in 2016 he spoke to Liberty University-- communicating to people with obvious opposing viewpoints where they are (albeit in her case with a bit of obvious snark) by focusing on common ground.

That is fundamentally different than a politician claiming a constituency for themselves who is likely opposed to their views in reality. When a politician does that it's at the very least condescending, and you can probably imagine how a group of trash-talking free marketheads on Reddit would respond if AOC actually tried to do that.

Greenwald's writing is littered with enough of these little boogers that it consistently gets in the way of his larger points. And in op-eds like his, there usually isn't that much original research in the first place-- there are plenty of other authors covering this territory who don't hurl completely unnecessary insults at people.

Just look at the comment sections of his articles to get a sense of what kind of person this type of writing attracts. It's not as rabid and pretentious as a David Foster Wallace fan club, but it's close.

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...