John Dvorak: “Yesterday I was fired from PC Magazine”

I actually am mostly in agreement with you, I'm just explaining the perspective of the people who _hate_ him.

The New Yorker article is actually very interesting and pretty generous towards Glenn.

> If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

So the anti-war, anti-domestic spying, gay progressive duck is a conservative Trump-lover?

What ducks are you looking at?

Oh, well, if he's gay then it's cool. /s

Poltics makes for strange bedfellows. The enemy of my enemy can easily become my friend. There is a certain segment of the left that seamlessly transitioned from criticizing Democrats and American foreign policy into cheering Russian propagandizing and backing Russian foreign policy goals ("as a counterweight to American power" or similar). Greenwald is one of them.

If his critical of the power of empire, now would be a good time to start criticizing the other side too. Democrats haven't held power for almost 2 years now and spending all his breath criticizing them isn't really helpful. It is, however, revealing about his agenda.

Again, I don't think he was always like this. He used to be doing legitimate journalism, deep dives into American abuses of power that nobody else was doing. It was good work, regardless of whether the expose happened under a Democratic administration.

That journalism is still happening, while Greenwald is off doing Fox News segments on how bad Democrats are. He's just not involved in it.

His decline from investigative journalist into partisan shill is very, very blatant. And I do feel from him, there is no question the media gave him a very rough go after Showden. But it doesn't excuse his "activism" since 2016. One good expose doesn't beatify everything you do for the rest of your life.

I think it's probably mostly him burying his head in the sand about the consequences of his activism. I don't think he consciously wants to trade American empire for Russian empire, he just can't get past the whole "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing, or viewing Russia as a counterbalance to American power, however you want to put it.

I hope he gets back on the horse, but right now he's definitely kinda broke-brained. C'mon, the guy spends his time on his farm caring for the 40 dogs he's rescued, nobody does that who's not at least a little broke-brained. I wish him a speedy recovery (dogs help with that!), but right now you really shouldn't be taking him overly seriously.

About 12 years ago I was working for a PC Magazine competitor when they cut the Managing Editor loose, a man who'd worked there 20+ years and was in his late 50s.

I ran into him in the bathroom, tears in his eyes, asking me what he was going to do now? That this is how they reward decades of loyalty?

Ironically that magazine, dedicated to predicting future technology trends, would go down the toilet some years later because they didn't see technology trends like Google and internet advertising coming.

Companies have no loyalty folks...neither should you.

My sense is that in the post-Snowden era, most of his articles focus on hypocrisy of some sort. At least that seems to be a dominating theme. I don't read every article he publishes but that's what I associate with Greenwald - he goes after people pushing certain views but then not living by them. Even when he was reporting on surveillance, a lot of his articles had as a theme "the NSA say X but they do the opposite".

When it comes to specific policies and what the best policies are, Greenwald is mostly silent, except for his open dislike of mass surveillance and wars.

Journalists make for an easy target for such a guy because they claim (implicitly or explicitly) to be neutrally documenting events, but then try to actively change the course of those events through manipulating their coverage.

He also targets the Democrats in some stories yes, but usually from the angle "they claim they support X but here they are doing not X". Is this partisan?

You could say that Republicans have the same issues, but I don't see them talk about fiscal conservatism anymore, Trump certainly didn't run on such a platform. Trump is many questionable things but most people I've heard express opinions on him say something like "I disagree with policy X but huh, it's weird to see a politician actually doing what he said he'd do for once". That is, labelling him a hypocrite is tougher than perhaps with other politicians.

Maybe that's why he's hard to pigeon-hole. His latest article on the Intercept is about Michael Moore's new movie. In it he says things like:

Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies

He then goes on to criticise the narrative that America was "good" until Trump was elected, whereupon it became "bad". He criticises a swathe of US policy stretching from the Bush era to the Obama era.

That doesn't sound like he's particularly partisan to me. Instead Greenwald argues for a systems-oriented take on politics. In Greenwald's world, Trump is merely a symptom or byproduct of deeper issues, and it's those issues that are the most interesting to study. This is probably why I like his writing.