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

They're a propagandist's take on the news, with their own slant (but probably not an agenda). Balanced, no; but not completely right wing nut job, so they're tolerable to find out what's happing in the non-right-on liberal space.

Often wrong, often hilariously so. Continually confusing personal and tribal loyalty with patriotism and idealism. For example, criticism of Trump means criticising the office of the presidency, or disrespecting the US if you are not American; or a republican showing some independence of thought is letting the team down. I don't think they understand idealism at all, they can only conceptualise self-seeking behaviour, everything is framed as that, in part because that's what sells the show as a reveal of the hidden motives.

Dvorak in particular gets extremely agitated when foreigners criticise the US, or express an opinion on US politics. He seems unaware of how much US politics directly affects other countries. He is also almost as ignorant as Trump in understanding how critical the US hegemon has been to peace (albeit on US favourable terms) after WWII.

They had no problems imputing a link between Bill Clinton as president setting the morals for the nation (and making blowjobs ok!), but completely fail to do the same for Trump. Balanced, nope.

Back at Caltech in the 70s, user accounts on the DECSystem 10 had 3 characters, and was set as the student's initials. One fellow had no middle name, so he used 'x'.

He got so used to it he legally changed his name so his middle name was 'X'.

It's not impossible his comp was more or less frozen ten or even twenty years ago when the boom times for print were ending. I would be surprised if he was getting four figures a month, and amazed and astounded if it was mid-or-higher four figures.

In fact all freelancers are disposable in magazine writing. It was always one of the original zero hours gig economy gigs.

The real value was in building a brand that could translate to book sales, consultancy, and so on.

Yeah, Greenwald has gone off the deep end over the last 2-3 years. He's pretty much paralleled the fall of Wikileaks, where they made some important points at the start but have fallen into the orbit of Russia specifically and anti-americanism generally.

Whatever you think of the Democrats or American foreign policy, there really is no call for actually defending Russia and their foreign policy, or downplaying their attempts to subvert our election system, and that's where Greenwald has been for the last couple years. He generally views Russia as a countervailing force to American/Democratic power and thus a necessary evil. Which, yuck.

There is still important work being done on exposing American mass surveillance and other such topics, but it's not being done by Greenwald, who mostly seems concerned with sniping on Twitter at this point.

> I suspect by now most Washington/New York based journalists hate his guts.

Not so - he is a regular guest on Fox News.

He's become very partisan over the years, and you can guess the slant based on the media where he chooses to appear.

I wouldn't say he is so much pro-Republican as anti-Democrat but it's getting really hard to say. Pro-Russian and pro-Republican politics have gotten all mixed up together since 2016.

I wouldn't say he is outwardly pro-trump, but he certainly doesn't seem to criticize him to anywhere near the extent he lavishes on the Democrats. Nor does he seem to be particularly concerned with criticizing American foreign policy now that Republicans are in the drivers' seat, which was his fig-leaf back in the early teens.

And in fact, he spends most of his time justifying the exact same types of behavior from the Russians. So much for "questioning the politics of the status quo and the corruption of empires".

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