Five weeks after the Sony hacking story broke, Glenn Greenwald has leapt into the fray with this: “North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims.”
Wow! American journalists still haven’t broken their habit of mindlessly repeating what U.S. government officials tell them.
Thanks for pointing that out Glenn. Who would have imagined that this still happens in America today?
I guess I missed how media coverage of this story has been so corrupt because I was relying on reporting from hard-hitting alternative investigative news organizations like CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Daily Beast, all of who showed why there were lots of reasons to doubt the official story.
The reason I’ve eagerly awaited Greenwald’s angle on this story is because he has a personal interest in how this all plays out.
The Intercept reported that Sony has scheduled to send a screenwriter to Brazil to meet with Greenwald this month.
Last March, Sony optioned the rights to turn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide, into a movie. But emails leaked from the November hacking revealed that Sony executives along with George Clooney — a champion of the project — have concluded they can’t successfully compete with Oliver Stone whose own movie based on Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man will get released sooner than anything Sony can produce.
Clooney wrote:
Stone will do a hatchet job on the movie but it will still be the film of Snowdon….and even if we made a kick ass version it would be using all the same story points…
If Stone’s movie — hatchet job or not — turns out to be commercial success, Luke Harding will presumably be reaping some of the rewards even though he had a rather modest stake among those who have tried to own the Snowden story.
Even though the basis of Greenwald’s confidence is now hard to understand, on December 22, The Intercept reported that “he believes the movie is still going forward…”.
As the hacking story has played out in Hollywood, stars including some of those embarrassed by the revelations, have lined up to express their support for Sony’s management. One doesn’t have to be a cynic to perceive this as a shamelessly self-serving exercise designed to shore up future working relations. Even those who spoke out in defense of free speech, accusing Sony of a cowardly capitulation, clearly also had a commercial interest in defending their own movie projects.
In this context, it seems important to understand where Greenwald’s own commercial relationship with Sony currently stands.
This is what his latest post reveals:
[Blank space]
Sometimes, silence can say more than 2,000 words.
The Sony hacking story is a story about Sony and hacking, but for executives who have been doing all they could to ride this out without getting fired, welcome support can come in the form of stories that turn this into something else — a story, for instance, which casts this as yet another episode in the never-ending saga of corrupt journalism subservient to the national security state.
Only one problem. If Greenwald were trying to protect Sony he’d go along with the North Korea link since it’s the one all Sony execs want to hear.
There’s a difference between wanting to protect Sony and wanting to avoid spoiling a working relationship. The bottom line here is merely that some transparency is called for, but it’s hard to be an investigative journalist and simultaneously be working on a lucrative business relationship when the two roles have the appearance of having become intertwined.
The point of this post seems to be that (1) Greenwald’s article fails to reveal to “where Greenwald’s own commercial relationship with Sony currently stands”; and (2) that failure implies that Greenwald’s article is another episode in the “never-ending saga of corrupt journalism subservient to the national security state.”
Nowhere is it stated how Greenwald’s own commercial relationship with Sony is relevant to the facts discussed in Greenwald’s story in the first place. As a result, the suggestion that Greenwald’s writing is “corrupt journalism” that is “subservient to the national security state” is hollow – especially given the fact that it’s difficult to think of any prominent journalist in the world today who has done more than Greenwald to challenge the national security state.
I wrote:
Greenwald is casting the Sony hacking story as another episode in the never-ending saga of corrupt journalism subservient to the national security state, and I’m saying that by doing this, he is helping turn attention away from Sony and the hacking.
That he has an obligation to be transparent about his commercial relationship with Sony is called “full disclosure.” It is well established practice that any journalist writing on a subject in which he or she has a personal financial interest be upfront about that fact or even decline to write on the subject because they will be viewed as lacking objectivity. I realize that Greenwald dismisses the idea that anyone can be objective, but as far as I’m aware he’s a big believer in transparency.
How is Greenwald’s own commercial relationship with Sony relevant here?
From early on, Sony adopted a “blame the media” campaign at the center of its damage-control strategy in an effort to turn attention away from mismanagement and security failures, presumably in anticipation of lawsuits from victims of identity theft amongst other grievances. Greenwald’s piece can be viewed as another chapter in that campaign — a perception that might have been avoided if he was transparent about the current state of his relationship with Sony Pictures.