The Age of (Dis)Information

Glenn Greenwald’s piece yesterday on salon.com is worth a complete read. It comes on the heels of a debate he had on CNN with former Bush Homeland Security advisor Fran Townsend and CNN Anchor Jessica Yellin. The exchange has gotten a lot or press, as have his writings in the last few days.

Greenwald says:

The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:

He goes on to extrapolate on four very thoughtful points concerning what he learned from the exchange. I suspect these thoughts will be with him for a long time, and will help frame his discussions and writings in the weeks to come. It is very refreshing to read this type of reflection. If only more commentators had the confidence to do it. Very professional, informative and most of all, smart.  And results in better work.

I was most taken by his points related to the state of American journalism, and the political culture it represents:

2) From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks -- the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy -- have been . . . America's intrepid Watchdog journalists. What illustrates how warped our political and media culture is as potently as that? It just never seems to dawn on them -- even when you explain it -- that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be . . . what they do.

What an astounding feat to train a nation's journalist class to despise above all else those who shine a light on what the most powerful factions do in the dark and who expose their corruption and deceit, and to have journalists -- of all people -- lead the way in calling for the head of anyone who exposes the secrets of the powerful. Most ruling classes -- from all eras and all cultures -- could only fantasize about having a journalist class that thinks that way, but most political leaders would have to dismiss that fantasy as too extreme, too implausible, to pursue. After all, how could you ever get journalists -- of all people -- to loathe those who bring about transparency and disclosure of secrets? But, with a few noble exceptions, that's exactly the journalist class we have.

Greenwald is on to something very important here. I would add that somewhere along the way, journalists traded in the power intrinsic to truth telling and embodied in the frameworks associated with the broadest access to information. They traded it in for the power only Beltway insiders care about having. Exactly when and how this happened, I don’t know. But this class of American journalists reminds me of corporate media consultants who sell their services of “controlling the message” as a necessary element of doing business. Equating power with the manipulating of facts, information and often – truth.

In the case of journalists, it is almost as if the transparency they see as a free-for-all, is for them actually a form of chaos they interpret as a loss of power. Almost as if the inability to control a message because there is just too much information out there to manipulate, represents a loss of professional power.

Warped. But as Glenn Greenwald reminds us, a lot to think about and learn from.