I only listened to about the first 30 minutes of this Joe Rogan podcast. Glenn Greenwald claims that
1. Edward Snowden is a hero. The U.S. security apparatus engaged in illegal and unconstitutional spying. It goes all out to protect itself from checks, and in that it has succeeded.
2. The media did not do their job with respect to Joe Biden. They should have been digging into the Hunter Biden story and the questions about Biden’s mental health. Instead, they downplayed those stories.
My view of the security agencies is based on my reading of David Brin’s The Transparent Society. I think we can expect security agencies to be very aggressive about spying. What I would propose is an oversight board or audit agency that examines their policies and procedures. I know that this leaves open the possibility that the oversight board could be captured by the agencies, as arguably the FISA courts have. But in my view it is a better idea than just letting them go with no oversight (or with the oversight that Congress provides, which amounts to no oversight).
Brin himself sees Snowden as someone addicted to self-righteous sanctimony (Snowden is not named in the linked essay, but elsewhere in an op-ed that is no longer on line). Some people might feel that way about Greenwald. After I composed this post but before it went up, Greenwald posted a piece that The Intercept (which he founded!) censored.
As for the media, my quarrel is not with the NYT. It is with the people who only read the NYT. They are the mirror image of people who only watch Fox News. It is these readers who are addicted to self-righteous sanctimony, and the NYT gives it to them good and hard.
If congress, comprised of famous and high status people with specific responsibility to do so and the ability to sue for key documents, can’t effectively supervise the spies, what would an organization that would effectively do so look like?
I think there are some effective models like the split between the FAA and the NTSB, but the FAA is a lot less powerful than the intelligence agencies. Also, the FAA often doesn’t have an incentive to protect the airlines, while the intelligence agencies seem to be both the equivalent of the FAA and the airlines, combined making for very different incentives.
If congress, comprised of famous and high status people with specific responsibility to do so and the ability to sue for key documents, can’t effectively supervise the spies
I believe your premise isn’t quite correct. I don’t think Congress can’t effectively supervise intelligence agencies. That’s just one of the many things de-prioritized so Congress can focus on power and party warfare.
It is these readers who are addicted to self-righteous sanctimony, and the NYT gives it to them good and hard.
Of course. That’s what sells, and the NYT is an advertisement sales outlet. As is all “news” media. They print that which drives eyeballs to ads and damn the consequences. Again, as does all “news” media. It’s not the fault of the 24-hour news cycle, since these problems existed even when the news was the evening news and the morning newspaper. It’s the fault of greed trumping ethics.
The media did not do their job with respect to Joe Biden.
The media absolutely did their job. Now that we’ve added self-righteous zealots who believe that they have a moral imperative to influence beliefs in a certain direction, regardless of the methods used, the job of the media is to manipulate public opinion and drive ad sales. The disconnect is the fact that we, as a society, haven’t accepted the fact that the point of “news” media has changed. If it was ever truly meant to inform, it no longer is.
Which, I suspect, is why news outlets love to use Facebook and Russia as whipping boys for manipulating public opinion.
No longer true for NYT — subscriptions make more money for them than ads. Subscription revenue is $301m vs $74m for ad revenue, with the latter dropping 30% YoY. So their decline in standards isn’t click-bait driven, unlike say Vox’s move into that area.
So we are at a stage in our culture where it is fashionable to drill deep, deep down into underlying motivations, both conscious and unconscious. Everywhere, we see people pursuing their marginal interests, and not considering the larger ethical consequences. We don’t trust each other.
How could things work? In the past, reputation served as a corrective. Now, there is just too much happening. Relationships and branding have become too convoluted, too fake to trust. What corrects the NYT or an individual columnist when they see the job of the media is to manipulate public opinion and drive ad sales, as Matt has said, and they don’t care a whit about the truth?
How does the culture correct for this? How does it pressure for news in exchange for its attention from the NYT?
It seems to me we’ve backed ourselves into a corner. We want virtually unlimited free speech, we want those that deliver it to be honest, yet we are repulsed by aggressive pushback, which we deem cancel culture
So what is it that we are willing to tolerate? We hate being manipulated and played, but many here seem to hate it even more when the public judges too harshly and pushes back. We deem that to be sanctimony.
So, how do we allow the necessary social friction, but control it enough so it doesn’t run out of control either?
Greenwald’s point is that the NYT no longer does real journalism because its reporters are scared of getting yelled at on Twitter by readers and colleagues if they report stories that are inconvenient. You seem to think some version of cancel culture helps to hold institutions accountable, which might be true, but doesn’t address the point in question.
“You seem to think some version of cancel culture helps to hold institutions accountable, which might be true, but doesn’t address the point in question.”
No, rather I’m asking how, in an age where market segmentation and targeting produces greater profits for news, how we can produce mechanisms asking for more objective reporting?
The Times is scared of getting yelled at on Twitter by readers because news neutrality is less profitable.
What Greenwald wants, and what I hope we all want too doesn’t make money. What do we do about that? And, is there any way out that doesn’t require some form of sanctimony?
The problem is not one merely of profitability. After all, thanks to the Trump Era, the NYT is probably flush with cash. His Administration was a gigantic boon for them, economically, as Greenwald discussed. The problem is also one of norms, both in the Times itself and in the Times’ readers. Dean Baquet was forced to resign by the Times’ staff revolt, and Bari Weiss cited harassment from colleagues in her letter of resignation. But cancel culture isn’t real.
“What I would propose is an oversight board or audit agency that examines their policies and procedures. I know that this leaves open the possibility that the oversight board could be captured by the agencies, as arguably the FISA courts have. But in my view it is a better idea than just letting them go with no oversight (or with the oversight that Congress provides, which amounts to no oversight).”
So…..
The current inventory of intelligence agency oversight entities is insufficient or incompetent:
1. United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
2. United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
3. 10 other congressional committees with intelligence oversight purview
4. Government Accountability Office
5. President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
6. Offices of Inspectors General
7. National Security Council, Office of Intelligence Programs
8. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Joint Intelligence Community Council
9. Department of Defense Intelligence Oversight Program
If we could just get the list up to 10, then we will have real oversight. Slathering on additional new redundant agencies has always been the establishment answer to everything. Count me skeptical.
The underlying problem is much more profound. Marini Caparini writes:
“Good governance of the intelligence sector in a democratic state relies on a combination of factors: the need for effective executive direction of the intelligence and security services under its control, but simultaneously a self-conscious exercise of restraint by the executive to avoid overt politicisation of the intelligence product and to allow sufficient independence to see beyond obvious existing threats and the immediate political concerns of the current government. It also relies on high professional standards within the intelligence community and the awareness of its members that they operate within the framework of national (rather than governmental) interests, the rule of law, and democratic values. It is the attitudes of those responsible for intelligence, in particular their respect for the law, that will ultimately determine the effectiveness of a system of accountability. Democratic norms and principles must be embedded in the corporate/professional culture of the service.”
Intelligence oversight reform in a Biden administration therefore would be a fool’s errand. As the USA lurches down the path to Venezuelan governance, citizens should not be lulled into false hopes of anything other than doom.
Fox News 90% GOP no surprise. NYT 90% Dem (‘resistance moms‘ lol) some surprise. Both are currently under siege. Once media co break apart from centrifugal force of internet what happens?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/inside-the-new-york-times-heated-reckoning-with-itself.html
>—-“As for the media, my quarrel is not with the NYT. It is with the people who only read the NYT. They are the mirror image of people who only watch Fox News.”
Exactly! The problem isn’t with media outlets nearly as much as people who want to create their own information bubbles where they won’t have to deal with the unpleasantness of encountering anything that would challenge their pre-existing views.
Remember when we thought the internet would make everyone better informed? Those were the days. Turns out most people are happy to submit themselves to information algorithms that drive them to more and more extreme versions of their most irrational beliefs and shield them from challenges to them.
For most of American history most media outlets were explicitly partisan and no one was under any illusions about that. Whether or not you like him, you should be able to recognize that Trump has insisted on having a very different relationship with news media than any other American President. He demands loyalty from them. If he gets it, he thinks he should be able to demand the firing of media personalities that fall short of the loyalty he expects. If he doesn’t get it, he calls them treasonous enemies of the people and demands that libel laws be tightened up to allow them to be punished. Is it really surprising that this drives more partisan coverage on all sides, especially in an economic environment where that is the more profitable route anyway?
We all need to stop whining about the media and take more responsibility for finding stronger versions of the ideas we disagree with rather than accepting the straw man versions found in a simple diet of the same partisan sites. Even though that has never been easier to do, fewer and fewer people actually choose to do it. It’s easier and more pleasant just to hear what you want to hear.
I come to this comment section precisely because I know I can count on finding here some of the best informed arguments against many of the positions I hold. Occasionally, my mind is changed. Always I come away with a better sense of where the strongest and weakest points in my arguments are.
You know all of those health officials that continually whine that we need to eat less + eat better + exercise more? Everyone basically ignores them and for good reason. They’ve got no rational reason on an individual basis to follow such advice.
Copy/paste this to your analysis and you’ve got your answer as to why people don’t have better political diets or exercise regimens – they have zero incentive to do so.
Lament it all you want, but that’s not going to change the underlying reality.
>—“Copy/paste this to your analysis and you’ve got your answer as to why people don’t have better political diets or exercise regimens – they have zero incentive to do so.”
Different people respond to different incentives. You are saying that being better informed and healthier are “zero incentive” for you. And you have convinced me that’s true.
As per the usual, you have failed to comprehend the basics of what I’m saying and you cannot resist the temptation to twist my words into something that I didn’t intend.
Please start here and then work your way forward from there:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08913810608443650
You folks were 0 for 10 in Texas. Go spend your your out-of-state money elsewhere.
“Republican Van Duyne’s win solidifies a conservative firewall in the Texas suburbs. Democrats targeted 10 U.S. House races in the state and lost all of them.”
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/elections/2020/11/10/candace-valenzuela-concedes-to-beth-van-duyne-in-heated-north-texas-congressional-race/
Hans,
Sorry, but your link to Converse is hilarious. Has it occurred to you that maybe he was talking about you?
@Tom DeMeo
Yes, it occurs to me every single day. Lol. That was my whole point.
As stated below, I love me some Fox News and our TVs are basically stuck on this one network.
Now that we have established that my mind is feeble, do you have anything else for me or are we done for now? Should I set a daily Siri alert to remind me that Converse is laughing at me?
Hans,
Yeah, there is one more thing. You seem to take joy in this. That’s the part I’m worried about.
@Tom DeMeo
My ideological immaturity is more or less offset by the motivated reasoning of you and the rest of the HEEs. That’s how I sleep soundly at night.
Produce all of the empirical studies that make you happy. You are looking for a needle in a haystack and you continue to pretend that you’ve found it. God bless you.
I agree with your prescription, but when people complain about the media they’re complaining about everyone else’s choices which they feel affects them. I can create a sort of diverse, ‘high quality news/commentary bubble’ for myself in which I read the Economist, the FT, maybe Quillette and City Journal and the Dispatch and Slate Star Codex, but if all everyone is talking about at the water cooler is the latest oped in the NYT or Fox News or whatever, I have to either partake of those or basically sit everything out. Our collective media consumption habits is a commons of sorts. Each of us individually can’t really escape everyone else’s habits, or we can but only by accepting Essenic detachment from popular political discourse.
I think it’s sort of like living in a culture with terrible taste in movies. Sure, you can still watch great movies, but if no one else has seen them and wants to talk about them, it’s just not as fun; in order to participate in the water cooler discussion, you have to watch Transformers 7, even if only to tell everyone how terrible it is (hence why complaining about Fox News/NYT is a more popular reaction than just reading something else instead).
“As for the media, my quarrel is not with the NYT. It is with the people who only read the NYT. They are the mirror image of people who only watch Fox News.”
I love me some Fox News and I have no shame in this. Our TVs are basically stuck on this one network except for some diversions for Dateline NBC, 48 Hours and Investigation Discovery.
So, I’m for sure biased, but I would draw a two distinctions:
1) for the NYT/WAPO crowd, their politics are their religion (and vice versa). They have only one dimension to evangelize their gospel to themselves and their non-believers. Contrast this with the typical Fox News viewer who has many other outlets to express his/her beliefs.
2) the typical Fox News viewer is unavoidably confronted with alternative points of view from the MSM, Hollywood, social media and academia. Contrast that with the typical lefty who doesn’t have to be exposed to any alternative points of view whatsoever.
> Brin himself sees Snowden as someone addicted to self-righteous sanctimony
I’ll see your (or perhaps Brin’s) *ad hominen* attack on Snowden and raise you an *ad hominem* defense.
Greenwald’s view that he is a hero is probably right. Snowden knowingly risked much to reveal the crimes of the security agencies and ended up an exile even when the dice-roll landed in his favour. That’s a high price for sending a virtue signal.
It’s worth listening to the two podcasts that Snowden hismelf did with Rogan. He talks like a character from a civics textbook, which is impossible to do without some self-concious posturing. But it’s also impossible without a very reasoned analysis of what is at stake both for him personally and for the rule of law.
Given the evidence, the most parsimonious explanation for why Snowden did what he’s just hte kind of guy ho does his civic duty. Now the question is in what way can his republic make use of his efforts.
Naive question: who cares about the Snowden affair at this point? What relevance do these events from 2013 have to today? Hero vs. villain…who cares? Honestly, seems kinda boring.
I think you are right that the hero vs. villain stuff is mostly a distraction — except as as part of one’s own moral education. It’s nice to read the classics, but also enlightening to see the play out in the flesh.
As to “… who cares about the Snowden affair at this point?”
Who cares who cares? What matters is that the US has no way of binding it’s security forces to the law and that political elites actually work to accomodate this. This hasn’t changed since 2013 — if anything the last four years have strengthened this devil’s bargain.
Or is it your point that the powers that be have succesfully buried the issue and we should get used to it? But should anyone play along like that?
And this points to a way the hero-vs-villain stuff matters a little. America currently actively ostracizing Snowden. Whatever else it is, that’s a symbolic act of the nation resigning itself to rule by it’s deep state. An America that found a way to welcome him home with parades would be one that is on the road to reform.
Brin himself is no stranger to self-righteous sanctimony:
A poem by Piet Hein (WWII polymath) to reinforce the last paragraph of your post.
THE OPPOSITE VIEW
For many system shoppers it’s
a good-for-nothing system
that classifies as opposites
stupidity and wisdom.
because by logic-choppers it’s
accepted with avidity:
stupidity’s true opposite’s
the opposite stupidity.
From Jan. 2017:
New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
“Former CIA dir. John Brennan calls on VP Pence and the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and strip Pres. Trump of his powers.”
Live on CNN.
You need to read the NYT because every HR department enforces the rules as announced in the NYT. Do you want to get fired? The NYT lays down the law very clearly about what opinions a person is permitted to entertain if they want to stay employed.
Let’s say the Party announces a distinction between mountain biking, which is prohibited as a danger to public health because the coronavirus spreads through mountain biking, and then on the other hand hiking in the woods, which is approved by the Party as a safe activity. The NYT is there to reassure us that this is absolutely scientific and not arbitrary.
Let’s say the Party informs us that if you take a jet ski out on the ocean you’re endangering public health but if you go indoors into a public library then that’s acceptable. The Party announces a distinction between walking on wet sand and walking on dry sand.
The Party instructs us to put our masks back on between bites of salad, and Party journalists make it very clear that this cannot be mocked. This is official policy and there are consequences for not respecting policy. This is what the NYT is for. You need to understand and affirm that the Party is always right, and to repeat the latest approved phrases. So why would you need a second newspaper?
Snowden is a sort of hero.
The CIA/FBI intel agencies are the key controlling agents in the deep state.
Edgar lists many agencies with oversight – but all failed.
When Sec. of State Clinton had an illegal email server, she needed to be investigated, and indicted and tried. The cover-up, instead of an indictment,
Because the (big-gov’t) Democratic Party has captured the deep state. The were, and are, skilled professionals AND highly partisan. And way over 90% partisan Dems.
They are very good at stopping Republicans from benefitting by breaking laws. But they’re bad at stopping Dems. We need to get over the idea of them being non-partisan gov’t professionals, and design oversight to stop both types of errors: too easy on Dems; too easy on Reps.
Among the already existing oversight boards, one should be split into two parts. One partisan Dem and one partisan Rep. Yes, this is a kind of Affirmative Action for Reps so as to allow explicit power sharing.*
In the Clinton case, the Rep Political Accountability agent would be able to push for investigation (some done) and indictment, and over ride Comey’s, & Obama’s, desire to stop investigation with no trial. They could recommend a Special Prosecutor, even if a majority of Congress doesn’t want it.
In the Trump Russian Hoax, the Dem Pol Acct would be able to push for investigation, and recommend a Special Prosecutor.
But the Rep Pol Acct guy could call for a Special Prosecutor against the fraudulent FISA application.
We don’t need “new laws” – we need effective enforcement of already existing laws. “No American is above the law” — that needs to be ideal, and giving both partisan power to call for a Special Prosecutor reduces the ability of the intel agencies to dominate while being illegal.
Maybe having the US Marshals expand their mandate to add an explicit agency groups whose ONLY job is to investigate the other intel agencies. There are many ways similar ideas could be structured. But the key is to balance strong partisanship fairly equally, so both Congressional Parties (of at least 3 members?) can call for investigation of gov’t malfeasance. Pretending the gov’t is neutral is, in today’s world, a pretense with immense costs.
Arnold, you are missing what is going on. The rot and corrupt D-politicians with the support of the press, social media, and gangs of radical leftists are trying to move very fast so you cannot catch them. Your new posts are history and everything said in comments by your readers in the last 24 hours is irrelevant: by moving fast they buried the past and create new situations. You have no choice but to get out and fight. Are you ready for that?
Be careful. Tyler Cowen will try to recruit you. He has shown his true colors and sold himself to the D-politicians.
To your readers. You are wasting your time if you think that reminding D-politicians about their past is going to change anything. They know how rotten and corrupt they are. They don’t argue the past, they are trying to steal your future –now.
Arnold, thanks to the press and social media, Joe Biden has been “elected” president. Of course, it’s a joke because they are still counting votes, and most likely some states will have to recount votes, separating legal from illegal votes. The Electoral College elects the president, not the rotten and corrupt NYT editors and owners or Tyler Cowen who has joined the D-Party gang of “idiots looking for a position in a Biden Administration”. BTW, the idiots want a “big” lockdown of the economy dictated by the Federal Government and I’d like to know your position on this proposal.
Nobody is betting that Trump will be re-elected once all legal votes are counted for the simple reason that there is no way to identify now the illegal ones. But if it happened, it’d be the most extraordinary political farce in a long time. For example, I’ve just read that Biden called South Korea’s President Moon, and here in Chile, President Piñera (a Ph.D. Econ from Harvard) is giving lessons to Trump about how to accept defeat while his approval record is 10%. I’m sure that there are too many other examples with presidents and prime ministers of many other countries. But nothing is more entertaining than what is going on in the U.S.
While the rotten and corrupt gangs that are now dancing around Biden are preparing new attacks against Trump and all those close to him and new cancelations of those that have not spoken in favor of their Social Justice, I wonder where those that are still silent about those threats are standing. I bet there are searching their boxes of poor excuses to justify the politics and the policies of their new masters. I hope they never mention again their support for the rule of law.