A Safe Space Nuzzling the Powerful

It’s an interview that has to be seen to be believed. BBC anchor Kirsty Wark lashed out at the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald as he explained his reporting on the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters. Wark also carefully avoided listening to Greenwald’s repeated references to overreach and politicized domestic spying. Instead, she coughed up this hairball of a question:

“But do you think it would be such a shock that spies actually do spy? Or do you think actually for a majority of the population, perhaps, it actually might be quite reassuring? They might actually feel quite safe.”

“I think it’s a shock that government officials lie to the face of journalists who don’t seem to mind very much,” Greenwald pointedly responds. He continues:

“So, for example, in that segment you just played, you had people defending the GCHQ on the grounds that [domestic spying] is only about terrorism or pedophiles. And yet much of the reporting that we’ve done proves that’s a lie.”

While Greenwald goes on to list the targets of GCHQ and NSA spying, he also says that the job of journalists is to reveal to the public when those in power are lying or flirting with corruption. Watch Wark’s scowling face as she demands to know where he is keeping his information. (“I’m not going to talk about what’s in my bedroom,” Greenwald replies, his voice dripping with contempt.) Listen to the aggressive care the BBC anchor takes to remain outside of Greenwald’s analytical framework. Instead, she puts forward a false choice between spying altogether and not spying altogether. Hear for yourself her extraordinary conclusion that government surveillance must be appropriate because of how it makes us feel. In this case, the government spying on non-terrorist and non-pedophile targets might make us feel safer, so then the programs must be aboveboard:

The British journalist Jonathan Cook calls this “the most embarrassing news interview ever.” He’s only wrong to the extent that his analysis puts Wark in the position of outlier, an exception to the rule. In fact, her tone and her message are both entirely common, even in the nominally independent press.

A particularly galling example comes from a newspaper that actually claims independence in its very name. In an October 13 op-ed in the Independent, former editor Chris Blackhurst proudly insists that you never would catch him publishing stories on Edward Snowden’s leaked material. Why? Because his government said so:

If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?

But Blackhurst isn’t done. Several times in his career as an editor, he received a “Defense Advisory Notice” that warned him not to publish sensitive material. “On each occasion, I confess, I’ve not published,” he admits. Somehow he does not also admit to wanting to die from the shame.

Greenwald quite reasonably referred to the piece as “the perfect epitaph for establishment journalism.”

It turns out the Soviet Union needn’t have bothered to so tightly control their state-run news media, since much of the independent press will instantly STFU once the state sends them a piece of paper demanding they do so. In the United States, our own press performs obedience with an impressive lack of direct prompting. For example, back in July, when faced with a story on the mass collection of domestic communications, NBC’s David Gregory cut straight to the heart of the matter with the most important question in this whole story: Man, Greenwald. Do you think you should be in prison?

More recently, former secretary of defense and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta met with political reporters in Washington, D.C., to criticize the American political class–including its most prominent member–and its descent into uselessness. Lashing back, the reporters in the room let the former government official know he had gone too far. As the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus wrote in her account of the meeting, the “reporters in the room seemed more forgiving of the circumstances in which the president finds himself.”

Of course they did. They’re journalists, after all. The powerful are above reproach, as long as they feel quite safe.