No Place to Hide

by Greenwald, Glenn

  The Times also led the way on the Manning coverage, insisting that what drove Manning to become a massive whistle-blower was not conviction or conscience but personality disorders and psychological instability. Numerous articles speculated, with no basis, that everything from gender struggles to anti-gay bullying in the army to conflicts with Manning’s father were the prime motives in the decision to disclose such important documents.

  Attributing dissent to personality disorders is hardly an American invention. Soviet dissidents were routinely institutionalized in psychological hospitals, and Chinese dissidents are still often forcibly treated for mental illness. There are obvious reasons for launching personal attacks on critics of the status quo. As noted, one is to render the critic less effective: few people want to align themselves with someone crazy or weird. Another is deterrence: when dissidents are cast out of society and demeaned as emotionally imbalanced, others are given a strong incentive not to become one.

  But the key motive is logical necessity. For guardians of the status quo, there is nothing genuinely or fundamentally wrong with the prevailing order and its dominant institutions, which are viewed as just. Therefore, anyone claiming otherwise—especially someone sufficiently motivated by that belief to take radical action—must, by definition, be emotionally unstable and psychologically disabled.

  Put another way, there are, broadly speaking, two choices: obedience to institutional authority or radical dissent from it. The first is a sane and valid choice only if the second is crazy and illegitimate. For defenders of the status quo, mere correlation between mental illness and radical opposition to prevailing orthodoxy is insufficient. Radical dissent is evidence, even proof, of a severe personality disorder.

  At the heart of this formulation is an essential deceit: that dissent from institutional authority involves a moral or ideological choice, while obedience does not. With that false premise in place, society pays great attention to the motives of dissenters, but none to those who submit to our institutions, either by ensuring that their actions remain concealed or by using any other means. Obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state.

  In fact, both observing and breaking the rules involve moral choices, and both courses of action reveal something important about the individual involved. Contrary to the accepted premise—that radical dissent demonstrates a personality disorder—the opposite could be true: in the face of severe injustice, a refusal to dissent is the sign of a character flaw or moral failure.

  Philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, writing in the New York Times about what he calls “the leaking, whistle-blowing and hacktivism that has vexed the United States military and the private and government intelligence communities”—activities associated with a group he calls “Generation W,” with Snowden and Manning as leading examples—makes exactly this point:

  The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not. But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system—in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role.

  Similarly it is possible that the system itself is sick, even though the actors within the organization are behaving in accord with organizational etiquette and respecting the internal bonds of trust.

  That discussion is one the institutional authorities are most eager to avoid. This reflexive demonization of whistle-blowers is one way that the establishment media in the United States protects the interests of those who wield power. So profound is this subservience that many of the rules of journalism are crafted, or at least applied, so as to promote the government’s message.

  Take, for instance, the notion that leaking classified information is some sort of malicious or criminal act. In fact, the Washington journalists who applied that view to Snowden or to me do not deplore all disclosures of secret information, only those disclosures that displease or undermine the government.

  The reality is that Washington is always drowning in leaks. The most celebrated and revered DC reporters, such as Bob Woodward, have secured their position by routinely receiving classified information from high-level sources and then publishing it. Obama officials have repeatedly gone to the New York Times to dish out classified information about topics like drone killings and Osama bin Laden’s assassination. Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta and CIA officials fed secret information to the director of Zero Dark Thirty, hoping the film would trumpet Obama’s greatest political triumph. (At the same time Justice Department lawyers told federal courts that, to protect national security, they could not release information about the bin Laden raid.)

  No establishment journalist would propose prosecution for any of the officials responsible for those leaks or for the reporters who received and then wrote about them. They would laugh at the suggestion that Bob Woodward, who has been spilling top secrets for years, and his high-level government sources are criminals.

  That is because those leaks are sanctioned by Washington and serve the interests of the US government, and are thus considered appropriate and acceptable. The only leaks that the Washington media condemns are those that contain information officials would prefer to hide.

  Consider what happened just moments before David Gregory suggested on Meet the Press that I be arrested for my reporting on the NSA. At the start of the interview, I referred to a top secret judicial ruling issued in 2011 by the FISA court that deemed substantial parts of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program unconstitutional and in violation of statutes regulating spying. I only knew about the ruling because I had read about it in the NSA documents Snowden had given me. On Meet the Press, I had called for its release to the public.

  However, Gregory sought to argue that the FISA opinion had decided differently:

  With regard to that specific FISA opinion, isn’t it the case, based on people that I’ve talked to, that the FISA opinion based on the government’s request is that they said, “well, you can get this but you can’t get that. That would actually go beyond the scope of what you’re allowed to do”—which means that the request was changed or denied, which is the whole point the government makes, which is that there is actual judicial review here and not abuse.

  The point here is not the specifics of the FISA court opinion (although when it was released, eight weeks later, it became clear that the ruling did indeed conclude that the NSA had acted illegally). More important is that Gregory claimed that he knew about the ruling because his sources had told him about it, and he then broadcast the information to the world.

  Thus moments before Gregory raised the specter of arrest for my reporting, he himself leaked what he thought was top secret information from government sources. But nobody would ever suggest that Gregory’s work should be criminalized. Applying the same rationale to the host of Meet the Press and his source would be considered ludicrous.

  Indeed, Gregory would likely be incapable of understanding that his disclosure and mine were even comparable, since his came at the behest of a government seeking to defend and justify its actions, while mine was done adversarially, against the wishes of officialdom.

  This, of course, is precisely the opposite of what press freedoms were supposed to achieve. The idea of a “fourth estate” is that those who exercise the greatest power need to be challenged by adversarial pushback and an insistence on transparency; the job of the press is to disprove the falsehoods that power invariably disseminates to protect itself. Without that type of journalism, abuse is inevitable. Nobody needed the US Constitution to guarantee press freedom so that journalists could befriend, amplify, and glorify political leaders; the guarantee was necessary so that journalists could do the opposite.

  The double standard applied to publishing classified information is even
more pronounced when it comes to the unwritten requirement of “journalistic objectivity.” It was the supposed violation of this rule that made me an “activist” rather than a “journalist.” As we are told endlessly, journalists do not express opinions; they simply report the facts.

  This is an obvious pretense, a conceit of the profession. The perceptions and pronouncements of human beings are inherently subjective. Every news article is the product of all sorts of highly subjective cultural, nationalistic, and political assumptions. And all journalism serves one faction’s interest or another’s.

  The relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who have none, a category that does not exist. It is between journalists who candidly reveal their opinions and those who conceal them, pretending they have none.

  The very idea that reporters should be free of opinions is far from some time-honored requirement of the profession; in fact, it is a relatively new concoction that has the effect, if not the intent, to neuter journalism.

  This recent American view reflects, as Jack Shafer, Reuters’s media columnist, observed, a “sad devotion to the corporatist ideal of what journalism” should be, as well as “a painful lack of historical understanding.” From the United States’ founding, the best and most consequential journalism frequently involved crusading reporters, advocacy, and devotion to battling injustice. The opinion-less, color-less, soul-less template of corporate journalism has drained the practice of its most worthy attributes, rendering establishment media inconsequential: a threat to nobody powerful, exactly as intended.

  But aside from the inherent fallacy of objective reporting, the rule is almost never consistently applied by those who claim to believe it. Establishment journalists constantly express their opinions on a whole range of controversial issues without being denied their professional status. But if the opinions they offer are sanctioned by Washington officialdom, they are thus perceived as legitimate.

  Throughout the controversy over the NSA, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer denounced Snowden and defended NSA surveillance, as did Jeffrey Toobin, legal correspondent for the New Yorker and CNN. John Burns, the New York Times’s correspondent who covered the Iraq War, admitted after the fact that he supported the invasion, even describing the US troops as “my liberators” and “ministering angels.” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour spent the summer of 2013 advocating for the use of American military force in Syria. Yet these positions were not condemned as “activism” because, for all the reverence of objectivity, there is in fact no prohibition on journalists having opinions.

  Just like the supposed rule against leaking, the “rule” of objectivity is no rule at all but rather a means of promoting the interests of the dominant political class. Hence, “NSA surveillance is legal and necessary” or “the Iraq War is right” or “the United States should invade that country” are acceptable opinions for journalists to express, and they do so all the time.

  “Objectivity” means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of entrenched Washington. Opinions are problematic only when they deviate from the acceptable range of Washington orthodoxy.

  The hostility toward Snowden was not hard to explain. The hostility toward the reporter breaking the story—myself—is perhaps more complex. Part competitiveness and part payback for the years of professional criticism I had directed at US media stars, there was, I believe, also anger and even shame over the truth that adversarial journalism had exposed: reporting that angers the government reveals the real role of so many mainstream journalists, which is to amplify power.

  But far and away, the most significant reason for the hostility was that establishment media figures have accepted the rule of dutiful spokespeople for political officials, especially where national security is concerned. It follows, then, that like the officials themselves, they are contemptuous of those who challenge or undermine Washington’s centers of power.

  The iconic reporter of the past was the definitive outsider. Many who entered the profession were inclined to oppose rather than serve power, not just by ideology but by personality and disposition. Choosing a career in journalism virtually ensured outsider status: reporters made little money, had little institutional prestige, and were typically obscure.

  That has now changed. With the acquisition of media companies by the world’s largest corporations, most media stars are highly paid employees of conglomerates, no different than other such employees. Instead of selling banking services or financial instruments, they peddle media products to the public on behalf of that corporation. Their career path is determined by the same metrics that amount to success in such an environment: the extent to which they please their corporate bosses and advance the company’s interests.

  Those who thrive within the structure of large corporations tend to be adept at pleasing rather than subverting institutional power. It follows that those who succeed in corporate journalism are suited to accommodate power. They identify with institutional authority and are skilled at serving, not combating it.

  The evidence is abundant. We know about the New York Times’s willingness to suppress, at the White House’s behest, James Risen’s discovery of the NSA’s illegal wiretapping program in 2004; the paper’s public editor at the time described the paper’s excuses for suppression as “woefully inadequate.” In a similar incident at the Los Angeles Times, editor Dean Baquet killed a story in 2006 by his reporters about a secret collaboration between AT&T and the NSA, based on information given by whistle-blower Mark Klein. He had come forward with reams of documents to reveal AT&T’s construction of a secret room in its San Francisco office, where the NSA was able to install splitters to divert telephone and Internet traffic from the telecom’s customers into agency repositories.

  As Klein put it, the documents showed that the NSA was “trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.” But Baquet blocked publication of the story, Klein recounted to ABC News in 2007, “at the request of then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and then-director of the NSA Gen. Michael Hayden.” Shortly thereafter, Baquet became Washington chief for the New York Times and was then promoted to the position of that paper’s managing editor.

  That the Times would advance so willing a servant of government interests should come as no surprise. Its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, noted that the Times might want to take a look in the mirror if its editors wanted to understand why sources revealing major national security stories, like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, did not feel safe or motivated to bring them their information. It is true that the New York Times published large troves of documents in partnership with WikiLeaks, but soon after, former executive editor Bill Keller took pains to distance the paper from its partner: he publicly contrasted the Obama administration’s anger toward WikiLeaks with its appreciation of the Times and its “responsible” reporting.

  Keller proudly trumpeted his paper’s relationship with Washington on other occasions, too. During a 2010 appearance on the BBC discussing telegrams obtained by WikiLeaks, Keller explained that the Times takes direction from the US government about what it should and shouldn’t publish. The BBC host asked incredulously, “Are you saying that you sort of go to the government in advance and say: ‘What about this, that and the other, is it all right to do this and all right to do that,’ and you get clearance, then?” The other guest, former British diplomat Carne Ross, said that Keller’s comments made him think one shouldn’t go to the New York Times for these telegrams. It’s extraordinary that the New York Times is clearing what it says about this with the U.S. Government.”

  But there’s nothing extraordinary about this kind of media collaboration with Washington. It is routine, for example, for reporters to adopt the official US position in disputes with foreign adversaries and to make editorial decisions based on what best promotes “US interests” as defined by the government. Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith hailed what he called “an und
erappreciated phenomenon: the patriotism of the American press,” meaning that the domestic media tend to show loyalty to their government’s agenda. He quoted Bush CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, who noted that American journalists display “a willingness to work with us,” but with the foreign press, he added, “it’s very, very difficult.”

  This identification of the establishment media with the government is cemented by various factors, one of them being socioeconomic. Many of the influential journalists in the United States are now multimillionaires. They live in the same neighborhoods as the political figures and financial elites over which they ostensibly serve as watchdogs. They attend the same functions, they have the same circles of friends and associates, their children go to the same elite private schools.

  This is one reason why journalists and government officials can switch jobs so seamlessly. The revolving door moves the media figures into high-level Washington jobs, just as government officials often leave office to the reward of a lucrative media contract. Time magazine’s Jay Carney and Richard Stengel are now in government while Obama aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are commentators on MSNBC. These are lateral transfers far more than career changes: the switch is so streamlined precisely because the personnel still serve the same interests.

  US establishment journalism is anything but an outsider force. It is wholly integrated into the nation’s dominant political power. Culturally, emotionally, and socioeconomically, they are one and the same. Rich, famous, insider journalists do not want to subvert the status quo that so lavishly rewards them. Like all courtiers, they are eager to defend the system that vests them with their privileges and contemptuous of anyone who challenges that system.