I guess when you have a Sunday talking head show you have to wing things, but this question from
Meet the Press host David Gregory to
Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald was
too Beltway by half:
“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”
Really? C'mon here, I know there's a difference between punditry and reporting (Lord, how we
all know that difference) but there has been more than a bit of attention has been paid of late to the notion that receiving leaked information or reporting on a leaker would or should be criminalized. It would be a hell of a thing if the government response to the public finding out about potentially illegal government activities was to send the people who
reported it to jail, and recent government actions and pronouncements have come rather close to that very line. It's been in all the papers. And is mere continued contact considered "aiding and abetting," or is Gregory suggesting something else?
I think we can be charitable and presume it was a devil's advocate sort of question, a way to introduce the subject of whether or not reporter Glenn Greenwald ought to be in jail without actually mentioning the kind of deeply crooked people that ascribe to that theory, people like Rep. Peter King (R-Actual Terrorist Supporter) and Bush wordsmith (yes, that was a thing) Marc Thiessen, two people who themselves ought to be familiar with the notion of people skirting jail time for doing terrible things. Rep. Peter King, as perhaps most prominent supporter of this theory, is a particularly well-known village idiot whose opinions on things regularly boil down to what is good or not good for Peter King. Gregory dug in afterwards, however, criticizing Greenwald for being irritated with the question:
This is the problem, for somebody who claims that he’s a journalist, who would object to a journalist raising questions, which is not actually embracing any particular point of view. And that’s part of the tactics of the debate here when, in fact, lawmakers have questioned him. There’s a question about his role in this, The Guardian’s role in all of this. It is actually part of the debate, rather than going after the questioner, he could take on the issues.
The
claims to be a journalist seems a curious phrase, as is the whole notion that you can ask someone point-blank if they ought to be in jail and they should be able to come up with a detached response to that.
Others have also chafed at Gregory's seeming suggestion of improprieties.
I don't know that I would make as much of it as some, but it does seem to show the gaping disconnect between Beltway political journalism—a primarily theatrical event, heavy on access and on star power—and what most of the rest of the journalistic world would consider their duties to be. Greenwald seems to be being hit with a good dose of Washington insider irritation, the notion that he and the Guardian are meddling in stuff that should properly be done by the David Gregorys of the world, and that not going through that sort of proper insiderism has made the whole story a bit uncouth. (The Washington Post reporter involved is getting a bit of that himself, which is perhaps even more interesting.) The more proper way to do it would, presumably, have been to give the proper government insiders the proper opportunity to quash the story, thus saving us from the whole messy business of deciding how the public right to know balances with the journalistic right to tell them.
Is that all this is? Insiderism? I'm not sure, but the general Beltway response to the story has been to generate reports on Snowden as personality and on the government pushback against the leaks that are in stark disproportion to further information or debate on the actual government programs themselves. That implies that at the very least, Washington's political press has been badly bobbling the story. At worst, it suggests a press that has gone from merely complacent to compliant, a press that has itself turned hostile to the notion of exposing government malfeasance if there is no ready-made political angle to the story or if there is no sufficiently powerful Sunday show guest wanting to flog the issue.