Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has an illuminating post (6/27/10) that argues that the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, with his “self-praising, desperately insecure need to tout his own wisdom, knowledge and expertise, while demeaning those who are not admitted to his Special Club…is a perfectly illustrative face of the American establishment media.” Responding to Goldberg’s assertion (Atlantic, 6/25/10) that the resignation of Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel after making anti-conservative comments in what he thought was a private forum reflected “a lack of adult supervision, and…the proper amount of toilet-training,” Greenwald wrote:
In his first post arguing that Weigel’s hiring evinced the Post‘s journalistic decline, Goldberg relied upon “one of [his] friends at the Post,” to whom he granted anonymity to trash Weigel as an “idiot” and someone who has “destroyed” the paper’s reputation. Just think about that: In the very same post where Goldberg pretentiously grieved for the collapse of journalistic standards, his “source” was a cowardly “friend” of his at the Post who was granted anonymity solely to spit out catty, petulant name-calling. Is that supposed to be journalism: granting anonymity to your friends to puke up conclusory condemnations of other reporters? That’s like lamenting the decline of American journalism while quoting the answers provided by one’s Ouija board.
Greenwald has a lot more to say about Goldberg as an exemplar of what’s wrong with corporate journalism.
