Glenn Greenwald helped Tucker Carlson attack various media outlets for presenting Iraq war cheerleaders as credible Iran war cheerleaders – while ignoring all the Iraq and Iran war hawks right under their noses at Fox.
I have no problem with Greenwald going on Fox News per se but watching him help enable the network's propaganda is shocking. Greenwald's comments were either sloppy, ignorant or dishonest or some combination thereof. Again.
The discussion began with Carlson rehashing his dishonest smear of CNN’s national security analyst Samantha Vinograd. In an earlier segment. Carlson falsely claimed she had attacked Donald Trump for “not killing enough people” when he changed his mind about a strike on Iran. (In reality, Vinograd was clearly criticizing how Trump handled his decision, not the decision itself.)
“So Glenn, the reaction to the president not going to war last night has been really striking, very little celebration about it in certain quarters, outright attacks,” Carlson began. Then ignoring the many war drums beaten under the Fox News roof, he added, “Liz Cheney, congresswoman from Wyoming, attacked the President. Others did, too. What about Washington makes war the first resort for both parties every time?”
Carlson “forgot” to mention that Cheney is a former paid contributor to Fox News.
We know why Carlson would cover up for Fox, but what’s Greenwald’s excuse?
Greenwald argued that the “obvious answer” is that war is “exciting” and drives ratings and newspaper sales. OK, fine, but then he started in on the neocons without mentioning the many Fox connections:
GREENWALD: So Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol and David Frum and the people who cheer war are never put at risk, but they get excitement and purpose from it. They get kind of a feeling of power.
Ben Shapiro on Twitter today said, "Let's show Iran that we can match them." That's something that people say when they go through life feeling inadequate, and without any kind of purpose or strength, so it gives people strength.
Putting aside Greenwald’s amateur psychoanalysis, three of the four people he named have gotten pay checks from Fox News: Kristol, Shapiro and the aforementioned Cheney.
Then Greenwald got even more ridiculous:
GREENWALD: And then there's also this much deeper issue that after the Iraq War, almost nobody other than Judy Miller, the single scapegoat, there was no accountability for the people who lied to the country into the war.
Hello, Glenn! Do you not know that after getting booted from The New York Times, Miller was hired by Fox News as a security and international affairs analyst?
Greenwald went on to complain about Jeffrey Goldberg becoming editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and Bret Stephens after being proven horribly wrong about Iraq. Nobody noted that Stephens subsequently became a regular on Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report after the Iraq war was proven to have been unnecessary. Marc Thiessen, another Greenwald target, happens to be a current Fox News contributor despite his prior work as a former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
Carlson did not correct the record. Instead, he slyly complained about Goldberg, alone.
CARLSON: If you claim that there was a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam, it is clearly untrue. How in the world could you stay in journalism? I mean, do you know -- how could Jeff Goldberg go on to run one of the most famous magazines in English?
Well, Tucker, maybe for the same reason another former colleagues of yours, John Bolton, went on to become the national security adviser. Or Mike Pompeo went on to become Secretary of State. Their positions seem a lot more relevant and significant to the situation at hand. In fact, Carlson had just shredded Bolton in a previous segment. But Greenwald didn't even mention Bolton and focused on attacking Goldberg instead.
GREENWALD: The amazing thing is, Tucker, the more you promote war, even if you get it wrong, the more you're going to prosper. That is the sickness, the pathology of the DC media and political class.
Jeffrey Goldberg's articles won a national magazine award for creating a grotesque conspiracy that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Not only should he not be in journalism, he should be out of decent society. And yet, when it came time to compete for whether he was going to stay at "The New Yorker" or go to "The Atlantic," the owner of "The Atlantic" gave him and his children, rare exotic horses to lure him away from "The New Yorker," and he now runs one of the most important magazines in the world.
You see that all throughout the media, the same people who not just lied about Iraq, but who cheered all kinds of wars in Muslim countries, prosper from it, they get promoted, they continually get treated as the voices of authority and that's why this continuously goes on.
That delighted Carlson and surely earned Greenwald another friendly booking on the show.
CARLSON: It is so mind bogglingly corrupt, it's hard to believe it happens in our city and in our business. Glenn Greenwald, thank you very much for that perspective. I appreciate it.
Watch Greenwald demolish his own credibility below, from the June 21, 2019 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
It is extremely important that Ellen notes here how Greenwald is deliberately ignoring the openly partisan and craven conduct of Fox News while he is on their airwaves. It sadly defeats Greenwald’s very basis for speaking – and shows him compromising any claim to integrity just so he can get a few cheap shots in.
The reality is that Fox News is a major part of the propaganda wing of the Pence White House, and anyone who appears as a guest there should be pointing that out in a vigorous manner. Fox News is not legitimate journalism and should not be dignified as such. Fox News is the equivalent of a combination of Breitbart’s screeds and some of the sillier ideas heard on Alex Jones’ radio show. The people who work there may make a few bucks, but they sacrifice any credibility by doing so. And when the Pence White House is hopefully voted out, they’ll have no place to turn – which is sadly the price one pays for having played these games and lost.