If you havent been watching Democracy Now! over the past couple of days, youve missed some excellent commentary on press freedom and terrorism from The Intercepts Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald. The two should dispel once and for all the myth that rigorous journalists cannot simultaneously be opinionated, trenchant media critics. Greenwald: There’s not even agreement about what the word terrorism means, which is why the old cliché that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist is, though clichéd, is so resoundingly true. You can have debates about what terrorism is, about who perpetrates it, and yet all of these so-called experts simply assume the answers to those questions, because if they were, for example, to say that the U.S. government is a state sponsor of terrorism by virtue of its support for death squads in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua or any of the other groups across the world that the United States continues to support that engages in violence against civilians for political ends, you would immediately have them eliminated. No major network like CNN or MSNBC or NBC would ever call somebody like that a terrorism expert, even though that’s a very plausible claim to make. It’s an extremely ideological and politicized view that gets called expertise.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 03:53:10 +0000