The Art of Senate Stoppage

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/opinion/collins-the-art-of-senate-stoppage.html?hp&rref=opinion

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 8:27 AM
Subject: re: The Art of Senate Stoppage
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

The U.S. had neither an embassy nor a consulate in Benghazi. That much is plain. What exactly we had there our Department of State has labored long and hard to obscure. It seems to have been a CIA spy base. Islamist militants attacked it, perhaps believing that the CIA was detaining or torturing their fellows there. We don't know if they were right.
All of which has nothing to do with the confirmation of a new chair of the Federal Reserve. There is no legitimate coupling of the one to the other. Janet Yellen deserves confirmation. And we deserve to know whether ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in performing his diplomatic mission, or in shilling for our CIA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/opinion/collins-the-art-of-senate-stoppage.html?hp&rref=opinion

Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/public-editor/sullivan-lessons-in-a-surveillance-drama-redux.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=opinion

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 6:41 AM
Subject: re: Lessons in a Surveillance Drama Redux
To: "letters@nytimes.com" <letters@nytimes.com>

To the Editor:

      When Bill Keller decided to quash the Lichtblau/Risen story of widespread illegal wiretapping, in one stroke he cheated the shareholders of the New York Times out of the scoop of the year (and the attendant boost in revenues) and cheated the American electorate out of the information on which we should have based our political choice in the national election.

   A fever of fear following the attacks of 9/11 can be no excuse.The very pressure that the White House brought to bear here should have screamed to any journalist that this was neither small nor trivial. As William Randolph Hearst put it "News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising".  By kow-towing to "somebody", Bill Keller degraded journalism.

Barry Haskell Levine

By MARGARET SULLIVAN

Published: November 9, 2013 5 Comments

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IT was almost eight years ago that The Times published a blockbuster story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about a secret Bush administration program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. But for many Times readers, it still resonates deeply.

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The 13-month delay in publishing the article, a period that spanned a presidential election, continues to bother these readers. Why did The Times, at the urgent request of the administration, wait so long? What does that say about the relationship between the government and the press? Would the same thing happen today? I hear about it often in email and online comments. It crops up in newspaper columns, on Twitter, in journalism reviews.

Now, in light of the huge leak of classified information on government surveillance from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, the episode has a renewed currency.

Mr. Snowden has said that, because of this very episode, he chose to take his trove elsewhere (largely to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, to the video journalist Laura Poitras and to Barton Gellman at The Washington Post). Mr. Snowden recently told the journalist Natasha Vargas-Cooper that those who put themselves in danger to leak information “must have absolute confidence that the journalists they go to will report on that information rather than bury it.”

In recent weeks, I have interviewed some of the key players in that nine-year-old drama. The episode — much written about elsewhere, in New York magazine, in The Washington Post, in a book by Mr. Lichtblau and in a new one by Peter Baker of The Times — has gone largely unexplained in the pages of The Times itself.

The public editor at that time, Byron Calame, submitted a long list of questions to Times leadership but got no answers. He later wrote about one element of the situation, establishing that the article could have appeared before the presidential election of 2004, in which George W. Bush won a second term. More recently, HBO bought the rights and had a screenplay written. Certainly, there is cinematic material here: The reporters who fought to publish; the government officials who wanted to kill the story (even arranging a last-ditch Oval Office meeting where Mr. Bush made the case to the Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.); the big-name editors weighing the decision.

Given the episode’s recent re-emergence, I thought it might be useful to examine it here, in order to give Times readers a deeper understanding of what happened and why, and to explore why it matters now and what the lessons might be.

Everyone involved sees the episode as inextricably linked with its moment in time — its proximity to 9/11 and all that followed. Some also say that a tumultuous era at The Times, after the Jayson Blair scandal and the flawed reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war, may have made editors more cautious.

“The whole confluence was pretty remarkable,” Mr. Lichtblau told me. Although he strongly believed, and still does, that the story should have run when it was first ready — the fall of 2004 — he sees the historical context as a major reason that it did not.

So does Bill Keller, then the executive editor, who — on the recommendation of the Washington bureau chief at the time, Philip Taubman — decided against running the original story.

“Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune,” Mr. Keller said. “It was not a kind of patriotic rapture. It was an acute sense that the world was a dangerous place.”

Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N.S.A. and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told me in an interview that he argued strenuously against publication, right up until the moment when The Times decided to go ahead. His rationale: “That this effort was designed to intercept threatening communication” and to prevent another terrorist attack.

In the end, The Times published the story with a couple of guns held to its head: First, the knowledge that the information in the article was also contained in a book by Mr. Risen, “State of War,” whose publication date was bearing down like a freight train. Second, at the end, the word of a possible injunction against publishing, Mr. Risen said, provided a final push: “It was like a lightning bolt.” (Mr. Hayden said that would not have happened: “Prior restraint was never in the cards.”)

Like a game of chicken played on a high wire, it remains “the most stressful and traumatic time of my life,” Mr. Risen recalls. Although The Times later said that further reporting strengthened the story enough to justify publishing it, few doubt that Mr. Risen’s book was what took an essentially dead story and revived it in late 2005. “Jim’s book was the driving force,” Mr. Lichtblau said.

There was another important factor, he said. “The Bush administration actively misled us, claiming there was never a doubt that the wiretapping operations were legal.” That turned out to be “laughably untrue.” In fact, there was an imminent revolt on this very issue within the Justice Department.

What would happen now? What if Mr. Snowden had brought his information trove to The Times? By all accounts, The Times would have published the revelations — just as it did many WikiLeaks stories.

“I think our story broke the fever,” Mr. Risen said. “We’re much better now” about pushing back against government pressure. Jill Abramson, the executive editor (then managing editor), has not only defended the Snowden-related stories as squarely in the public interest but has had Times reporters and editors collaborating with The Guardian and ProPublica on Snowden-sourced stories.

IS it ever appropriate for the press to hold back information at the government’s urging? It depends on whom you ask. Mr. Hayden would answer that one way; Mr. Greenwald quite another. (And even Mr. Hayden told me that he can’t prove any harm to national security from the publication of the eavesdropping stories — then or now.) I like Mr. Risen’s answer: “Very rarely.”

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Mr. Keller and Mr. Taubman say that they made the best decisions they could at the time, after a great deal of consideration. “If people knew everything, different people would reach different conclusions,” Mr. Keller said. As for whether publishing the article in the fall of 2004 would have changed history, it’s impossible to know.

“It’s become an unexamined article of faith” on the left, he said, that early publication might have given John Kerry the presidency.

One thing is certain, Mr. Keller said. The story (published in December 2005, it won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006) “looks prescient,” he said, adding: “We know now that people with noble intentions can run way out of bounds. Risen and Lichtblau were on to that a long time ago.”

What’s more, the reporters were working without the cache of classified documentation that a whistle-blower might have. They based their story on the patient development of confidential sources.

Mr. Taubman remembers his fateful recommendation not to publish as “an agonizing one.” He dismisses any role played by his relationships with members of the Bush administration, including Condoleezza Rice, with whom he shares longstanding and close ties to Stanford University (where they both now teach). As national security adviser in 2004 and secretary of state in 2005, she opposed the article’s publication, he said. But “that did not affect my thinking,” which was that national security would be harmed by publication.

What if he knew then everything he knows now, in light of the Snowden revelations? “I would have made a different decision had I known that Jim and Eric were tugging on a thread that led to a whole tapestry,” Mr. Taubman said.

Given the law of unintended consequences, and a fair helping of irony, the publication of the warrantless eavesdropping story resonates now in quite another way: The furor it caused prompted the Bush administration to push hard for changes in the laws governing surveillance.

“Our story set in motion the process of making all this stuff legal,” Mr. Lichtblau said. “Now it’s all encoded in law. Bush got everything he wanted on his way out of office.”

There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s legal.

Mr. Taubman now teaches a course at Stanford — titled “Need to Know” — about the tension between government and the news media. He recently brought Mr. Hayden in as a guest speaker.

What is the major lesson, then, of the drama in which Mr. Taubman played such a crucial role?

“The old adage, which we violated, is still a good one,” he said. “Always err on the side of publishing.”

Hollywood Donors Set to Cast Hillary Clinton in Top Role

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:55 AM
Subject: re: Hollywood Donors Set to Cast Hillary Clinton in Top Role
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   As long as U.S. law privileges political donations as protected symbolic free speech, moneyed elites--whether in Hollywood or on Wall Street--will presume to crown our "leaders" for us. We will never truly know the "voice of the People" while the voices of the rich are permitted to dominate the public discourse.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/us/politics/in-hollywood-clintons-a-star.html?hpw&rref=politics&_r=0

By AMY CHOZICK and ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: November 7, 2013

LOS ANGELES — In the prelude to the 2008 Democratic presidential primary season, the split between the Hollywood mogulDavid Geffen and Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton represented an early and embarrassing sign of trouble for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Geffen, previously one of the Clintons’ most generous benefactors, criticized the former first lady as overly ambitious and called the former president “a reckless guy.” Hollywood divided, quickly and sharply, between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, then a senator.

When Mrs. Clinton arrives here on Friday to accept an award at an A-list charity event organized by, among others, the producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, she will find a decidedly more embracing climate.

Conversations with a range of Hollywood figures suggest that there is widespread — if not so starry-eyed — support for Mrs. Clinton should she decide to run for president in 2016, a stark contrast with 2008, and an important early indication of Mrs. Clinton’s standing with some of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party.

“If she ran, I would support her — no question,” Mr. Geffen said in an interview. “I think she’s the best candidate currently available for either party.”

Mr. Katzenberg, who joined Mr. Geffen and Steven Spielberg in arranging a $1.3 million fund-raiser for Mr. Obama at Mr. Geffen’s Beverly Hills estate in February 2007, also said he planned to throw his weight behind Mrs. Clinton the next time around.

“If Secretary Clinton makes the decision to run, I expect she’ll have near-unanimous support here,” Mr. Katzenberg wrote in an email. “Hillary represents our best chance to win in 2016, build upon the successes of the Obama administration, and keep the country moving in the right direction.”

The shift reflects enthusiasm about Mrs. Clinton’s prospects for winning the election, but it also highlights the less rose-colored view of Mr. Obama now held by some of his most loyal supporters. “The Hollywood community really came together in the last election and raised an awful lot of money and supported him,” said Felix Schein, a Los Angeles-based political strategist. “I wouldn’t say that’s gone, but the mood is sour.”

In his first run for president, Mr. Obama offered Hollywood not only a new leading man but an irresistible story line: The idea of electing the first black president electrified the industry. And he was an antiwar candidate in a part of the country where the war in Iraq was highly unpopular. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, seemed like a sequel, a wooden Washington insider.

Disenchantment with Mr. Obama in Hollywood has grown over the years, over such issues as eavesdropping and the perception that he has been weak in dealing with Republicans in Congress.

There is little suggestion, however, that this is the major factor driving the embrace of Mrs. Clinton; several figures here said they were at this point more frustrated with Republicans in Congress than with Mr. Obama.

Given “how poisoned the atmosphere is,” said Rob Reiner, the actor and director, “I don’t think he could have done any better.”

The Clintons have always had a close, if complicated, relationship with Hollywood. Bill Clinton had an ease with the world of pop culture, fostered by his fun-loving mother, Virginia, who revered Elvis Presley. After a speech at the 1988 Democratic convention that most pundits considered political suicide, Mr. Clinton used an appearance on “The Tonight Show” to poke fun at — and ultimately redeem — himself.

In 1992 he played the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” and it was his television producer friends Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason whose video, “The Man From Hope,” introduced many Americans to the future president’s small-town-boy-made-good biography.

Last week, at a charity gala at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, told the story of the time he and the actors Billy Crystal, Sam Waterston and Christopher Reeve dropped in unannounced on Mr. Clinton in the Oval Office as he pored over Supreme Court briefing books.

“I hope HBO will soon come again to the White House and there will be another President Clinton sitting at that desk,” Mr. Plepler said. “But next time, I promise to knock first.”

Since leaving the State Department, Mrs. Clinton has reconnected with old Hollywood friends like the agent Casey Wasserman, and her schedule has been peppered with Hollywood-related events.

Last month, she headlined a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in Beverly Hills hosted by the entertainment entrepreneur Haim Saban to raise money for Terry McAuliffe’s Virginia governor’s campaign.

Before Mrs. Clinton picks up an award at the International Medical Corps gala in Beverly Hills on Friday, she and her daughter, Chelsea, will attend a discussion about early-childhood development moderated by Mr. Reiner. And the political action committee Ready for Hillary plans to hold two Hollywood fund-raisers by the end of the year, one of which will be hosted by Howard Gordon, the executive producer of the hit TV shows “Homeland” and “24.”

The changed climate does surprise some of Mrs. Clinton’s crucial 2008 supporters. Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, who was a prominent figure in Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign and Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, said he was struck by the shift.

“There’s a lot of support and excitement about the prospect of Hillary as a candidate,” Mr. Villaraigosa said. “People feel like she would be tough to beat. She’s a proven commodity.”

The newfound support is welcome, but it also brings back memories of the rifts between the Clintons and Hollywood donors in 2008, the most notable of which was Mr. Geffen, who aired his grievances with the Clinton “machine” in an interview with Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. He criticized Mrs. Clinton for her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. “It’s not a very big thing to say ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” he told The Times.

Mr. Geffen had raised about $18 million for Mr. Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and slept in the Lincoln Bedroom twice, which he told Ms. Dowd was “not as nice as my bedroom.” The falling-out between Mr. Geffen and the Clintons attracted widespread news media attention and entered political lore as one of the most acrimonious donor-politician rifts.

In the interview this week, Mr. Geffen acknowledged his past critical words of the Clintons, but added: “I think Hillary is an extraordinary, smart, accomplished woman.” In July, he told Fortune magazine he would “absolutely” support Mrs. Clinton.

“I supported Obama because when I heard his speech at the Democratic convention, I told him I would support him for president if he ran, and this was before anyone announced,” he said. “And I’m a man of my word.”

Mrs. Clinton’s support here also highlights a concern in the Democratic Party that should she decide not to pursue the presidential nomination, there is no obvious fallback candidate. The Hollywood power brokers interviewed for this article agree that other potential 2016 candidates, including Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the vice president, or Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, would not generate the same kind of unity.

“Last time, the community was really split down the middle between Obama and Hillary,” said Mr. Reiner, a steadfast supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s. “This year I think everybody is going to be rallying around Hillary.”

Asked why, Mr. Reiner said that in addition to Mrs. Clinton’s record: “There is nobody else.
”

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 2:03 PM
Subject: re: Doctors Fear Losing Leukemia Drug Deemed Risky
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  The FDA's approval of Gleevec for CML in 2001 changed chemotherapy. Until then, we had attacked any cell that tried to replicate and hoped to kill the cancer faster than we killed the patient. Since then, we target the biochemical signals that drive the malignancy.  Gleevec was wonderfully effective--initially--against both early and late-state CML. But while the cases that were treated early, when there was only one mutation remained in remission for years, those that had progressed further ("blast crisis") rapidly developed resistance to Gleevec. 

   Ponatinib was developed and launched to defeat the most common resistance mechanism to Gleevec. But the larger lesson--that cancer should be pre-empted, when the mutations are few, without waiting to tick off all the "hallmarks of cancer" has been lost on both clinicians and on the FDA. Only dermatologists reach for the scalpel (or the cyrogenics) to remove pre-cancerous lesions. And only the dermatologists are winning. For other tissues, pre-cancerous conditions aren't even called diseases, and treating them can't be remunerated under current American health insurance policies.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/health/doctors-fear-losing-leukemia-drug-deemed-risky.html?_r=0

Doctors Fear Losing Leukemia Drug Deemed Risky

By DENISE GRADY and ANDREW POLLACK

Published: November 1, 2013

People with fatal diseases may be willing to try risky treatments that have a chance of saving their lives. But when is the risk too high?

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Brian Lee for The New York Times

Dr. Brian Druker, of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, said, “My patients are panicked.”

That question was at the heart of a decision announced Thursday by theFood and Drug Administration to suspend sales of a leukemia drug, Iclusig, that was keeping patients alive but also significantly raising their odds of heart attacks, strokes,blindness, death and amputations.

Despite the potential consequences, several doctors who treat people with the disease, chronic myeloid leukemia, said there were patients for whom nothing else works, and whose lives depend on the drug.

“My concern is that I have patients right now who are benefiting from this medication with very few side effects, and if they’re on the end of a one-month prescription, what’s going to happen when their medication runs out?” said Dr. Brian Druker, the director of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. “Without this medication, they won’t have long to live. My patients are panicked.”

The drug agency has said that patients who need the drug will still be able to obtain it, but that doctors will have to file applications for each patient, a process that some say is cumbersome and might leave patients tangled up in red tape, with no pills.

Dr. Michael Mauro, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that 23 leukemia specialists and three patient advocacy groups had sent the drug agency a letter saying they were concerned that the sudden withdrawal of the drug would interrupt treatment for patients with no other good options.

Iclusig, also called ponatinib, was approved in December 2012 to treat patients who had chronic myeloid leukemia that did not respond to other drugs. The disease is a relatively uncommon form of leukemia, with about 5,000 cases a year and 600 deaths in the United States. The wholesale price of the drug was $115,000 a year.

Iclusig was given accelerated approval by the drug agency under a program that allows some important drugs to reach the market quickly, without the full evidence of safety and efficacy that the agency usually requires but subject to further studies to confirm the drug’s benefit. 

Critics might say Iclusig’s approval is a sign that accelerated approval can allow dangerous drugs on the market. But supporters of the program say the fact that marketing of Iclusig is being suspended is a sign that the system is working as intended.

Iclusig is part of a new generation of “targeted” drugs that act against specific biochemical defects that fuel the explosive growth of certain types of cancer. The first of these drugs for chronic myeloid leukemia was Gleevec. (Dr. Druker was one of its developers.) It revolutionized the treatment of the illness and transformed it from a death sentence into a chronic disease that people could live with for many years.

Iclusig is one of several drugs developed for patients who did not respond to Gleevec, or who became resistant to it.

But even though these powerful new drugs are specifically designed to fight cancer cells, they also find their way to other targets, including the cardiovascular system.

In a bulletin on Thursday, the drug agency said that 24 percent of patients taking Iclusig who were studied for a median of 1.3 years, and 48 percent studied for a median of 2.7 years, had suffered “serious adverse vascular events.” Those figures are unusually high, and higher than what was reported from the initial studies done before the drug was approved.

The events included blockages in blood vessels that led to heart attacks, strokes, blindness and lack of blood flow to the extremities. Some of the patients were young, in their 20s, and some had no risk factors for heart or artery disease.

A spokeswoman for the drug agency, Stephanie Yao, said that in studies of the drug to date, which involved 530 patients, at least 14 had died from cardiovascular problems.

Dr. Frank Haluska, the chief medical officer of Ariad Pharmaceuticals, the Cambridge, Mass., company that makes the drug, said the company was working with the drug agency to analyze the problems and hoped to return the drug to the market. Over all, he said, about 2,000 people have taken the drug.

In an article published Friday by The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard researchers said that the reports of cardiovascular problems linked to ponatinib and other newer drugs (not Gleevec) lacked the kind of details that doctors need to figure out whether side effects could be prevented.

One of the authors, Dr. Javid Moslehi, a co-director of the cardio-oncology program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in an interview that if, for instance, the problems were known to occur because of excessive blood clotting from a cancer drug, then patients could also be given another medication to prevent clots. Or, if the cancer drug were causing plaque to build up in the arteries, patients might be given a statin to try to prevent it.

“What we don’t want to have happen is for a good drug, ponatinib, to be killed and not given to patients,” Dr. Moslehi said.

The setbacks for the drug have also shaken its maker. Ariad’s stock has lost about 85 percent of its value since Oct. 9, when it first announced that the drug agency had halted further enrollment in clinical trials of Iclusig because of the safety concerns.

On Oct. 18, it canceled a clinical trial aimed at winning approval for the drug as an initial treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, rather than as a treatment used only after other drugs have failed. Such an approval could have greatly expanded sales of the drug.

Some Wall Street analysts say they think that the drug can remain on the market, but might be only for those whose cancer cells have a particular mutation for which other treatments do not work.

“We expect a meaningful delay for the drug to potentially return to the market and a more modest opportunity if this were to occur,” Jonathan Eckard, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a note Thursday.

Analysts expect that Ariad will have to sharply cut expenses, including its work force, to preserve cash.

On Friday, Ariad’s board approved a poison pill defense apparently aimed at preventing the acquisition of additional shares by Sarissa Capital, a hedge fund that might seek to change the management. Ariad said the move was designed to preserve its ability to use accumulated losses to offset future taxes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/opinion/the-white-house-on-spying.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/opinion/the-white-house-on-spying.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
To the Editor:

    President Barack Obama has shown less aptitude for peace-making than the Nobel Committee expected. Herewith, a little coaching.

    Promises to not spy on her in the future are not enough. This is the point at which Prime Minister Merkelneeds a good-faith offering. I suggest admiral Keith Alexander's head. In a box. Tied in magnetic tape. If he's a loyal American, he'll do it for our national interest. And if he's not, he mustn't be kept as head of NSA.

    Ongoing violations of Americans' basic rights are driving us towards armed revolution.  Representative Rush Holt's bill repealing the PATRIOT act and resetting the FISA statute to the version of 1979 deserves immediate action.

   Aside from the foreign and the domestic fronts, you're doing great. Keep it up.

Barry Haskell Levine

EDITORIAL

The White House on Spying

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: October 28, 2013 122 Comments

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The White House response on Monday to the expanding disclosures of American spying on foreign leaders, their governments and millions of their citizens was a pathetic mix of unsatisfying assurances about reviews under way, platitudes about the need for security in an insecure age, and the odd defense that the president didn’t know that American spies had tapped the German chancellor’s cellphone for 10 years.

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• Data Suggests Push to Spy on Merkel Dates to ’02 (October 28, 2013)

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Is it really better for us to think that things have gone so far with the post-9/11 idea that any spying that can be done should be done and that nobody thought to inform President Obama about tapping the phone of one of the most important American allies?

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, kept repeating that Mr. Obama ordered a review of surveillance policy a few months ago, but he would not confirm whether that includes the tapping of the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, or the collection of data on tens of millions of calls in France, Spain and elsewhere. It’s unlikely that Mr. Obama would have ordered any review if Edward Snowden’s leaks had not revealed the vacuum-cleaner approach to electronic spying. Mr. Carney left no expectation that the internal reviews will produce any significant public accounting — only that the White House might have “a little more detail” when they are completed.

Fortunately, members of Congress have been more aggressive in responding to two broad disclosures. One, that both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations misinterpreted the Patriot Act to permit the collection of metadata on phone calls, emails and text messages of all Americans, whether they were international or domestic. And, second, that the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were being stretched to excuse the routine collection of data from 60 million telephone calls in Spain and 70 million in France over two 30-day periods.

Legislation scheduled to be introduced on Tuesday by Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, would end the bulk collection of Americans’ communications data.

The administration has said that such data collection is permitted by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, although Mr. Sensenbrenner, who wrote that section, has said it is not. The bill, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, would require that the “tangible things” sought through data collection are “relevant and material to an authorized investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” They would also have to pertain to a foreign power or its agent, activities of a foreign agent already under investigation or someone in touch with an agent.

Currently, the government conducts metadata collection by periodically vaguely informing a federal court in secret that it is working on security-related issues.

The bill would require a court order in order to search for Americans’ communications in data collected overseas, which falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it would restrict “reverse targeting” — targeting a foreigner with the goal of getting information about an American. The bill would not address spying on foreigners, including such abuses as in the Merkel affair. Those activities are governed by a presidential order that is secret and certain to remain so.

We are not reassured by the often-heard explanation that everyone spies on everyone else all the time. We are not advocating a return to 1929 when Secretary of State Henry Stimson banned the decryption of diplomatic cables because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” But there has long been an understanding that international spying was done in pursuit of a concrete threat to national security.

That Chancellor Merkel’s cellphone conversations could fall under that umbrella is an outgrowth of the post-9/11 decision by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that everyone is the enemy, and that anyone’s rights may be degraded in the name of national security. That led to Abu Ghraib, torture at the secret C.I.A. prisons, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, grave harm to international relations, and the dragnet approach to surveillance revealed by the Snowden leaks.

Is Glenn Greenwald the future of journalism?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/opinion/a-conversation-in-lieu-of-a-column.html?_r=2&

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:17 AM
Subject: re: Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   The corporate media model requires that an editor worry about getting her/his reporter into tomorrow's news conference.  In such a position, an editor can be intimidated. And so it happened that this newspaper blew the biggest news story of 2004. Bill Keller was called into the White House and was told to quash Eric Lichtblau's story of widespread illegal wiretaps, and he did it.

   The presidential election of 2004 should have been contested against the backdrop of a presidential impeachment hearing. One of the candidates for the highest office in the land had been shown to be directing a vast pattern of criminal activity.

   The Press is protected in our Constitution to make that sort of intimidation harder. But it still requires journalists--and editors--with spine.

Barry Haskell Levine

Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?

By BILL KELLER

Published: October 27, 2013 187 Comments

Enlarge This ImageMuch of the speculation about the future of news focuses on the business model: How will we generate the revenues to pay the people who gather and disseminate the news? But the disruptive power of the Internet raises other profound questions about what journalism is becoming, about its essential character and values. This week’s column is a conversation — a (mostly) civil argument — between two very different views of how journalism fulfills its mission.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Bill KellerGlenn Greenwald broke what is probably the year’s biggest news story, Edward Snowden’s revelations of the vast surveillance apparatus constructed by the National Security Agency. He has also been an outspoken critic of the kind of journalism practiced at places like The New York Times, and an advocate of a more activist, more partisan kind of journalism. Earlier this month he announced he was joining a new journalistic venture, backed by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who has promised to invest $250 million and to “throw out all the old rules.” I invited Greenwald to join me in an online exchange about what, exactly, that means.

Dear Glenn,

We come at journalism from different traditions. I’ve spent a life working at newspapers that put a premium on aggressive but impartial reporting, that expect reporters and editors to keep their opinions to themselves unless they relocate (as I have done) to the pages clearly identified as the home of opinion. You come from a more activist tradition — first as a lawyer, then as a blogger and columnist, and soon as part of a new, independent journalistic venture financed by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Your writing proceeds from a clearly stated point of view.

In a post on Reuters this summer, media critic Jack Shafer celebrated the tradition of partisan journalism — “From Tom Paine to Glenn Greenwald” — and contrasted it with what he called “the corporatist ideal.” He didn’t explain the phrase, but I don’t think he meant it in a nice way. Henry Farrell, who blogs for The Washington Post,wrote more recently that publications like The New York Times and The Guardian “have political relationships with governments, which make them nervous about publishing (and hence validating) certain kinds of information,” and he suggested that your new project with Omidyar would represent a welcome escape from such relationships.

I find much to admire in America’s history of crusading journalists, from the pamphleteers to the muckrakers to the New Journalism of the ’60s to the best of today’s activist bloggers. At their best, their fortitude and passion have stimulated genuine reforms (often, as in the Progressive Era, thanks to the journalists’ “political relationships with governments”). I hope the coverage you led of the National Security Agency’s hyperactive surveillance will lead to some overdue accountability.

But the kind of journalism The Times and other mainstream news organizations practice — at their best — includes an awful lot to be proud of, too, revelations from Watergate to torture and secret prisons to the malfeasance of the financial industry, and including some pre-Snowden revelations about the N.S.A.’s abuse of its authority. Those are highlights that leap to mind, but you’ll find examples in just about every day’s report. Journalists in this tradition have plenty of opinions, but by setting them aside to follow the facts — as a judge in court is supposed to set aside prejudices to follow the law and the evidence — they can often produce results that are more substantial and more credible. The mainstream press has had its failures — episodes of credulousness, false equivalency, sensationalism and inattention — for which we have been deservedly flogged. I expect you’ll say, not flogged enough. So I pass you the lash.

Dear Bill,

There’s no question that journalists at establishment media venues, certainly including The New York Times, have produced some superb reporting over the last couple of decades. I don’t think anyone contends that what has become (rather recently) the standard model for a reporter — concealing one’s subjective perspectives or what appears to be “opinions” — precludes good journalism.

But this model has also produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession. A journalist who is petrified of appearing to express any opinions will often steer clear of declarative sentences about what is true, opting instead for a cowardly and unhelpful “here’s-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won’t-resolve-the-conflicts” formulation. That rewards dishonesty on the part of political and corporate officials who know they can rely on “objective” reporters to amplify their falsehoods without challenge (i.e., reporting is reduced to “X says Y” rather than “X says Y and that’s false”).

Worse still, this suffocating constraint on how reporters are permitted to express themselves produces a self-neutering form of journalism that becomes as ineffectual as it is boring. A failure to call torture “torture” because government officials demand that a more pleasant euphemism be used, or lazily equating a demonstrably true assertion with a demonstrably false one, drains journalism of its passion, vibrancy, vitality and soul.

Worst of all, this model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?

The relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who do not, because the latter category is mythical. The relevant distinction is between journalists who honestly disclose their subjective assumptions and political values and those who dishonestly pretend they have none or conceal them from their readers.

Moreover, all journalism is a form of activism. Every journalistic choice necessarily embraces highly subjective assumptions — cultural, political or nationalistic — and serves the interests of one faction or another. Former Bush D.O.J. lawyer Jack Goldsmith in 2011 praised what he called “the patriotism of the American press,” meaning their allegiance to protecting the interests and policies of the U.S. government. That may (or may not) be a noble thing to do, but it most definitely is not objective: it is quite subjective and classically “activist.”

But ultimately, the only real metric of journalism that should matter is accuracy and reliability. I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding one’s subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism — from the most stylistically “objective” to the most brazenly opinionated — has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data. The claim that overtly opinionated journalists cannot produce good journalism is every bit as invalid as the claim that the contrived form of perspective-free journalism cannot.

Dear Glenn,

I don’t think of it as reporters pretending they have no opinions. I think of it as reporters, as an occupational discipline, suspending their opinions and letting the evidence speak for itself. And it matters that this is not just an individual exercise, but an institutional discipline, with editors who are tasked to challenge writers if they have given short shrift to contrary facts or arguments readers might want to know.

The thing is, once you have publicly declared your “subjective assumptions and political values,” it’s human nature to want to defend them, and it becomes tempting to omit or minimize facts, or frame the argument, in ways that support your declared viewpoint. And some readers, knowing that you write from the left or right, will view your reporting with justified suspicion. Of course, they may do that anyway — discounting whatever they read because it appeared in the “liberal” New York Times — but I think most readers trust us more because they sense that we have done due diligence, not just made a case. (I once saw some opinion research in which Times readers were asked whether they regarded The Times as “liberal.” A majority said yes. They were then asked whether The Times was “fair.” A larger majority said yes. I guess I can live with that.) I work now in the realm of opinion, but as a news reporter and editor I defined my job not as telling readers what I think, or telling them what they ought to think, but telling them what they needed to know to decide for themselves. You are right, of course, that sometimes the results of that process are less exciting than a hearty polemic. Sometimes fair play becomes false equivalence, or feels like euphemism. But it’s simplistic to say, for example, unless you use the word “torture” you are failing a test of courage, or covering up evil. Of course, I regard waterboarding as torture. But if a journalist gives me a vivid description of waterboarding, notes the long line of monstrous regimes that have practiced it, and then lays out the legal debate over whether it violates a specific statute or international accord, I don’t care whether he uses the word or not. I’m happy — and fully equipped — to draw my own conclusion.

If Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush administration lawyer, had praised the American press for, in your words, “their allegiance to protecting the interests and policies of the U.S. government” then I would strongly disagree with him. We have published many stories that challenged the policies and professed interests of the government. But that’s not quite what Goldsmith says. He says that The Times and other major news outlets give serious consideration to arguments that publishing something will endanger national security — that is, might get someone killed. That is true. We listen respectfully to such claims, and then we make our own decision. If we are not convinced, we publish, sometimes over the fierce objections of the government. If we are convinced, we wait, or withhold details. The first time I ever faced such a decision was in 1997 when I was foreign editor, and a reporter learned of a dispute between Russia and Georgia, the former Soviet republic, over what to do with a cache of highly enriched uranium left behind after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The dispute was interesting news. But when the reporter checked, it turned out the stockpile was completely unsecured, available to any terrorist interested in constructing a dirty bomb. We were asked to hold the story until the material was fenced and guarded — and we did so. It was not a hard call.

So what would your policy be on publishing information that some would argue jeopardizes national security? (I realize this is not an entirely hypothetical question.) Would you even let them try to make the case?

Why would reporters who hide their opinions be less tempted by human nature to manipulate their reporting than those who are honest about their opinions? If anything, hiding one’s views gives a reporter more latitude to manipulate their reporting because the reader is unaware of those hidden views and thus unable to take them into account.

For instance, I did not know until well after the fact that [Times correspondent] John Burns harbored some quite favorable views about the attack on Iraq. He not only admitted in 2010 and 2011 that he failed to anticipate the massive carnage and destruction the invasion would wreak but also viewed the invading U.S. soldiers as “ministering angels” and “liberators.” Does that make him an activist rather than a journalist? I don’t think so. But as a reader, I really wish I would have known his hidden views at the time he was reporting on the war so that I could have taken them into account.

It is, I believe, very hard to argue that the ostensibly “objective” tone required by large media outlets builds public trust, given the very low esteem with which the public regards those media institutions. Far more than concerns about ideological bias, the collapse of media credibility stems from things like helping the U.S. government disseminate falsehoods that led to the Iraq War and, more generally, a glaring subservience to political power: pathologies exacerbated by the reportorial ban on any making clear, declarative statements about the words and actions of political officials out of fear that one will be accused of bias.

As for taking into account dangers posed to innocent life before publishing: nobody disputes that journalists should do this. But I don’t give added weight to the lives of innocent Americans as compared to the lives of innocent non-Americans, nor would I feel any special fealty to the U.S. government as opposed to other governments when deciding what to publish. When Goldsmith praised the “patriotism” of the American media, he meant that U.S. media outlets give special allegiance to the views and interests of the U.S. government.

One can, I guess, argue that this is how it should be. But whatever that mindset is, it is most certainly not “objective.” It is nationalistic, subjective and activist, which is my primary point: all journalism is subjective and a form of activism even if an attempt is made to pretend that this isn’t so.

I have no objection to the process whereby the White House is permitted to give input prior to the publication of sensitive secrets.

Indeed, WikiLeaks, advocates of radical transparency, went to the White House and sought guidance before publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, but the White House refused to respond, then had the temerity to criticize WikiLeaks for publishing material that it said should have been withheld. That pre-publication process is both journalistically sensible (journalists should get as much relevant information as they can before making publication decisions) and legally wise (every Espionage Act lawyer will say that such consultation can help prove journalistic intent when publishing such material). For all the N.S.A. reporting I’ve done — not just at The Guardian but with media outlets around the world — the White House was notified by editors before the fact of publication (though in the vast, vast majority of cases, their demands that information be suppressed were disregarded due to lack of specific reasons in favor of suppression).

My objection is not to that process itself but to specific instances where it leads to the suppression of information that ought to be public. Without intended rancor, I believe that the 2004 decision of The Times to withhold the Risen/Lichtblau N.S.A. story at the request of the Bush White House was one of the most egregious of such instances, but there are plenty of others.

In essence, I see the value of journalism as resting in a twofold mission: informing the public of accurate and vital information, and its unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on those in power. Any unwritten rules that interfere with either of those two prongs are ones I see as antithetical to real journalism and ought to be disregarded.

Dear Glenn,

“Nationalistic,” your word for the “mindset” of the American press, is a label that carries some nasty freight. It is the dark side of the (equally facile) “patriotic.” It suggests blind allegiance and chauvinism. I assume you do not use it casually. And I can’t casually let it stand.

The New York Times is global in its newsgathering (31 bureaus outside the U.S.), in its staffing (for starters, our chief executive is British) and especially in its audience. But it is, from its roots, an American enterprise. That identity comes with benefits and obligations. The benefits include a constitution and culture that, compared with most of the world, favor press freedom. (That is why your editors at The Guardian have more than once sought us as partners in sensitive journalistic ventures — seeking shelter under our First Amendment from Britain’s Official Secrets Act.) The obligations include, above all, holding the government accountable when it violates our laws, betrays our values, or fails to live up to its responsibilities. We have spent considerable journalistic energy exposing corruption and oppression in other countries, but accountability begins at home.

Like any endeavor run by human beings, ours is imperfect, and sometimes we disappoint. Critics on the left, including you, were indignant to learn that we held the N.S.A. eavesdropping story for more than a year, until I was satisfied that the public interest outweighed any potential damage to national security. Critics on the right were even more furious when, in 2005, we published. Honorable people may disagree with such decisions, to publish or not to publish. But those judgments were the result of long, hard and independent calculation, a weighing of risks and responsibilities, not “fealty to the U.S. government.”Readers’ Comments

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By the way, since you mention WikiLeaks, one of our principal concerns in turning those documents into news stories in 2010 was to avoid endangering innocent informants — not Americans, but dissidents, scholars, human rights advocates or ordinary civilians whose names were mentioned in the classified cables from foreign outposts. WikiLeaks’ attitude on that issue was callous indifference. According to David Leigh, The Guardian’s lead investigator on that story, Julian Assange said, “If they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them.” (Assange denies saying this, but David Leigh’s track record earns him considerable credibility.) Google executive Eric Schmidt says Assange told him he would have preferred no redactions. On several occasions I’ve said that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks should be entitled to the same press freedoms as The New York Times. But let’s not pretend they have the same sense of responsibility.

New subject?

Pierre Omidyar, your new employer, thinks he has seen the future of journalism, and it looks like you. In an NPR interview, Omidyar said that “trust in institutions is going down” and now “audiences want to connect with personalities.” So he is building a constellation of stars, “passion-fueled” soloists, crusading investigators. I know you don’t speak for Omidyar, but I have some questions about how you see this new world.

First, it has become a cliché of our business/profession/craft that journalists are supposed to build themselves as individual “brands.” But journalism — especially the hardest stuff, like investigative journalism — benefits immensely from institutional support, including a technical staff that knows how to make the most of a database, editors and fact-checkers who fortify the stories, graphic designers who help make complicated subjects comprehensible and, not least, lawyers who are steeped in freedom-of-information and First Amendment law. In the Snowden coverage, you worked within the institutional structure of The Guardian and, for a little while, The Times. So what’s so different about the new venture? Is it just a journalistic institution by another name?

Second, in an interview with my old friend David Cay Johnston you said coverage of governments and other big institutions is about to be radically changed because of the pervasiveness of digital content. Governments and businesses depend on vast troves of information. All it takes, you said, is access and a troubled conscience to create an Edward Snowden or a Bradley Manning. But it seems to me it takes one other thing: a willingness to risk everything. Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence for the WikiLeaks disclosures, and Snowden faces a life in exile. The same digital tools that make it easy to leak also make it hard to avoid getting caught. That’s one reason, I think, the overwhelming preponderance of investigative reporting still comes for reporters who cultivate trusted sources over months or years, not from insiders who suddenly decide to entrust someone they’ve never met with a thumb drive full of secrets. Do you really think Snowden and Manning represent the future of investigative journalism?

And, third, will Pierre Omidyar’s New Thing be a political monoculture, or do you expect there will be right-wing Glenn Greenwalds on board?

Back to you.

Dear Bill,

To understand what I mean by “nationalistic,” let’s examine the example we’ve discussed: The N.Y.T.’s non-use of the word “torture” to describe Bush-era interrogation techniques. You say that the use of this word was unnecessary because you described the techniques in detail. That’s fine: but the N.Y.T. (along with other media outlets) did use the word “torture” without reservation for the same techniques — when used by countries that are adversaries of the U.S. That’s what I mean by “nationalism”: making journalistic choices to comport with and advance the interests of the U.S. government.

I don’t mean the term pejoratively (at least not entirely), just descriptively. It demonstrates that all journalism has a point of view and a set of interests it advances, even if efforts are made to conceal it.

On the difference between WikiLeaks and The N.Y.T.: The Guardian (along with The N.Y.T.) has a bitter and protracted feud with Assange (now that they’re done benefiting from his documents), so I personally would not assume their inherent credibility in disputes over what was or was not said in private. From everything I’ve seen, neither Assange nor WikiLeaks has any remote desire to endanger innocent people. Quite the opposite: they have diligently attempted to redact names of innocents, and sought White House input before publishing (which was inexcusably denied). Also, the only time a huge trove of unredacted documents was released was, ironically, when the journalist you mentioned (not one associated with WikiLeaks) published the archive password in his book.

But to the broader point: even if one were to assume for the sake of argument that WikiLeaks’ more aggressive transparency may occasionally result in excess disclosures (a proposition I reject), the more government-friendly posture of The N.Y.T. and similar outlets often produces quite harmful journalism of its own. It wasn’t WikiLeaks that laundered false official claims about Saddam’s W.M.D.’s and alliance with Al Qaeda on its front page under the guise of “news” to help start a heinous war. It isn’t WikiLeaks that routinely gives anonymity to U.S. officials to allow them to spread leader-glorifying mythologies or quite toxic smears of government critics without any accountability.

It isn’t WikiLeaks that prints incredibly incendiary accusations about American whistle-blowers without a shred of evidence. And it wasn’t WikiLeaks that allowed the American people to re-elect George Bush while knowing, but concealing, that he was eavesdropping on them in exactly the way the criminal law prohibited.

As for the new venture we’re building with Pierre Omidyar: we’re still developing what it will look like, how it will be structured and the like, so my ability to answer some of your questions is limited. But I can address a few of the questions you raise.

We absolutely believe that strong, experienced editors are vital to good journalism, and intend to have plenty of those. Editors are needed to ensure the highest level of factual accuracy, to verify key claims, and to help journalists make choices that avoid harm to innocents.

But they are not needed to impose obsolete stylistic rules, or to snuff out the unique voice and passion of the journalists, or to bar any sort of declarative statements when high-level officials prevaricate, or to mandate government-requested euphemisms in lieu of factually clear terms, or to vest official statements or official demands for suppression with superior status. In sum, editors should be there to empower and enable strong, highly factual, aggressive adversarial journalism, not to serve as roadblocks to neuter or suppress the journalism.

We intend to treat claims from the most powerful factions with skepticism, not reverence. Official assertions are our stating point to investigate (“Official A said X, Y and Z today: now let’s see if that’s true”), not the gospel around which we build our narratives (“X, Y and Z, official A says”).

With regard to sources, I really don’t understand the distinction you think you’re drawing between Snowden and more traditional sources.

Snowden came to journalists who work with newspapers that are among the most respected in the world. We didn’t just have “thumb drives” dumped in our laps: we worked for quite a long time to build a relationship of trust and to develop a framework to enable us to report these materials. How is that any different from Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to take the Pentagon Papers to The Times in the early 1970s?

All that said, you raise an interesting and important point about the dangers posed to sources. But it isn’t just people like Manning and Snowden who face prosecution and long prison terms. American whistle-blowers who went to more traditional media outlets — such as Tom Drake and Jeffery Sterling — also face serious felony charges from an administration which, as your paper’s former general counsel, James Goodale, hassaid, has been more vindictive in attacking the newsgathering process than any since Richard Nixon.

And even journalists in this process, such as your paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Jim Risen, face the very real threat of prison.

The climate of fear that has been deliberately cultivated means that, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer put it, the newsgathering process has come to a “standstill.” Many Times national security reporters, such as Scott Shane, have been issuing similar warnings: that sources are now afraid to use the traditional means of working with reporters because of the Obama administration’s aggression. Ubiquitous surveillance obviously compounds this problem greatly, since the collection of all metadata makes it almost impossible for a source and journalist to communicate without the government’s knowledge.

So yes: along with new privacy-enhancing technologies, I do think that brave, innovative whistle-blowers like Manning and Snowden are crucial to opening up some of this darkness and providing some sunlight. It shouldn’t take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting. Reclaiming basic press freedoms in the U.S. is an important impetus for our new venture.

As for whether our new venture will be ideologically homogenized: the answer is “definitely not.” We welcome and want anyone devoted to true adversarial journalism regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, and have already been speaking with conservatives journalists like that: real conservatives, not the East Coast rendition of “conservatives” such as David Brooks. Our driving ideology is accountability journalism grounded in rigorous factual accuracy.

Your apparent contempt for David Brooks is revealing. Presumably what disqualifies him from your category of “real conservatives” is that he puts reason over passion and sometimes finds a middle ground. As Lenin despised liberals, as the Tea Party loathes moderate Republicans, you seem to reserve your sharpest scorn for moderation, for compromise. Look at today’s Washington and tell me how that’s working out.

We agree, of course, that the current administration’s affection for the Espionage Act and readiness to jail reporters who protect their sources have created a hostile climate for investigative reporting of all kinds. We agree that is deplorable and bad for democracy.

There are other things we agree on, too, but this exchange wasn’t meant to be a search for common ground, so before signing off, I’d like to return once more to what I think is our most essential disagreement.

You insist that “all journalism has a point of view and a set of interests it advances, even if efforts are made to conceal it.” And therefore there’s no point in attempting to be impartial. (I avoid the word “objective,” which suggests a mythical perfect state of truth.) Moreover, in case after case, where the mainstream media are involved, you are convinced that you, Glenn Greenwald, know what that controlling “set of interests” is. It’s never anything as innocent as a sense of fair play or a determination to let the reader decide; it must be some slavish fealty to powerful political forces.

I believe that impartiality is a worthwhile aspiration in journalism, even if it is not perfectly achieved. I believe that in most cases it gets you closer to the truth, because it imposes a discipline of testing all assumptions, very much including your own. That discipline does not come naturally. I believe journalism that starts from a publicly declared predisposition is less likely to get to the truth, and less likely to be convincing to those who are not already convinced. (Exhibit A: Fox News.) And yes, writers are more likely to manipulate the evidence to support a declared point of view than one that is privately held, because pride is on the line.

You rightly point out that this pursuit of fairness is a relatively new standard in American journalism. A reader doesn’t have to go back very far in the archives — including the archives of this paper — to find the kind of openly opinionated journalism you endorse. It has the “soul” you crave. But to a modern ear it often feels preachy, and suspect.

I believe the need for impartial journalism is greater than it has ever been, because we live now in a world of affinity-based media, where citizens can and do construct echo chambers of their own beliefs. It is altogether too easy to feel “informed” without ever encountering information that challenges our prejudices.

A few volleys back, you pointed out that polls show the American public has a low opinion of the news media. You declared — based on no evidence I can find — that this declining esteem is a result of “glaring subservience to political power.” Really? It seems more plausible to me that the erosion of respect for American media — a category that includes everything from my paper to USA Today to Rush Limbaugh to The National Enquirer to If-it-bleeds-it-leads local newscasts — can be explained by the fact that so much of it is trivial, shallow, sensational, redundant and, yes, ideological and polemical.

I’ll offer you the last word, and then we can leave the field to commenters, if any have made it this far.