NBC Journalist: 'I'd Almost Arrest Glenn Greenwald'

***UPDATE: Sorkin apologized to Greenwald Tuesday, saying he didn’t mean what he said.

Along with NBC’s David Gregory and Chuck Todd, you can now add CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin to the list of journalists (and NBC journalists) floating the idea that one of their own, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, has done something illegal in reference to his work with NSA leaker Edward Snowden:

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My personal suggestion to Gregory, Todd, and Sorkin is that before they throw these kinds of baseless accusations around, they might want to clean up their own backyard. With their selectively edited videos and audio, NBC News is currently a hotbed of journalistic malpractice unlike anything I have ever seen before.

Greenwald responded to Sorkin and Gregory via the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple:

I’ve purposely made myself an outsider by very aggressively and harshly criticizing not just the culture itself but the most prominent members of it, including David Gregory and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who this morning suggested on CNBC that I be arrested.*

Some of what is driving this hostility from some media figures is personal bitterness. Some of it is resentment over my having been able to break these big stories not despite, but because of, my deliberate breaching of the conventions that rule their world.

But most of it is what I have long criticized them for most: they are far more servants to political power than adversarial watchdogs over it, and what provokes their rage most is not corruption on the part of those in power (they don’t care about that) but rather those who expose that corruption, especially when the ones bringing transparency are outside of, even hostile to, their incestuous media circles.

They’re just courtiers doing what courtiers have always done: defending the royal court and attacking anyone who challenges or dissents from it. That’s how they maintain their status and access within it. That’s what courtiers to power, by definition, do.

The only thing Greenwald might not have right is that if Bush or any Republican were president, he would currently be enjoying ticker tape parades thrown by his colleagues, not scorn.

While NBC commits seven outright acts of journalistic malpractice in open service to Obama and the State, it is only those who dare ding Obama or the Cause that find themselves facing the media’s wrath: Bob Woodward, Howard Kurtz, and now Greenwald.

 

 

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC