Greenwald On "Smear Campaign" Against Snowden: "Tactic Of The Establishment"
HOWARD KURTZ: Your source, Ed Snowden, on the cover of "Time" magazine.
Lengthy profiles in this morning's "Washington Post" and "The New York Times." Commentators are calling him a hero or a traitor. Are you surprised how personal the coverage of Snowden has gotten?
GREENWALD: Unfortunately, I'm not. One of his big concerns with coming out, really his only one, is that he knows that political media loves to dramatize and personalize things. And he was concerned that the focus would distract away from the revelations about what our government is doing onto him personally.
The other problem is that, whenever there's a whistleblower, somebody who just dissents from our political institutions, the favorite tactic is to try and demonize him and highlight what are his alleged bad personality traits. And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to present him in his own words to the world, so they could form their own impressions before these smear campaigns began.
KURTZ: Which you did in that video. And, in fact, you write that there is a sustained demonization campaign against Ed Snowden. You cite various columnists. But why is it a campaign for some commentators and writers to criticize what Snowden did with these NSA leaks? Others, of course, are defending him?
GLENN GREENWALD: I don't think there's any problem with people who want to criticize what he did on the merits, although I think it's extremely strange that people who call themselves journalists find more contemptible than anything when somebody steps forward and brings transparency to what the government is doing, that's supposed to be their jobs. They should be in the lead cheering for that but so be it. If they decide that disclosure and transparency for the government are bad things, I think it's odd that they call themselves journalists but they have every right to do that.
What I'm talking about is this effort to smear them personally. Remember the first instinct of the Nixon administration when Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers was to break into a psychoanalyst's office to get his psychosexual secrets. David Brooks writes a column, defending him as a loser and a loner. Richard Cohen in "The Washington Post" did the same thing.
It's the tactic of the establishment to try and demean people psyche and personality as a way of discrediting their revelations to the public and distracting attention away from it and that's what you're seeing and that's what I think is illegitimate.
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