Damn. Glenn Greenwald dismantles NYT's John Burns regarding Wikileaks

[Enrique]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/27/burns/index.html

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Then there's this:

The profile, Burns said, is "an absolutely standard journalistic endeavor that we would use with any story of similar importance in the United States" . . . . Burns added that the Times is "not in the business of hagiography" but in the "business of giving our readers the fullest context for these documents" and the Assange's motivations. "To suggest that doing that is some kind of grotesque journalistic sin, and makes me a sociopath," Burns said, "strikes me as pretty odd."

This is the heart of the matter. What Burns did to Julian Assange is most certainly not a "standard journalistic endeavor" for The New York Times. If anyone doubts that, please show me any article that paper has published which trashed the mental health, psyche and personality of a high-ranking American political or military official -- a Senator or a General or a President or a cabinet secretary or even a prominent lobbyist -- based on quotes from disgruntled associates of theirs. That is not done, and it never would be.

This kind of character smear ("he's not in his right mind," pronounced a 25-year-old who sort of knows him) is reserved for people who don't matter in the world of establishment journalists -- i.e., people without power or standing in Washington and, especially, those whom American Government authorities scorn. In official Washington, Assange is a contemptible loser -- the Pentagon hates him and wants him destroyed, and therefore the "reporters" who rely on, admire and identify with Pentagon officials immediately adopt that perspective -- and that's why he was the target of this type of attack. After I wrote my criticism of this article on Monday, I was contacted by Burns' co-writer, Ravi Somaiya, who defended this article from my criticisms. I agreed to keep the exchange off-the-record at his insistence -- and I will do so -- but that was the question I kept asking: point to any instance where the NYT ever subjected Someone Who Matters in Washington to this kind of personality and mental health trashing based on the gossip and condemnation of associates. It does not exist.

As for Burns' pronouncement that "the Times is 'not in the business of hagiography'," he should probably remind himself of what he himself wrote about the Right Honorable Gen. Stanely McChrystal, after Burns had attacked Michael Hastings for daring to publish the General's own statements that reflected badly on him. Here's what Burns wrote while falling all over himself in reverence of this Great American Warrior:

ll that I know about General McChrystal suggests that he is, just as the Rolling Stone article suggested, a maverick of high self-belief and intensity, uncautioned in his disregard for the conventional, but for all that a soldier with a deep belief in the military's ideals of "duty, honor, country." Though handed what many would regard as a poisoned chalice in the Afghanistan command, he had worked relentlessly to rescue America’s fortunes there. . . . grave misfortune it is, considering what is lost to America in a commander as smart, resolute and as fit for purpose as General McChrystal . . . .

General George S. Patton Jr. . . . a man who was regarded at the time, like General McChrystal in Afghanistan, as the best, and the toughest, of America's war-fighting generals. . . . In Iraq, we barely glimpsed General McChrystal, then running the super-secret special operations missions that were crucial in turning the tide against Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency under General Petraeus’s command; but he, too, continued the pattern of access after he took command in Afghanistan in June 2009. . . .

Reporters, of course, do best when they keep their views to themselves, to retain their impartiality. But it's safe to say that many of the men and women who have covered General McChrystal as commander if Afghanistan, or in his previous role as the top United States special forces commander, admired him, and felt at least some unease about the elements in the Rolling Stone article that ended his career.

It seems Burns wrote that while standing and saluting in front of a large wall photograph of the General, or perhaps kneeling in front of it. The only hint of a criticism was quite backhanded: that McCrystal "blundered catastrophically" by failing to exercise sufficient caution when speaking to an Unestablished, Unaccepted, reckless, low-level loser like Michael Hastings, who simply did not know -- or refused to abide by -- the General-protecting rules that Real Reporters use when venerating covering for covering top military officials. And despite writing 2,700 praise-filled words about McChrystal, Burns never once mentioned little things like his central involvement in the Pat Tillman fraud or the widespread detainee abuse in Iraq under his command, until a reader asked about it, and only then, he mentioned it in passing to dismiss it. Burns' view of McChrystal is the very definition of journalistic hagiography.

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