GREENWALD, Glenn: "The entity [media] that is designed to be, and endlessly praises itself for being, a check on US government power is, in fact, its most loyal servant”

Glenn Greenwald (anti-racist Jewish American journalist and author, co-founding editor of the web magazine “The Intercept”, and famous for his role in Guardian and thence Mainstream reportage of the material revealed by Edward Snowden) (2013): “The US media, over the last decade (at least), has repeatedly acted to conceal newsworthy information it obtains about the actions of the US government. In each instance, the self-proclaimed adversarial press corps conceals these facts at the behest of the US government, based on patently absurd claims that reporting them will harm US national security. In each instance, what this media concealment actually accomplishes is enabling the dissemination of significant government falsehoods without challenge, and permitting the continuation of government deceit and even illegality.… One of the most notorious examples was in mid-2004 when the New York Times discovered - thanks to a courageous DOJ whistleblower - that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law. But after George Bush summoned to the Oval Office the paper's publisher (Arthur Sulzberger) and executive editor (Bill Keller) and directed them to conceal what they had learned, the NYT complied by sitting on the story for a-year-and-a-half: until late December, 2005, long after Bush had been safely re-elected... The entity that is designed to be, and endlessly praises itself for being, a check on US government power is, in fact, its most loyal servant” (Glenn Greenwald, “US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets”, Guardian, 8 February 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/07/saudi-arabia-drones-media-concealment ).