Has Greenwald, Inc. Peaked?

Last edited Thu Sep 4, 2014, 09:36 PM - Edit history (1)

or about a year, the global enterprise you might call Glenn Greenwald, Inc. has been taking off like a red-hot app. The question now is whether the sudden rise of Greenwald—a 47-year-old lawyer-cum-activist from Queens by way of George Washington University—will soon follow the course of most Information Age startups: Boom. Bust. Bye.



Only a year and a half ago, Greenwald was a left-wing blogger who was known mainly to a devoted band of online followers for his invariably harsh view of American national security policy and fierce advocacy of openness in government. Among those who was said to follow Greenwald’s writings was a discontented digital operative working deep inside what both he and Greenwald viewed as a Big Brother-style surveillance state. That guy’s name was Edward Snowden.

The rest is history. Or journalism. Or treason. Or something. Starting in June 2013 , the revelation that Snowden had handed over to Greenwald — along with the Washington Post and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras— a huge trove of documents detailing National Security Agency operations amounted to the biggest breach of official intelligence secrets in history.



Today, riding on his international fame—a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards— Greenwald is still a one-man exposure industry whose main stock in trade remains these same “Snowden archives.” He continues to drizzle out fresh revelations about the NSA based on Snowden’s documents, including some neatly timed with the rollout of his book, No Place to Hide, in May. He has started up a digital magazine called The Intercept from his base in Brazil—with 20 journalists hired so far, and 30 more hires to come, he says—thanks to backing from a new $250 million company called First Look Media founded by billionaire admirer Pierre Omidyar, the French-Iranian-American creator of eBay. Omidyar and Greenwald also have launched a new foundation to help journalists in legal trouble, the Press Freedom Litigation Fund, the first grantee of which is Greenwald’s Brazilian live-in partner, David Miranda. Though he’s not a journalist, Miranda is suing the British government over the seizure of Greenwald’s documents, which the Brazilian was trying to carry to his partner by going through London’s Heathrow Airport in August of last year.


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/glenn-greenwald-inc-peaked-110576.html?hp=l4#.VAiwIaTD9zl

And, as if on cue, Greenwald gets into a pissing match with Ken Dilanian of the L.A. Times for doing the same thing he does...

EDIT: As expected, Glenn's buddies don't take long to spring to his defense -- I present to you Erik Wemple's response (Funny that he calls this a "hit piece" when the actual criticism is quite mild: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/09/04/7-problems-with-politico-magazines-hit-piece-on-glenn-greenwald/