Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald's quote about the U.S. government

July 3, 2013 WaPo story

The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, breaker of stories on the National Security Agency (NSA), recently made the following declaration to the New York Times’s David Carr about his approach to his work: “All activists are not journalists, but all real journalists are activists.”

In an interview this week with Fox News’s Eric Bolling, for example, Greenwald said,

“I think what the Obama administration wants and has been trying to establish for the last almost five years now, with the unprecedented war on whistleblowers that it is waging, is to make it so that everybody is petrified of coming forward with information about what our political officials are doing in the dark that is deceitful, illegal or corrupt.”

Had Greenwald been from the New York Times or NBC News, he would have coded the message above in middleoftheroadese — something like the following: “The record shows that the Obama administration has taken an aggressive approach toward those who leak national-security information, and, frankly, critics are split on whether that’s a necessary step for the protection of national security or whether it will limit press freedoms in the United States. It’ll be interesting to see how the Edward Snowden case unfolds.”

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