[lbo-talk] Mr. Slick

[David Green]

"So far as I can see, their criticisms are aesthetic rather than political, aimed 
at Greenwald's style rather than substance of what he wrote."
 
Kind of like the sort of criticism that Greenwald referred to in his discussion of Chomsky's critics:
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/23/noam-chomsky-guardian-personality
 
Nobody has been subjected to these vapid discrediting techniques more than Noam Chomsky. The book on which I'm currently working explores how establishment media systems restrict the range of acceptable debate in US political discourse, and I'm using Chomsky's treatment by (and ultimate exclusion from) establishment US media outlets as a window for understanding how that works. As a result, I've read a huge quantity of media discussions about Chomsky over the past year. And what is so striking is that virtually every mainstream discussion of him at some point inevitably recites the same set of personality and stylistic attacks designed to malign his advocacy without having to do the work of engaging the substance of his claims. Notably, these attacks come most frequently and viciously from establishment liberal venues, such as when the American Prospect's 2005 foreign policy issue compared him to Dick Cheney on its cover (a cover he had framed and now

 proudly hangs on his office wall).