[lbo-talk] Mr. Slick

Carl G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Wed May 29 15:52:05 PDT 2013


Greenwald has sinned by fulfilling the late Alex Cockburn's self-description:

"I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and better than anyone who can write faster."

--CGE

On May 29, 2013, at 4:31 PM, David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> "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).
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