{"id":5267,"date":"2013-07-16T19:13:16","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T01:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5267"},"modified":"2013-07-16T19:13:16","modified_gmt":"2013-07-17T01:13:16","slug":"from-tom-paine-to-glenn-greenwald-we-need-partisan-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5267","title":{"rendered":"From Tom Paine to Glenn Greenwald, we need partisan journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/jackshafer\/2013\/07\/16\/from-tom-paine-to-glenn-greenwald-we-need-partisan-journalism\/\">Jack Shafer<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I would sooner engage you in a week-long debate over which taxonomical subdivision the duck-billed platypus belongs to then spend a moment arguing whether Glenn Greenwald is a journalist or not, or whether an activist can be a journalist, or whether a journalist can be an activist, or how suspicious we should be of partisans in the newsroom.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not that those arguments aren\u2019t worthy of time \u2014 just not mine. I\u2019d rather judge a work of journalism directly than run the author\u2019s mental drippings through a gas chromatograph to detect whether his molecules hang left or right or cling to the center. In other words, I care less about where a journalist is coming from than to where his journalism takes me.<\/p>\n<p>Greenwald\u2019s collaborations with source Edward Snowden, which resulted in Page One scoops in the Guardian about the National Security Agency, caused such a rip in the time-space-journalism continuum that the question soon went from whether Greenwald\u2019s lefty style of journalism could be trusted to whether he belonged in a jail cell. Last month, New York Times business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin called for the arrest of Greenwald (he later apologized) and Meet the Press host David Gregory asked with a straight face if he shouldn\u2019t \u201cbe charged with a crime.\u201d NBC\u2019s Chuck Todd and the Washington Post\u2018s Walter Pincus and Paul Farhi also asked if Greenwald hadn\u2019t shape-shifted himself to some non-journalistic precinct with his work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jack Shafer: I would sooner engage you in a week-long debate over which taxonomical subdivision the duck-billed platypus belongs to then spend a moment arguing whether Glenn Greenwald is a journalist or not, or whether an activist can be a journalist, or whether a journalist can be an activist, or how suspicious we should be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}