Journalism is Not Poetry

Transcript of segment from “System Update with Glenn Greenwald,” aired January 26, 2024

Honest Media has often focused on examples of poor journalists, such as our Disinfo Dupes pieces, or topics that the mainstream media has missed covering. However, we also want to highlight examples of good journalists and remind people, including ourselves, of what journalism should be. For this reason, we wish to share with you the transcript of a segment from Glenn Greenwald’s show System Update that recently aired.

Watch the segment here: https://x.com/SystemUpdate_/status/1750912605743468590?s=20 

When I was at The Intercept and it was funded by the billionaire Pierre Omidyar and people thought well, we don’t have to care about things that are beneath us, like trying to get people interested in our writing, trying to develop an audience; I used to always give a speech to them that I knew fell on deaf ears, which is that there’s no such thing as good journalism that people don’t listen to or care about.

Journalism is not poetry which can be ignored for two centuries until it’s discovered under a bed and then poetry experts say, “Wow this is real art.” Poetry and art can be beautiful and of the highest quality independent of the impact that they have. That is not true for journalism.

 Journalism is not an art. It is solely a function of how it can affect society for the better, of how it can expose secrets, make people aware of things that they ought to know about that the powerful are doing. But if you don’t have a way to attract people to be interested in what you are saying – no matter how beautiful your article is, no matter how well constructed and well written, how nice the graphics are. If nobody is reading it, by definition it’s not good journalism.

And that is the problem – one of the problems – with the corporate media that is largely liberal – which is overwhelmingly the vast bulk of what they are, especially in the age of Trump. They all decided that their mission – their overarching mission – was not to inform the public but was to defeat Donald Trump and his movement. And so they all became homogenized. They all became activists. They all became overtly partisan. And they all became copycats of one another. There’s barely any dissent.

Who is a kind of maverick within corporate journalism? The minute there is one they’re gone. Even at Fox News, Tucker Carlson started gradually and then rapidly deviating from standard conservative politics, and despite having the best ratings, he was out. The one thing corporate media does not tolerate is any sort of heterodoxy – any sort of challenge or divergence of views, no real debate possible. You can have debates between Republican and Democratic strategists about horse races – “Oh Nikki Haley is going to win, no she’s not” – but not about the real issues governing how power is dispersed in the United States. 

And then on top of that you have all those media frauds – major media frauds – in which the country has been drowning for years, that come not from 4Chan or Facebook or social media, but from the largest media corporations in the world. And you just look at polling data – and we will show it to you in just a second – that shows that people just hate journalists. They hate corporate journalists. They do not trust them and therefore have no interest in what they’re saying.