Glenn Greenwald, the advocate-journalist who broke the story of the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, argues the press is steering the American public toward supporting another Middle Eastern war in the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130.
“The lesson that the American media supposedly learned after the 9/11 attacks was allowing political, military, and intelligence officials to make all kinds of claims without scrutinizing and questioning and pushing them is a really destructive thing to do,” Greenwald said Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
“It propagandizes the population. It leads to things like torture, Guantanamo, the attack on Iraq. I think you’ve seen that exact behavior but even worse from the overwhelming majority of the media since the Paris attack,” Greenwald said.
Greenwald specifically targeted the station he was appearing on.
“I think that CNN has unfortunately led the way in this,” Greenwald said. “You’ve had one intelligence official with the CIA or formerly with the CIA after the next, gone on air and made all kinds of extremely dubious claims that print journalists have repeatedly documented … are totally false.”
“There’s been this really alarming anti-Muslim climate cultivated in this country not just by Republican candidates … but by the American media itself,” Greenwald said. “A CNN reporter stood up in President Obama’s press conference and said, ‘Why can’t we take these bastards out?’ Essentially, pushing the president toward war in Syria. This is the kind of opinionating that comes from CNN all the time. You’re allowed to demonize Muslims.”
Greenwald was referring to CNN anchor Jim Acosta’s line of questioning to President Obama in a press conference on November 16.
“I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS,” Acosta said. “I guess the question is — and if you’ll forgive the language — is why can’t we take out these bastards?”
