Glenn Greenwald on Trump and Biden, the Military-Media Complex, and Why He Thinks MSNBC and CNN Are Worse Than Fox

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Glenn Greenwald made a name for himself with pioneering reporting on national security and surveillance, but these days he’s training much of his fire on other targets: media outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

The famed journalist — who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden NSA leaks, founded The Intercept, and then quit The Intercept in a blaze of fury last year to go independent on Substack — joined me to talk about the media on this week’s episode of The Interview podcast.

Greenwald’s wrath is — on this podcast, his Twitter feed and his Substack — reserved for media outlets that are far too deferential to U.S. government agencies. He finds few things more offensive than the doling out of cable news contributorships to figures like former CIA Director John Brennan.

“Mainstream media outlets are far too reliant upon and trusting of the security state agencies that exist in order to deceive and manipulate the public and to disseminate propaganda and lies,” he says.

He thinks those trends were exacerbated by the presidency of Donald Trump, which prompted networks like CNN and MSNBC, and their viewers, to embrace members of Trump’s sworn enemy: the deep state.

On top of that, Greenwald argues Trump prompted liberals to memory-hole the “authoritarianism” of the Bush administration and embrace its cast-offs, merely because they objected to Trump and the crude incivility of his White House.

“To watch these Bush-Cheney operatives — like Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Dowd and so many other ones, the Lincoln Project scumbags, but also all those security state operatives like Michael Hayden at the time, or John Brennan, who was working with the CIA, and especially neocons who were the worst of the worst from that perspective, like Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jen Rubin, Max Boot — now be turned into icons and leaders of American liberalism — I can’t find the words for how damaging and how stunning that is.”

Despite Greenwald’s searing criticism of mainstream media, he is considerably more tolerant of Fox News, which also happens to be the only cable news network that invites him on the air. He explains that one reason for his focus on MSNBC and CNN over Fox News is borne out of a desire to cover things that aren’t receiving attention from the rest of the press.

“The reason I started writing about politics was because I wanted to draw attention to things that I thought were receiving insufficient attention from the rest of the media. If all I wanted to do was just to write about everything that was already being covered by The New York Times or CBS News, there have been no reason for me to change careers and create a blog,” he says.

He also points out that he has been highly critical of Fox News throughout his career, and despite appearing frequently on Tucker Carlson’s show, he previously confronted the Fox News host on his race-baiting rhetoric in an interview.

Still, Greenwald maintains that in the wake of the Trump era, Fox News has emerged a less poisonous news outlet than its rivals: “I do think that the Trump era has transformed liberal outlets like CNN and MSNBC in a way that I do think makes them worse than Fox.”

Those beliefs have prompted laments from progressives about Greenwald as the right has embraced him. Some liberals have accused him of supporting Trump, a charge Greenwald denies. He also described Trump as a “a game show host and a charlatan, a real estate salesman” who “ended up being a very weak president, incapable of doing much of what his rhetoric suggested he intended to do.”

When I asked who he voted for in the 2020 election, he said he doesn’t vote. I also asked if he was optimistic about the Biden presidency.

After all, in the first six months of his administration, Biden tightened restrictions on drone strikes that Trump loosened, froze arms sales to Saudi Arabia and announced that he would end American support for the Saudi coalition, and set a deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan. His Justice Department has pledged that it won’t spy on journalists like the previous administration.

“I see some positive signs from the Biden administration,” Greenwald said, “I’m just keeping a skeptical eye on how much follow through there is.”

We also discussed his reporting on corruption in Brazil, retaliation from the Bolsonaro government, and a shocking armed robbery. Download the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.