This is the story of investigative news in 2014 and probably beyond.
Greenwald also gets rougher treatment than Gellman because of general in-group bias. You can call it cliqueishness, gated community decorum, country club rules, or just raw tribalism, but that bias is the same: Even though both the insider and the outsider may be doing exactly the same thing, the American establishment treats the in-group member with reverence and respect, while attacking the outsider for daring to be on the outside. Gellman is on the inside, because he is publishing through one of the ultimate symbols of political insiderism, the Washington Post. Greenwald is perceived to be on the outside, because he comes out of the world of independent non-corporate media; he has worked with more independent-minded news organizations like The Guardian America; and he has broken stories with foreign news organizations that America’s establishment media snobs often see as unimportant and/or beneath them. All of these factors explain a lot — but on top of it all is one other big difference between these two journalists: Greenwald is publishing his reporting in multiple venues. In doing that, he is exploiting the fact that in the digital age, information’s relevance, salience, and significance is today less contingent on its particular medium and more defined by its actual content. Put another way, he is taking advantage of a Web-centric, social-media-dependent, email-connected world in which every article is just another link. The rise of that new world means that if a reporter like Greenwald, a documentarian like Laura Poitras, or any other journalist digs up news that is significant, it now has a chance to reach a huge audience, whether or not it happens to be transmitted by the old media oligopolies. (via The journalist who hacked the old system | PandoDaily)
Barbara K Iverson 