Matt Taibbi describes enormous price Glenn Greenwald is willing to pay to get the big story out. Taibbi’s article is titled: “Why “Securing Democracy” Will Be Taught in Journalism Schools.” Here is an excerpt:
Lastly: for all the quasi-psychiatric analyses of Greenwald in places like The New Yorker or New York magazine, none of them seem to grasp that being willing to be the object of intense public loathing is now a pre-condition of most serious investigative reporting.
The costs of publishing something really damaging were always high — think of the way the business turned on Sy Hersh after he published the “Family Jewels” story about the CIA in 1975 — but in the digital age, full-scale character assassination is usually just a beginning. The Car Wash story prompted the spreading of a wild forgery purporting to show a secret bitcoin payment by Greenwald to a Russian hacker for the archive. This turned into Bolsonaro’s son Flavio publicly insisting that “Glenn Greenwald may have paid a Russian hacker to invade the cell phones of Brazilian authorities,” followed by accusations of pedophilic predation, followed by Bolsonaro himself speculating that Glenn might need to “spend some time in the slammer here in Brazil.”
America’s social media smear artists can be proud that they share many thematic ideas with the Brazilian fascist. Bolsonaro is too dense to know the word “grooming,” but he insinuated that Greenwald and Miranda were “tricksters” who “adopted boys” to abuse them. Greenwald and Miranda’s lesson: “It is impossible to anticipate all the threats that you will face when confronting powerful governments.”
Even after all this, Greenwald could regularly be seen arguing the story’s merits with every after-midnight three-follower egg on Twitter, which drives some people crazy but is probably a big part of why the hacker-source picked him in the first place. Most whistleblowers are in jams, thrust into impossible situations that have cost them jobs, friends, even their families sometimes. They need someone willing to join them on the hated list, and in the Internet age, the number of such people is small.
