Edward Snowden copied and leaked information from inside the world’s most protected spy agency, and then fled to Russia, but yet, because a small part of the data he expropriated was provided to a news organisation, journalism conventions readily accord him lone whistleblower status.
Long-running scandal fuels targeted political media. It’s the stuff of obsession, which is the basis of a passionate core audience. More obsession means more passion and a crazy, over-the-top audience. Equally, of course, this obsession leads to less soberness, moderation and disinterest in the media world.
The most significant social pathology of my youth was the generation gap.
One point about understanding Donald Trump is that he is always representing something which has only a casual connection to what he actually is.
Next to financial impropriety, being charged with a reckless pursuit of women is certainly the most damaging thing you can accuse a public person of.
All politicians, no matter how gifted, ultimately depend on circumstances for their success.
Culture has no logic.
The Apple imperative is to build a system that is 100 per cent resistant to any government warrant. The data on your iPhone, no matter how swarmy, corrupt, or dangerous you are, is supposedly safe. That’s also the proposition of Panamanian banking laws.
As a journalist – or as a writer – my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that’s not as close to someone else’s truth, but the truth as I see it.
I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes.
Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.
I have written periodically for the Guardian for more than a decade.
I am old enough to think the word ‘journalist’ is not all that noble a designation. Journalist – that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases – was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer – once the ambition of every journalist – was to be the greater truth teller.
Politics is ultimately not that complicated a profession; it’s where the mediocre distinguish themselves.
I can hardly tell you how boring it is to interview almost every politician among the multitudes I have ever interviewed (journalists can’t say this, because if people knew how boring politicians were they wouldn’t read what we write), how dead the conversation feels, how bald, flat, uninteresting the message is.
Brexit and Trump had upended the fundamental establishment viewpoint that politics was aspirational, that good politics promised progress, generational betterment and ever-expanding world reach.
President Donald J Trump and the U.S. media appear now to be split by deep doctrinal differences – of the constitutional crisis kind. But, virtually up until the split, Trump and the media were as one – a perfect symbiosis.
Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue.
The most characteristic aspects of the Clintons, a political couple who might otherwise largely see themselves as practical-minded centrist consensus builders, is, of course, how much personal hatred they inspire.
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