General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News? - Bill Keller/NYT [View all]He wont. He's too much of a megalomaniacal narcissist; he's going to face the Faustian bargain of all people like GG in media: "Is is it worse to be boring or a liar?"
They always decide that boring is worse and so they become more and more detached from the truth until they have the kind of credibility Glenn Beck enjoys. Why it happens is simple: Very little of current affairs particularly where it concerns foreign affairs and civil liberties is Snowdens and Assanges, war crimes and Wikileaks; most of it is sausage-making and the dry-bread of nebbishy analysis of diplomatic craft and constitutional law. It's 6-player blindfold Chinese checkers, not chess and certainly nothing interesting to watch or read. So to keep eyeballs, you chase every crackpot theory and scheme and mysterious stranger who claims to have scandal at hand and you punch them up to be more interesting still. If it bleeds, it leads until you're living by the one-line media criticism of The Man who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend". One day you wake up and all your dreams, aspirations and integrity is the dull smouldering ash of four-color-print newsstand tabloids screaming about "bat boy!" and Taitian "Obama conspiracies."
To put it another way, he won't be because he lacks the integrity to be boring.