Shooting Messengers with Wonky Long Bows.

Written By: - Date published: 4:58 pm, March 3rd, 2014 - 5 comments
Categories: accountability, making shit up, Media - Tags: , , , ,

I commented a few weeks back that I’d become bemused by Mark Ames commentaries on Snowdon and the NSA leaks. The reason I became bemused was because Ames used to write stuff I considered informative and worth reading. Now, it seems, he’s on a mad crusade to assassinate the characters of Glen Greenwald and other reporters at ‘The Intercept’, on the grounds that the publisher of First Look Media (Pierre Omidyar) which publishes The Intercept , is a billionaire who makes publicly disclosed donations to foreign groups from time to time.

It really is all rather strange and, well….desperate.

Greenwalds response is here. And Ames’ tag team mate’s response to Greenwald’s response is here.

5 comments on “Shooting Messengers with Wonky Long Bows. ”

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  1. greywarbler 1
    4 March 2014 at 10:46 am

    It is hard to see through the fog of claim and counterclaim but in Ames piece he is shocked so often that it gets in the way of finding out the actual facts.
    I don’t like emotional pieces by journalists supposedly giving news and helpful information. Emotion is for rants at the bottom of the piece or elsewhere.

    It was very useful Bill that you put the link to your earlier comments so one can set this spat in some sort of context.

  2. Instauration 2
    4 March 2014 at 7:29 pm

    Ames has for long been very entertaining in his exile.ru and exiledonline.com pieces.
    Now that the editorial emphasis of exiled has shifted to nsfwcorp.com – it is worth checking there for the irreverent killer pieces of Levine, Ames and Dolan (the latter with some tenure @ Otago).
    The Ames – Omidyar item below precedes the Pando piece by a couple of weeks – gives some context to his cynicism of First Look.;

    https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/

  3. Instauration 3
    4 March 2014 at 7:55 pm

    Sorry Bill, arrow already been shot, in your second hyperlinked word – keep up with the play Instauration!
    Just that I too have always considered Ames stuff worth reading.
    But I can’t understand why someone would think the best way to help Democracy in the Ukraine is to fund an organisation that thumbs it’s nose at the established and OSCE endorsed democratic process.

    http://www.osce.org/node/51888

    Ukraine should simply have waited for the next Presidential election to express the democratic will of the people – Viktor Yanukovych being 4/5ths through his mandate.
    Yanukovych was proposing the status quo – nothing new or ominous.

    • Bill 3.1
      4 March 2014 at 8:40 pm

      I just find it peculiar that a journalist gets attacked because of the activity of the person providing funding, rather than for their journalism. Billionaires don’t tend to be angels. All major media is funded by very rich people. That Greenwald and whoever have editorial independence is the important part. That Ames lies when he claims that Omidyar has Snowdon’s files is also important. That Ames’ own bosses are also dodgy rich guys is, given his argument, pertinent as well.

      I just don’t understand why he’s slinging mud. (He bizarrely referred to Snowdon as a defector somewhere or other too) It’s all madness.

  4. Instauration 4
    8 March 2014 at 8:55 pm

    Why is it ?
    Being prepared for serious debate about the permutations of Crimean secession, there is no evident NZ political forum for discourse.
    Do we not care ?
    Does the left feel vulnerable that supportive comment of the Russian position would reveal dichomatic weakness ?