Glenn Greenwald targeted by Brazilian government and attacked by fellow journalist
Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, has a personal vendetta against Glenn Greenwald, journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, which has now turned into the Bolsonaro regime charging Greenwald with "cybercrimes" against the Brazilian regime in the course of his reporting on the Bolsonaro regime. From The Intercept:
On Tuesday, A federal prosecutor in Brazil announced a denunciation of American journalist and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald related to his work on a series of stories published on The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil. The denunciation is a criminal complaint that would open the door to further judicial proceedings. It alleges that Greenwald “directly assisted, encouraged and guided” individuals who reportedly obtained access to online chats used by prosecutors and others involved in Operation Car Wash, a years long, sprawling anti-corruption investigation that roiled Brazilian politics.
The denunciation will now go before a judge who can approve or deny the request for charges.
After the charges were announced, Greenwald did an interview with Isaac Chotiner for the New Yorker, where he discussed what it's been like living in Brazil under the Bolsonaro regime:
Have your daily life or experiences changed much since Bolsonaro’s election? Do you feel any sense of fear?
Neither my husband, nor I, nor our children have left our house in the last year without armed security, armored vehicles, teams of security. We get death threats all the time. Our private lives have been dug through in the most invasive ways. Every one of our friends has been offered money to either reveal things about our private lives or make up lies about our private lives. There is a hugely powerful fake-news machine that supports the Bolsonaro movement that has churned out lies about our family and about our children and about our marriage. Obviously, the threats of imprisonment. It has been every single kind of threat imaginable, and it really goes back to 2018, when one of our best friends, Marielle Franco, the black L.G.B.T. city councilwoman, was savagely assassinated in a crime that the Bolsonaro family has subsequently become linked to. [Last March, two police officers were charged in the murder of Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes. Bolsonaro has denounced reporting that he has personal connections to the officers.] So there has been political violence and intimidation in the air for a long time, and we have become the main target of a lot of it.
This answer prompted a critical tweet from journalist Jonathan Myerson Katz:
https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/1220004560896516099
Katz is a frequent critic of Greenwald on Twitter, but this is one of his more nonsensical complaints. For starters, it ignores Greenwald's journalistic record dating back to the Bush regime, including his Pulitzer Prize winning journalism on the Edward Snowden leaks that showed that the U.S. federal government had been illegally spying on American citizens and lying about it under the Bush and Obama regimes, among other disclosures. So the idea that Greenwald doesn't care about authoritarianism in the United States doesn't hold up to any critical inspection.
Interestingly, doing a Google search and a Twitter search for what Katz has said on the subject of the Snowden leaks turns up exactly nothing. So one could credibly question why Katz, in the over 6 years since the Snowden leaks came out, has failed to condemn this facet of U.S. authoritarianism. He can correct me if I'm wrong on that.
Another problem with Katz's critique is that Greenwald explains in the interview why he feels Bolsonaro and Trump represent different types of threats to two very different countries, stating, "It isn’t that I don’t believe basic core freedoms are imperilled [sic] in the U.S. I just see the trajectory and the causes of that differently." He goes on at length on the issue of authoritarianism in the U.S. versus that of Brazil in several answers to different questions from Chotiner that you can read in full at the New Yorker's website.
Katz does respond to one of Greenwald's answers on the subject:
https://twitter.com/katzonearth/status/1220005566891819008?s=21
The sentence Katz is objecting to is, "As I said, it is a genuine, realistic objective of the Bolsonaro movement to usher in a military regime that ruled the country until quite recently," but the fact that there is opposition within Brazil to the Bolsonaro regime's goals doesn't disprove what may or may not be Bolsonaro's "objective" as Greenwald states it. Greenwald's point is that those institutions opposing Bolsonaro's objectives are newer and more fragile than their counterparts in the United States, and that Trump doesn't seem to have the same objective in the first place. There is no journalist in the United States, for example, who has any genuine fear of being assassinated at Trump's command. You don't have to agree with Greenwald's point, but, again, you can't pretend that he didn't make it.
And finally, even if what Katz is saying is true and Greenwald is only reporting on Brazil because he happens to live there, why is that a bad thing? There's a division of labor in journalism just as there is in any other field, because not every journalist can report on every single issue and proximity to an issue is as good a reason as any other to choose to report on it. Greenwald, as an American journalist living in Brazil with a large platform, is uniquely positioned to report on what's happening in Brazil, and to contrast it to what's happening in the United States. In fact, it gives him more credibility on the issue than someone making claims about the Brazilian regime who has no direct experience with it.
Beyond that, what is Katz's record of journalism? From the bio on his official website:
Katz was the Associated Press correspondent in Haiti when he survived and provided the first international alert of the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Soon after he produced the first evidence showing United Nations peacekeepers caused a devastating post-quake cholera epidemic, launching six years of investigation and federal lawsuits. In 2016, Katz obtained the first admission from the U.N. Secretary-General that his organization had played a role in the outbreak and the deaths of more than 10,000 people.
So Katz did what seems to be some solid journalism on an issue that affected him personally. If we applied the standard he's trying to apply to Greenwald we might ask why Katz thinks the Haiti earthquake was worse than, say, the flooding in Pakistan from the same year. There are several possible answers, one being that the earthquake killed more people, but the more obvious being that it affected him personally. Katz happened to be in Haiti for the earthquake. If he had been in Pakistan instead is it plausible that he still would have spent his time reporting on the Haitian earthquake? Maybe, but it seems more likely that he would have reported on what affected him personally and he would have been right to do so because his personal experience would have made for more compelling journalism.
Katz did condemn the Bolsonaro regime's attack on the freedom of the press and express his support for Greenwald, but couldn't help but to attack him in the process as well. It seems to me to be petty jealousy that motivates Katz's attacks on Greenwald given the latter's success, but there also seems to be some projection going on as well because it's pretty clear who has the stronger record of battling authoritarianism between the two of them.