I have great respect for Bill Keller, but Greenwald makes the much stronger case here. Keller suggests that news that is trivial, shallow, sensational, redundant tends to be the same as news that is ideological and polemical - I'm surprised that Greenwald did not list the many outlets that have produced seminal journalism in the past century (e.g., Orwell at Tribune, the neo-conservatives at Commentary. Hitchens at The Nation), which seem to undermine the usefulness of the correlation that Keller claims.
One passage (from Greenwald, which Keller does not argue with), sticks out: The climate of fear that has been deliberately cultivated means that, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer put it, the newsgathering process has come to a “standstill.” Many Times national security reporters, such as Scott Shane, have been issuing similar warnings: that sources are now afraid to use the traditional means of working with reporters because of the Obama administration’s aggression. Ubiquitous surveillance obviously compounds this problem greatly, since the collection of all metadata makes it almost impossible for a source and journalist to communicate without the government’s knowledge.
One passage (from Greenwald, which Keller does not argue with), sticks out: The climate of fear that has been deliberately cultivated means that, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer put it, the newsgathering process has come to a “standstill.” Many Times national security reporters, such as Scott Shane, have been issuing similar warnings: that sources are now afraid to use the traditional means of working with reporters because of the Obama administration’s aggression. Ubiquitous surveillance obviously compounds this problem greatly, since the collection of all metadata makes it almost impossible for a source and journalist to communicate without the government’s knowledge.