Greenwald on accountability

Greenwald today (emphasis mine):

That Jeffrey Goldberg of all people is the reporter to whom we turn to understand the contours of the Iran debate would be comical if it weren't so troubling, and it illustrates the broader shield from accountability with which political and media elites have vested themselves.

...

Goldberg is still treated as credible and influential despite his unrepentant Iraq falsehoods because the people who determine credibility and influence did essentially the same thing he did, and are thus incentivized to maintain a Look Forward, Not Backward amnesia, ensuring that nobody pays a price for anything that happened (see, as but one example, Slate's Fred Kaplan -- who was also spectacularly wrong in his Iraq-war-enabling reporting -- gushing this week about Goldberg's brilliance: "the best article I've read on the subject -- shrewd and balanced reporting combined with sophisticated analysis of the tangled strategic dilemmas."). Meanwhile, Goldberg's colleague publicly demands that nobody hold Goldberg's past transgressions against him. No profession is more accountability-free than establishment journalism.

Greenwald last month (emphasis mine again):

With the Nasr firing, here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free "objectivity" is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones.

It simply isn't true that establishment journalism is accountability-free. It is true that establishment journalists are not accountable to the truth, nor to the public (though they might purport to be). But they are accountable to power, as Octavia Nasr and Ashleigh Banfield and Eason Jordan and Phil Donahue, among others, well know. Thus, nobody is held accountable for the disaster of the Iraq war because the Iraq war wasn't a disaster to the powerful! Further, people are rewarded for their contributions to the Iraq war because the Iraq war was good for the powerful!

I'm sure Glenn knows this because he documented it quite well in the 2nd linked piece, but I feel like his piece today suffers for not explicitly making the connection.