Glenn Greenwald: Journalists have become servants to power

Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional rights attorney, said the media's reaction to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement highlighted how mainstream media journalists had become part of the elite class.

"If you look at, say, a host on MSNBC, what you're actually seeing is a very high ranking employee of what was General Electric and now is Comcast, who makes many millions of dollars a year and has a make-up artist sitting in front of their face for an hour applying all sorts of make-up and another person working on their hair."

He said that journalists had traditionally been people outside of power who acted as watchdogs to aid the powerless, but that mainstream journalists now identified with the powerful.

"It has converted them into watchdogs over power into spokespersons and servants to people in power," Greenwald explained in conversation with Salon founder David Talbot.

He noted that at first the media ignored the "Occupy Wall Street" protest in New York City and then portrayed the protesters as misguided or confused.

"Why is the son of the CEO of Chevron and the fiancé of the second highest ranking executive at Citigroup scornful of Wall Street protesters? It's because this is who our media class is, they are integrated fully into the political class."

Watch video, courtesy of Fora.TV, below: