During the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama attacked the Bush administration for its abuse of the state secrets privilege. The Bush administration was the first to argue that cases could be dismissed entirely because they would require the disclosure of state secrets — previously that privilege could be used to suppress certain sensitive evidence, but not to toss out a case entirely.

And yet, when President Obama took office, his administration continued to use the policy exactly as the Bush administration had, much to the chagrin of civil rights activists.

Last night, Time magazine’s Michael Scherer asked Obama to address the discrepancy between his campaign position and the position his administration has taken. Dan Froomkin has the full question and answer. This alone was a huge win — now Obama is on the record with his position on state secrets.

As it turns out, Obama’s answer was deficient and somewhat dishonest, see Glenn Greenwald’s analysis for more. At least now, though, we’re having a conversation. Obama has taken a position, that position is somewhat at odds with reality, and so we can see how those reality and that position are reconciled as time goes on.

Roger Ebert wrote a remarkable recollection of the culture of the newsroom that any fan of newspapers should read. The future of the newspaper business is bleak, but its past is indisputably glorious.

I, like everyone else on the Internet (it seems) watched Jon Stewart pummel Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last night. At the end, Jon said, roughly, I hope that was as uncomfortable for you as it was for me. It was. But an aversion to that kind of discomfort is a disease that prevents big problems from being solved.

I had in mind a different post about the show, explaining that Jon Stewart’s criticism of how Jim Cramer and CNBC cover Wall Street describe the overall failure of journalism across the board, but Glenn Greenwald wrote that post for me.

So instead I want to talk about Glenn Greenwald and the necessity of feeling uncomfortable.

I voted for Barack Obama, and beyond that I donated money to his campaign and went door to door to encourage other people to vote for him as well. I really want him to succeed because I invested in his success.

Here’s the thing — sometimes President Obama lets me down, and I know this in large part because I read Glenn Greenwald’s blog. It’s not very comfortable for me to read about how the guy I really, really wanted to be our President does things I really think he shouldn’t, but I consider it to be necessary medicine. Greenwald is fighting the noble fight — criticizing a President who I’m sure he in large measure supports, because principles are more important than the person or the political value of a united front.

People are too unwilling to face discomfort. Journalists don’t want to make the people they interact with on a daily basis squirm. People want to read that the politicians they support are fighting the good fight. And this reaches far beyond politics as well. Java programmers didn’t want to read that C# had a lot of nice language features that improved on weaknesses in Java. People in general seem to prefer to remain ignorant of the practices of industrial agriculture in the modern world.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it also has negative externalities.

I’m not writing this to congratulate myself. For me, the challenge is in asking the uncomfortable questions directly when they need to be asked. I’d always rather try to figure out those answers myself, but in many cases there’s value in the asking.

Jay Rosen on the role the Internet plays in the media sphere:

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized—meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the “echo chamber,” which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what’s really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.