Yes. Literally since his Salon days. He also wasn’t much of a lawyer, and his porn and sex tourism businesses were pretty shitty and exploitative too.
He was never really much of a journalist. He was a columnist(Ie, writing opinion and giving perspective on current events, not reporting news), and most of his respect came from people attributing stories to him that he didn’t do the hard work on. Like the Snowden story, which he blew off because he couldn’t be arsed with the security measures Snowden wanted, and was only saved when Snowden copied in Laura Poitras, and she went “Holy shit, this is huge, what the fuck Glenn”. She then both brought in Ewen MacAskill(Guardian’s defence and intelligence correspondent), and started really pushing the story forward, dragging Glenn along like a balloon on a string because he was basically just the bait to keep snowden on the hook, since Snowden reached out to him first.
Fun facts - he also never got a Pulitzer, despite his claims. The Guardian won that Pulitzer, and he keeps claiming it as his own, despite it not being an individual prize, and despite being the smallest part of that team.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. A lot of his image for a while was based on basically three things: 1)Goodwill from the Snowden disclosures, 2)People naively assuming that the reason he hated liberals was because he was left-wing(He’s always been a pretty right-wing Ron Paul Libertarian), and 3)basically people being willing to look the other way on all the shitty stuff while singing his praises, because for quite a while there, even milquetoast Bernie support could cover a truly astounding amount of sins.