Tag Archives: The Intercept

Glenn Greenwald: ‘Journalists Are Authoritarians’, an Interview with Nick Gillespie

Posted on February 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Glenn Greenwald is the rare journalist who puts his principles before his politics. From Nick Gillespie at reason.com:

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(Leo Correa/A.P.)

Few journalists are more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald, who shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden revelations.

Though unapologetically progressive, the 53-year-old former lawyer never shrinks from fighting with the left. A week before the 2020 election, he quit The Intercept, the online news organization he co-founded in 2014, because, by his account, it refused to run a story unless he “remove[d] all sections critical of” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Denouncing what he called “the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality” that led him to be what he characterized as  “censored” by his own media outlet, Greenwald railed that “these are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom.”

Like a growing number of refugees from more-traditional news organizations, Greenwald took his talents to Substack, a platform that lets independent content creators earn revenue directly from their audiences. He wasted no time lobbing grenades, posting stories and videos with titles like “No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump” and “The Three Greatest Dangers of Biden/Harris: Militarism, Corporatism and Censorship, All Fueled by Indifference.”

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie spoke with Greenwald via Zoom in November. The reporter appeared from his home in Brazil, where he lives with his husband, two children, and numerous dogs. Among other topics, they discussed what Greenwald sees as a generational fight playing out in newsrooms and what he fears from Biden’s presidency.

Let’s start with you leaving The Intercept, this amazing publication that you helped start only a few years ago. What happened?

Well, some of you may recall that when I created The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, it was at the height of the Snowden story back in 2013. I was at The Guardian at the time. And I had received a lot of support institutionally and editorially from The Guardian. But I began noticing, as I worked with other media outlets to report that story, a lot of internal obstacles that they thought were quite difficult to overcome in terms of doing the reporting not just with that story but that, in general, I thought needed to be done.

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Glenn Greenwald Escapes His $100 Million Webzine, by Ron Unz

Posted on November 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

There are a lot of alternative media sites that produce much better material than The Intercept at a fraction of the cost. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

Several years ago during the height of the Edward Snowden/NSA spying scandal, Glenn Greenwald was sometimes described as the world’s most famous journalist. I think that characterization was probably correct, at least if we exclude Julian Assange from consideration.

The American government has emphatically denied that Assange was ever a journalist, now working to prosecute him for espionage and sentence him to life in a maximum security prison. Meanwhile, it did grudgingly concede that protective status to Greenwald. So the fates of the two most famous figures who revealed American crimes to the world sharply diverged, and the year after Assange was forced to desperately seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and begin his long period of miserable confinement to a single room, Greenwald made worldwide headlines as founding editor of a lavishly-funded new journalistic enterprise that captured the imagination of the world.

That venture was First Look Media, established by Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pledged $250 million in financial support. Its first and only visible project has been The Intercept, an outlet intended to provide a home for fearless investigative journalism, free from the pressures and dishonest compromises so often found in traditional media outlets. Greenwald’s two fellow founding editors were Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentarian who had collaborated on the Snowden project, and Jeremy Scahill, whose best-selling books had lacerated the American crimes committed during our disastrous Iraq War, focusing especially upon the huge growth of international mercenary outfits, now euphemistically styled as “military contractors.”

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Greenwald’s Intercept Resignation Exposes The Rot In All Mass Media, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on November 1, 2020 | Leave a comment

If it’s not already, lone wolf journalism may be the only kind you can trust. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has made major waves throughout mainstream and alternative media by resigning from The Intercept, an outlet he co-founded in 2014 with the stated mission of holding power to account with the power of unrestricted journalism.

Greenwald says he resigned because Intercept editors refused to let him publish an article he’d been working on about the mass media’s role in covering up the Hunter Biden October surprise and obfuscating its nature, which he says is a violation of the conditions in his contract for editorial freedom. He also published part of the email exchanges he’d been having with the editors in the lead-up to submitting his notice of resignation.

The email exchanges make it fairly clear that Intercept editors were holding Greenwald’s analysis of the allegations against Joe Biden and his family to a much higher evidentiary standard than they hold any journalist who wants to criticize Trump or promote flimsy Russia conspiracy theories on the platform, and generally creating pressure and inertia to remove anything in the article that might hurt Biden’s election chances. Journalist Matt Taibbi has his own article out on Greenwald’s resignation which contains more information on the email exchanges, and which is very much worth reading.

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Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on October 31, 2020 | 4 comments

High-profile journalists are not allowed to stray from the Democratic party line. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald quit his job this morning. In a bizarre, ironic, and disturbing commentary on trends in modern media, the celebrated reporter was forced to resign after writing a story criticizing both the Biden campaign and intelligence community — only to have it spiked by the editors of The Intercept, the news outlet he co-founded six years ago with the aim of preventing pretty much this exact situation.

“The irony,” Greenwald says, “is that a media outlet I co-founded, and which was built on my name and my accomplishments, with the purpose of guaranteeing editorial independence, is now censoring me in the most egregious way — about the leading presidential candidate, a week before the election.”

Greenwald becomes the latest high-profile journalist to leave a well-known legacy media organization to join Substack. You’ll be able to read the piece rebuffed by The Intercept at his new site here.

In a nutshell, the fatal sequence of events went as follows:

Greenwald, after commenting pointedly about the reaction by press and Democratic Party officials to the New York Post story, reached out to Intercept editor Betsy Reed to float the idea of writing on the subject.

The first hint of trouble came when Reed suggested that yes, it might be a story, if proven correct, but “even if it did represent something untoward about Biden,” that would “represent a tiny fraction of the sleaze and lies Trump and his cronies are oozing in every day.”

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My Resignation From The Intercept, by Glenn Greenwald

Posted on October 29, 2020 | 1 comment

Glenn Greenwald is one of the best journalists in the alternative media. Here is his resignation letter from the Intercept, of which he was one of the founders. From Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.
Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose.

The censored article will be published on this page shortly (it is now published here, and the emails with Intercept editors showing the censorship are here). My letter of intent to resign, which I sent this morning to First Look Media’s President Michael Bloom, is published below.

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Trump Continues Obama’s War On Whistleblowers, Arrests Another Alleged Intercept Source, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

Trump has no more respect for the First Amendment than Obama did. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

“New drone whistleblower at The Intercept,” tweeted the outspoken CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou in October 2015. “For God’s sake don’t let @MatthewACole learn his identity.”

Intercept investigative reporter Matthew Cole has been tied both to Kiriakou’s discovery and prosecution and to that of Reality Winner, who leaked classified documents to The Intercept in 2017. Kiriakou’s comment came after the first in a series of articles was published in The Intercept titled “The Drone Papers” by Jeremy Scahill on October 15, 2015. Today, the alleged source of this report has been arrested, the third alleged Intercept source to have been prosecuted by the Trump administration.

Former US Air Force language analyst Daniel Hale has been arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act and other offenses related to leaking classified documents to the press. Court documents didn’t reveal the identity of the journalist who received the documents, but AP reports that “details in the indictment make clear that Jeremy Scahill, a founding editor of The Intercept, is the reporter who received the leaks.”

“The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government,” Scahill’s 2015 article reads, quoting his source as saying, “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong.”

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Opinion: Fearless Adversarial Journalism Doesn’t Work When You Are Funded By A Billionaire, by Elizabeth Vos

Posted on February 18, 2018 | Leave a comment

Don’t expect a member of the “moneyed interests” to take on the “moneyed interests.” From Elizabeth Vos at disobedientmedia.com:

Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives’ attempt to finally free him from the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.

What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish “fearless, adversarial” reporting, while it is funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein, formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar’s First Look Media, has described endemic problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar’s leadership or lack thereof.

The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in and of itself despicable. It’s that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique “fearlessly.”

Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept’s principals in the wake of the outlet’s hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of the Snowden files.

Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also sent Wikileaks’ own Sarah Harrison to the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.

After the publication of the Snowden files, the UK ceased any attempt to create a legal process by which Assange might have been safely freed, and in the same year pressured Sweden to continue its investigation after the country’s authorities expressed their intent to drop the matter. Likewise, in the wake of Assange’s actions towards Snowden, the Obama White House changed its stance from a reluctant acceptance that prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing might not be possible given that US publishers had also published the same material.

Snowden’s revelations also provided much of the impetus for the launch of The Intercept as an outlet, after Glenn Greenwald departed from The Guardian. In this way, Assange’s story and his fate in the Ecuadorian embassy is inextricably linked with the origin of The Intercept’s rise on the back of the Snowden revelations.

To continue reading: Opinion: Fearless Adversarial Journalism Doesn’t Work When You Are Funded By A Billionaire

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