Glenn Greenwald resigns from The Intercept
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| Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of, and censored by, The Intercept // photo by David dos Dantos |
In his resignation letter, he excoriated the editors of The Intercept, a news outlet he co-founded following the Edward Snowden story he broke, citing a censorious environment among the editors at the news outlet, an environment he sought to keep away since its founding. He says that while the original founding was to cultivate and provide a platform to journalists that may have been bullied from covering certain angles to news stories elsewhere like much of the corporate media, The Intercept has transformed into the desert that the founders had set out to provide an oasis from.
Though the straw that broke the camel's back was the editors demanding a structural change in his recent piece about the Hunter Biden emails, he says this has been going on for a while. He appears particularly miffed about The Intercept alleging he had a role in the organization's complete blunder in protecting a source, Reality Winner, when she came forward with documents concerning potential cybersecurity breaches in the voting system when he had nothing to do with it. He also cites the mistreatment of his colleague, Lee Fang, who had been bullied by his peers at The Intercept into apologizing for interviewing a black person who was critical of the violence in protests. He additionally cites the suppression of regular reporting of Julian Assange of Wikileaks due to political disagreements as well as posting numerous false stories about Russiagate, including the wildly false accusation of the Biden emails being "Russian misinformation."
The Intercept's editors responded with their own excoriating and, quite frankly, unprofessional article, a piece rife with sarcasm and ad hominems against a co-founder. In it, they claim to refute the claim of political bias by invoking their record of publishing articles critical of Joe Biden, but as Reason points out, their articles critical of Joe Biden were more prolific during the presidential primaries when he was battling Bernie Sanders than after receiving the nomination. While their claim that they were trying to keep the level of accuracy high on Greenwald's piece may have merit, their inference in the same sentence of Greenwald's bias by parroting Trump's unfounded claims is rather dubious since Greenwald is, by no stretch of the imagination, a conservative or Republican.
Reading the draft that Greenwald submitted to the editors at The Intercept, Greenwald is correct that the demands of the editors to delete the assertions concerning the Biden documents and potential corruption would structurally change the article, with half of it to be deleted. Additionally, the claim that the parts requested for deletion are just repeating Trump's claims appears to be baseless as well. The sourcing in the article appears to be entirely apart from Trump, with the exception of one section, about being able to verify the authenticity of the Biden emails. But this reasoning for deletion is very strange, given that the authenticity has been verified by other sources so additional citations should suffice. Plus, the section of the article was about an interview of Trump on 60 Minutes, so of course it would source Trump in the claim. Maybe the editors were talking about a different section, but that was the only part I saw that explicitly referenced Trump's thoughts.
It's a bizarre state of affairs when the co-founder of a journal is ousted by its editors over censorship, then a hit piece was written against him from that very outlet. It's too bad. He is one of the best journalists we have today.
