Welcome Back In Independence - Why It Was High Time For Glenn Greenwald To Resign From The Intercept

 

 moon of alabama

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald resigned from the Intercept.

The editors of the online journal, which Greenwald had co-founded, tried to censor a recent piece he wrote on the corruption of Joe Biden and on the concerted media effort to suppress that story. Greenwald's contract with the Intercept guaranteed him editorial independence. With its censorship efforts the Intercept breached that contract.

• Greenwald gives his reasons for his decision here.
• He also appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to explain his resignation.
• His exchanges with the Intercept editors is here.
• His now independently published Biden piece:
  THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS.

The Intercept editors replied to Greenwald with a smear piece that does not refute any of the claims he has made:

We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years. It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.

Aheem. No. I have read Glenn Greenwald since, fifteen years ago, he first published at his former blog Unclaimed Territory. He went on to write for Salon and the Guardian. Every Greenwald piece I have read was worth the time. Greenwald's writing has not changed at all. It was the Intercept which soon after it launched already moved away from what it had promised to be and which ended up as useless 'me too' in the librul media landscape.

Others have commented on the resignation:

• Matt Taibbi has written about Greenwald's decision at his substack blog.
• Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism also has a thoughtful take.
• Michael Tracey adds his thoughts in this video.

My first reaction to Greenwald's resignation was a question:

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA - 18:19 UTC · Oct 29, 2020

Why did it take him so long?

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept

The answer is, as Greenwald himself mentions, the financial security the contract with the Intercept gave to Glenn and his family. But that came with a serious reputational price that is no longer worth to pay.

That the Intercept was not the adversarial outlet that it had promised to be at its founding has long been clear. I have written several Moon of Alabama pieces about that.

• Do Not Trust The Intercept or How To Burn A Source, June 6 2017
• The Intercept Mistranslates Assad Speech - Smears Syria As Neo-Nazi, Sept 9 2017
• Intercept Augments Its Anti-Syrian Stable, Oct 4 2017
• Whom Not To Trust - U.S. Government Indicts Another Intercept Source, May 9 2019

Our most seminal piece on the Intercept described it as part of a U.S. government operation which used Silicon Valley billionaires to buy the Washington Post and to create the Intercept with the intent to remove the Snowden papers from the public. The same outlets then went on to create Russiagate:

     From Snowden To Russiagate - The CIA And The Media was published on December 26, 2017.

Snowden had copies of some 20,000 to 58,000 NSA files. Only 1,182 have been published. Bezos and Omidyar obviously helped the NSA to keep more than 95% of the Snowden archive away from the public. The Snowden papers were practically privatized into trusted hands of Silicon Valley billionaires with ties to the various secret services and the Obama administration.

The motivation for the Bezos and Omidyar to do this is not clear. Bezos is estimated to own a shameful $90 billion. The Washington Post buy is chump-change for him. Omidyar has a net worth of some $9.3 billion. But the use of billionaires to mask what are in fact intelligence operations is not new. The Ford Foundation has for decades been a CIA front, George Soros' Open Society foundation is one of the premier "regime change" operations, well versed in instigating "color revolutions".

It would have been reasonable if the cooperation between those billionaires and the intelligence agencies had stopped after the NSA leaks were secured. But it seems that strong cooperation of the Bezos and Omidyar outlets with the CIA and others continues.

After the Snowden rush was over Glenn Greenwald mostly wrote for Intercept Brazil about the corruption under Jair Bolosonaro. He unraveled the fascist efforts to put the former President Lula into jail. As he lives in Brazil Greenwald's reporting came at a high personal risk.

As he will now be freelancing again we can expect him to again concentrate on U.S. politics. He will add to the faithful reporting of Taibbi, Yves Smith, Tracey and other independent writers. It is high time to do so as U.S. media on the leftish side have become incapable of publishing faithful news about their favorite candidate.

In his censored Intercept piece Greenwald points out that the U.S. media and social media suppress any mention of the corrupt behavior of the Biden family in the Ukraine and in China. It his highly welcome that he adds his voice to our debunking of the media falsehoods in those affairs:

The claim that Shokin was not investigating Burisma and its owner is evidently false. As we have pointed out several times Shokin, the prosecutor, confiscated four large houses and a luxury car of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky just ten days before Joe Biden started to press for his firing.

Glenn Greenwald is a well known author. He will be able to gain enough readers to support his now again independent writing. Still independence comes at a price. Besides the income there are a lot of perks that come with writing for a larger outlet. As a lonely independent blogger one is at times missing those. 

But Greenwald's career path only reinforces my determination to continue Moon of Alabama as an independent entity. It is the only way to report and opine without the interference of other interests. My thanks go to you, the readers, who make this possible. 

Posted by b on October 30, 2020 at 13:22 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/10/it-was-high-time-for-glenn-greenwald-to-resign-from-the-intercept-.html#more