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My Resignation from the Intercept

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#51

"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" That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is ri…

>If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election

Nobody disputes why this story was dropped at the time it was dropped. It's a common tactic that has been practiced for decades by political campaigns and even media outlets. Heck, there is a reason why the Kavanaugh story broke when it did. There is a reason why the NY Times published Trump taxes when they did.

What's different is that all of center-left/left news establishment decided that they are going to get Biden elected and protect him from any negative news.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#54

Greenwald has really fascinated me the past decade. He was on track to being one of the most prolific reporters on the planet, and he has gone really down this weird victimhood "censorship" path. Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.

who defines what is misinformation and by what standard? it seems any opinion that doesn't conform to mainstream ideologies are now labeled as misinformation. the whole point of his article he published is you don't shut down opinions and works of other journalists just because you don't agree with it as an editor.

By way of example, his description of PRISM was factually incorrect to the point of making the people who read his articles more misinformed than people who hadn't. There is nothing ideological in what is a statement of fact and what is not, and Greenwald gets in trouble on that basic point.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#55
post #11
post #5

We are witnessing the biggest concerted censorship effort in the history of the USA. One for the history books, depending on who gets to write it in the future. Regardless of whether or not you believe on Tony Bubolinsky, you should at the very least have the opportunity to hear him and make up your own mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zLfBRgeFFo

In what sense? The media has always censored information that can't be verified. Nytimes doesn't publish articles about flat earth theory. Even Fox News actual News division refuses to run these Hunter Biden stories. Same thing with Seth Rich, or ideas about crisis actors. How is this different?

You've got a hard full of emails, texts, and nasty pictures, people on the receiving end of the emails that have verified some of them, the head of one of these companies Hunter Biden set up to do business with China coming forward on the record, and the Bidens haven't even denied that the emails are real. This is mountains more evidence than ever existed for Russia or Ukraine or all the other nonsense that has passed for news during the past four years. This bizarre dodge of saying "it can't be verified" is nonsense. There's plenty here for a journalist to do some journalism on to try and verify.

Its not that it can't be verified, it's that mainstream news doesn't want to verify it and be blacklisted by their peers for taking out Biden. They value their standing in their fancy social circle more than doing their job with integrity. It's pure corruption.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#56
post #7

Greenwald has really fascinated me the past decade. He was on track to being one of the most prolific reporters on the planet, and he has gone really down this weird victimhood "censorship" path. Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.

Exerpt: > refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden

Was that the specific mandate? Nothing critical of Joe?

Or was it that all the sections in the article critical of Joe were unsubstantiated.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#57

"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" That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is ri…

>If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election Nobody disputes why this story was dropped at the time it was dropped. It's a common tactic that has been practiced for decades by political campaigns and even media outlets. Heck, there is a reason why the Kavanaugh story broke when it did. There is a reason why the NY Times published Tru…

Except it wasn’t news.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#58
post #6

The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press. Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to…

What do you make of the idea that independent journalists on the web being the future?

They are an alternative, but not a substitute for institutional journalism.

News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#59
post #6

The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press. Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to…

Why would Substack solve this? It's just a more refined Medium with better monetization opportunities. Being on Substack doesn't mean the author is trustworthy, only that they have content that people will engage with (and potentially pay for), which is still the same KPI you're referring to.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. It may turn out that the "V" in MVP here necessarily required monetization, for those who see journalism as the search for truth, not the search for clicks, to take the leap of going indie. Certainly if that trend continues we ought to expect larger organization - where solo-indies merge into mini-guilds, and so on, hopefully to the point where these become large organizations comparable to the 'old' media companies before they shifted away from journalism. Certainly Taibbi and Greenwald could be the first "dyad" to collaborate within this alternative media universe, so that might give us a clue of what organizing principles this new world may operate under, with these new incentives.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#60
post #25

Greenwald has really fascinated me the past decade. He was on track to being one of the most prolific reporters on the planet, and he has gone really down this weird victimhood "censorship" path. Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.

What leads you to believe that he was trying to spread misinformation? The suppression of criticism leveled against Joe Biden or any other individual in public service is a grave danger to democracy. I commend Mr. Greenwald for standing up to censorship.

Please entertain the possibility for a moment, whether you agree with it or not, that this story was indeed planted by a foreign nation for the specific purpose of manipulating our election. Do you then believe that it is responsible to willfully help spread it and blast it all over every social media site? Aren't you doing the foreign nation's bidding then?

If you do agree there, then where would you draw the line for blocking such information being spread? Is the fact that the reporter at the singular publication in all the the US willing to report on it didn't want their name on it worry you? The fact that the only evidence comes from some random Trump supporting repairman in some random state not worry you? The fact that unreliable (self-exposing to 15yo) people such as Giuliani are attached to the story not worry you? What about our own intelligence services saying that foreign nations have been trying to use said person to manipulate our election?

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