Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Resignation from the Intercept

greenwald.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#121

Post by ehsankia »

StavrosK wrote: post #63
bachmeier wrote: post #20

"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…

Are you of the opinion that all story publication should stop in the days before the election? If not, how do you reconcile that with this? Your argument seems to be based on an assumption that the story was garbage, with the evidence being that the editor pulled it, which begs the question.

Don't many countries (such as France) actually have such a mandate? From my understanding it does work fairly well. That being said, even if you don't entirely stop, there should at the very least be a higher bar for fact checking, not a lower one. This story doesn't even pass the normal level of fact checking done by almost every single publication in the US.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#122

Post by uncoder0 »

1980phipsi wrote: post #29

Is there anything worth reading by the Intercept excepting Greenwald?

That was the only reason I went there. There podcast also went off the deep end over the past few months and has been terrible I used to love it and listen to it regularly since 2016ish.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#123

Post by jdhn »

gkoberger wrote: post #3

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 determined it was misinformation? Nobody on the Biden campaign has said that the emails are false. The media has just decided that it's "Russian misinformation", which is increasingly looking more like a justification for not investigating valid news that may paint their preferred candidate in a badl ight.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#124

Post by dylan604 »

RspecMAuthortah wrote: post #69
lern_too_spel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK so if journalists have to get 100% of what they say accurate then 99% of what we see reported today are "factually incorrect" and there won't be anyone left in the profession. Same goes with your point saying more opinion leads to more misinformation.

if that meant that we had to force the slate clean and start over with proper journalistic standards, i'd kind of be okay with that. if it also means that we could eliminate network talking heads opinion shows from being listed under a News banner, i'd be even more okay with it.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#125

Post by gfodor »

ehsankia wrote: post #60
jtdev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

There was a time when journalists cared about the truth, and what the truth requires is the disclosure of facts and objectivity. The proper way to publish this is to describe the evidence, and the reasons as to why the evidence may be falsified, and do continual reporting as the story develops to keep the public informed how likely or not the information is false.

The alternative of suppressing it based upon supposition and a "gut check" says very, very clearly: we don't trust the public to make up their minds, or, worse, we think this might be true but it would run counter to our interests if people knew about it. Saying something like this is "misinformation by the Russians" when it is not denied nor has evidence been presented as such is what we used to call "believing in conspiracy theories." Sometimes conspiracy theories are true, and the facts prove them. But journalists shouldn't make publishing decisions based upon conspiracy theories without evidence supporting those theories.

In any case, both of those behaviors run counter to the principles of journalism, which is predicated on the idea that preferring to share imperfect information, accurately described, is ultimately what leads to an informed citizenry, even if some of that information turns out to be misleading or wrong in the end.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#126

Post by zarkov99 »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #31
gfodor wrote: 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?

It won't work, we will simply just have a collection of disparate, narrowly focused and financially limited sources, from which anyone can draw to reinforce whatever view of the world they already have. You need an instution with the resources to look deep and wide and enough of a reputation that people will listen when it reports something they do not like.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#127

Post by gameswithgo »

bachmeier wrote: post #20

"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…

Greenwald has never operated in a way that concerns itself with the consequences of actions. The philosophy is "we report, freely, what we believe to be true and fair, and whats comes of it does not matter".

I am personally torn on this kind of philosophy. Would that everyone was like this, but since they are not, surely there are times when too much is on the line to behave this way?

He explicitly talks about this attitude in this interview: https://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12853236/glenn-greenwald-trump...

But it is a bit weird that here we are again, on the cusp of another trump presidency, and Greenwald swoops in to Trump's aid, again. Not sure how I feel about it.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#128

Post by boc »

gotoeleven wrote: post #55
pfisch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 passe…

This is false. The people making the claims are refusing to turn over the hard drive or original emails to the journalists who are trying to verify the story.[1]

I can also claim that I have a hard drive with incriminating information on it. Nobody should run a news story on it unless they too can see the evidence for themselves. This is journalism 101.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/rudy-giuliani-giv...

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#129

Post by threatofrain »

Nacdor wrote: post #42
gkoberger wrote: post #3

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.

Do you have anything to support this accusation? I've been watching him closely for several years and it seems the mortal sin he committed was his failure to join the Russiagate bandwagon. In the end that was clearly the correct choice, but the liberal media no longer tolerates anyone who has the audacity to undermine their chosen narrative.

Tucker Carlson just announced on Twitter that he has lost critical documents relating to the alleged wrongdoings of Hunter Biden.

This was moments before Glenn Greenwald's resignation.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#130

Post by pfisch »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #40
pfisch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is information that is trivially verifiable and has been verified by numerous sources. There's already been leaks such as a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack while receiving a footjob (edit: if this seems crude, I'm mentioning it as something that makes it very clear that the info is real) so unless you think it's a deepfake - or that they hacked it from his iCloud account and made up the story about the lapto…

I didn't think the story was about Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with girls. That doesn't seem like it qualifies as a story to me that needs to be on national news because who cares? I also do think there is like an 80% chance they hacked his iCloud account though.

I think that there is no source for this information, which is required for hard journalism. Like who is standing by this information and saying it is genuine? I think it bears all the hallmarks of Russian intelligence, and they even did this exact same thing in France.

The entire "story" here is unclear. How is Joe Biden involved? Can you even prove these business deals are real? You can't even verify the contents of these emails are real. Journalists aren't even being allowed to verify the hard drive.

The tax returns did have a real source that the journalists themselves verified. That isn't possible here because the story of the laptop is wildly unbelievable.

https://www.newsweek.com/wsj-newsroom-found-no-joe-biden-rol...

The media isn't ignoring this, but it is incredibly sketchy.

Post reply on HN