571–580 of 1001 posts
Though I shall stay far, far away from that crazy train WSJ calls an "opinion page".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...garbage story... > I want to be clear that I'm not claiming to know the truth as it relates to this story... Make up your mind.
You are trying to frame these two quotes as being contradictory by leaving out the words preceding the first quote. Why would you do that? It should read: "If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story..." Looks like including the entire sentence makes it pretty clear that this isn't a self-contradicting position to take.
Besides, the rest of their post clearly indicates they do think the story is garbage. It looks as if they are giving a spin of legitimacy to that angle as if that was also what editors thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. While this may be true theoretically, it's already been disproven in practice. People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, whether it is a no-name website or a random tweet that goes viral.
Some people certainly do. Whether the majority of voters as a whole do has not been proven to me.
There are still millions of loyal subscribers to the big institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 right". On the other hand, if Greenwald actually does have, or believe he has, a contract which guarantees him immunity to outside editing as he seems to claim ("The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of edit…
A right is only useful if you assert that right. If you look at the email chain that Glenn himself published [1], the correspondence is essentially the editor giving a bunch of suggestions of how to improve the article, then Glenn asserting CENSORSHIP and then the EIC telling him to stop being so rude to his colleagues and then Glenn quitting in a huff. Maybe it's possible that all of the implied messages were exactl…
From the beginning of the first letter: "Overall I think this piece can work best if it is significantly narrowed down to what you first discussed with Betsy — media criticism about liberal journalists not asking Biden the questions he should be asked more forcefully, and why they are failing to do that."
In other words, the editor is asking Greenwald to keep only the part about criticism of liberal journalists, and not publish the allegations against the Bidens. That's not just a suggestion on how to improve the article - it's asking him to remove a substantial part of the article.
> Glenn at no point even brings up what his supposed contractual rights are
As for his contractual rights, he spells those out in his original article: "to publish articles without editorial interference except in very narrow circumstances that plainly do not apply here". And: "my separate contractual right with FLM regarding articles I have written but which FLM does not want to publish itself". Presumably, the editors would already be well aware that his contract allows him to be free of editorial interference - he's one of the founders of The Intercept, not some obscure random journalist that the editors don't know.
The Intercept then turned around sent the NSA the letter, asking them to verify it and clumsily burning their source in the dumbest possible way.
It's unfortunate that Glenn's tactic of screaming "DEBATE ME!" at his editors didn't work, and wish Glenn well as he joins the ranks of the other accursed shills, banished from their homelands and forced haunt Twitter whining about cancel culture or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're propagating disinfo - in the real sense of the word, not the modern Orwellian meaning - with this line of criticism. Because this is a story that has absolutely been vetted, but the issue is all of the left-leaning mainstream media (read: literally everyone except parts of Fox News) have absolutely refused to cover this story. Do you really believe if the same story were about a member of the Trump family, tha…
Take a minute to step back. What do you think is more probable. That every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong, while the one publication is in the right. Or that maybe, just maybe, it's the other way around and NYP published something that has not been well vetted?
But after living through the media's credulity toward the war on terror, credulity toward the war on drugs, credulity toward the satanic panic of the 90s, credulity toward the broken forensics that have gotten innocent people executed, dismissal of Juanita Broaddrick and vilification of Edward Snowden, I'm inclined to believe they are totally capable of a kind of mass group think without any need for a belief in a kind of conspiracy.
Article: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...
Emails: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...
To me, the article seemed rather light on evidence and heavy on speculation. The first email from the editorial staff seemed reasonable, if perhaps a little heavy-handed. It certainly did not seem to warrant Glenn's immediate escalation - his reply reads like an ultimatum:
> But if the Intercept's position is that it won't publish any article by me that suggests that there are valid questions about whether Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing, then I think we should agree that the Intercept's position is that it is unwilling to publish the article I want to publish about the Democratic front-runner. Under my contract, if TI decides it does not want to publish something I want to publish, then I have the right to publish it elsewhere, which is a right I would exercise with this article.
Another excerpt that stood out, this one from Glenn's follow-up email (the 3rd in the chain):
> ...this is the first time in fifteen years of my writing about politics that I've been censored... and it's happening less than a week before a presidential election.
So, he first equates the editorial request to censorship, then emphasizes the closeness of the election in order to justify why that editorial concern should be bypassed.
His entire attitude seems to be that since he doesn't write anything factually incorrect, any attempt to influence or challenge the things his writing tries to imply is equivalent to censorship. A misguided attitude, if not downright disingenuous, IMO. But you can read and decide for yourself.
Honest question: is it just me or is it getting harder to determine what is factual and what is not? It seems like the US has begun to splinter such that there are two different sets of "facts" on many issues, but of course that is not how facts work. Nevertheless, when doing research and investigation is it often hard for me to pin down the truth behind any of the "facts" that are thrown at me, whether that's by the…
Train your ability to model the world and judge whether new information fits with the current model or requires substantial revision. This is a powerful guide to whether the new information is true. Of course, this requires you have the ability to dispassionately analyze information and judge how well events fit together. If you're a partisan or an emotional thinker, IBE won't do you any good. The truth is available for those who are capable of dispassionate analysis. If you're not, then you're doomed to a steady diet of falsehoods and a worldview that diverges from the truth.
- no more headlines like "what nobody (read power structure) will tell you .. the real story behind..." which sours information by building mistrust. People are wrong, don't know, sometimes right but the entire msm is not people lying to you and you (readers) are not chumps. Let's do better.
- the constant bitching, whining, sniveling by media group 1 about media groups 2, 3, 4... Look you gotta something to say, say it. You can argue the other side got it wrong. Say it. And leave it there. What I don't want to read is third grader stuff: Biden wears a hair piece and. NPR and CNN know it but but wont say anything. Whining about claimed tribes and tribe favoritism isn't a journalist's task. It has the side effect seen in article of making the writer small, powerless, and unequal to the task.
The last issue I believe has its roots (maybe not chronological firs but in impact) to rush Limbaugh who successfully got am into politics by claiming mainstream media plays favorites. Fox later did the same on TV.