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

931–940 of 1001 posts

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#931

Post by RoutinePlayer »

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…

Agree, but maybe "the market" will NOT correct this error, maybe we need some key regulations, or maybe we need a little more infusion of money to public-funded journalism?

Call me a pessimist, but this core issue is a threat to democracy, and I'm not sure we can rely entirely on "the market" to auto-correct itself.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#932

Post by RIMR »

marcusverus wrote: post #411
ggggtez wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the kind of story that can break someone's journalistic career. Even Fox News wouldn't run the story because it wasn't supported by facts. And last I heard, there still has been no concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Tucker Carlson claims that his evidence "got lost in the mail". In the age of the internet, they didn't snap any photos of this so-called proof? There is no "there" there. Just a bunch of internet…

Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. He broke the Snowden story--another sensational-sounding scoop which likely sounded like total bullshit at first. Is it possible that Mr. Greenwald is a better judge of whether or not there is a story here?

I have seen too many journalists gain a reputation for one story, and then ride that reputation into the ground, and while I still have a lot of respect for Greenwald, I feel like that's what I'm watching happen with him right now.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#934

Post by bart_spoon »

nojito wrote: post #893
juniper_strong wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stopped caring about institutions' reputations because I don't need them to gatekeep for me anymore. If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to…

Those are opinion writers not journalists. It’s a sad state of affairs when people confuse the two.

You’ve been downvoted but I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s lots of debate in these comments about how journalism is dying due to various monetization schemes, organization and lower dynamics, etc. But I personally think the issue is that we, as news consumers, are becoming lazier and are simply looking for someone to tell us what to think, rather than a comparatively dry report on the facts that then requires the reader to make do their own analysis. Opinion articles seem to be what dominates traditional media outlets like the NYT and WP, while 24 hour news networks don’t even label it as opinion, they just bring on pundits to comment on every single thing that happens.

Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened. Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the internet has accelerated and further enabled it to the point where it feels like journalism as an institution is collapsing.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#935

Post by hnhnsomething12 »

pm90 wrote: post #71
throwaway3699 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It isn’t reasonable to expect independent journalists to take over the work that news media currently engages in. While there are legitimate criticisms of media companies becoming too large and being driven by outrage based engagements, they also provide the resources for some of the best journalists to spend a large part of their lives dedicated to digging into a story rather than worrying about how to make ends mee…

My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them!

I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#936

Post by ilikehurdles »

nickysielicki wrote: post #897
ilikehurdles wrote: post #787

Someone pretty familiar with Greenwald posted a pretty thorough, point-by-point takedown of the piece he wanted The Intercept to publish, and ended up publishing himself: https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1321923054499495938?s=... Frankly, if you read his original piece, it's exhaustingly shoddy. To say he needs an editor is putting it lightly.

I can’t believe that you genuinely would consider these tweets to be a “thorough point-by-point takedown” of the article. If anything, her counter arguments were so weak that I’m even more strongly in support of Greenwald than before. For example, at one point she implies that we should not trust the emails (and further, that it is incorrect to claim that emails have been leaked), because they are pictures of emails…

The first point? Ask Greenwald, he’s helped get actual emails from whistleblowers into publication a few times.

I mean the blind computer repair shop owner on the opposite side of the country from where Hunter lives allegedly had 3 laptops in his possession that he offered to do data recovery on for the low total of $75, before digging into the data and handing it to Giuliani and friends. Why would these laptops only have PDF reproductions of some email rather than any originals with any headers intact? Surely they must have the real things in there. Tell him to open outlook.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#937

Post by tigershark »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #871

It shocks, and disgusts me to see clearly intelligent people rallying around a guy who wants to publish unverified and irrelevant drivel as an October Surprise. Defenders here are quoting Tucker Carlson for God's sake -- whose defense team in court persuasively argued that no reasonable person should expect to hear the truth from his show. Comments are barely falling short of singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"…

It’s even more shocking that HN allows such blatant misinformation and conservative propaganda. I would never have thought that this website was at the level of a tabloid like the New York Post. At least we know for sure that all allegations against Biden are just total bullshit given that even Fox News decided to not publish them and they were published only by a cesspool tabloid that writes articles on how miley Cyrus was chased by aliens.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#938

Post by reducesuffering »

jackthezipper wrote: post #880
fareesh wrote: post #865

There seems to be a premise in the USA that if Russia has a hand in true information coming to light, the bigger story is about Russia's hand in it, and not the information itself. This narrative has been seen a lot, and often times it is invoked as the default narrative whenever things are being claimed in a particular political direction. I would like to question this at a fundamental level. At what point does the…

>There seems to be a premise in the USA that if Russia has a hand in true information coming to light, the bigger story is about Russia's hand in it, and not the information itself. You're absolutely right, and it is frustrating to no end.

Imagine all politicians have at least a bit of dirt in secret, documented in some email, text, or photo, on a computer somewhere. Also suppose each politician has varying degrees of dirt, from minor mistakes, not in bad faith, to full on treason. Then suppose there's an adversary capable of hacking any of the politicians' aforementioned secret media. This adversary can now pick and choose which politician they release damaging evidence of. They don't need to release all of it, implicating the politician with the most severe grievances. Just the one the adversary decides they disfavor. In this case, your argument is saying "let's focus on this small mistake, because that's all the info we have."

I'm not advocating that in the real world, the bigger story is about who's releasing the info, rather than the info itself. However, there are issues when not taking both into account.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#939

Post by ColanR »

ggggtez wrote: post #346
blhack wrote: post #27

Glenn had a 3 hour long conversation on a podcast a few days ago where he laid out the problem really well: Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat, because the people they are friends with are the ones that own that boat, invite them to parties, and are a part of their friend groups. The reporting around this story has been absolutely unbelievable t…

It's also the kind of story that can break someone's journalistic career. Even Fox News wouldn't run the story because it wasn't supported by facts. And last I heard, there still has been no concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Tucker Carlson claims that his evidence "got lost in the mail". In the age of the internet, they didn't snap any photos of this so-called proof? There is no "there" there. Just a bunch of internet…

Sounds like the UPS confirms there was a package and it got lost. https://www.businessinsider.com/ups-says-it-lost-tucker-carl...

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#940

Post by macspoofing »

rat87 wrote: post #464
macspoofing wrote: post #51

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 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…

Kavanaugh story broke when it did because it leaked

Yes. And the leak along with the timing of it, was no accident.
Post reply on HN