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My Resignation from the Intercept

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#181

Post by zarkov99 »

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…

I agree there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism. But who would anyone trust? The incentives in the media point towards pandering and outraging. Left to the shareholders a news organization is mandated to maximize short term profit in whatever way it can. So capitalism is out. Perhaps a benevolent billionaire could support such an effort? But again, who would trust him? Its a pikle.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#182

Post by jMyles »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #47
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…

Exactly. This looks much more like Greenwald trying to capitalize on hype. The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked and there is tons of evidence to suggest it’s illegitimately sourced by agents directly directed by Trump, from sources with active incentives to try to damage Biden. It is responsible to decline to run this story. It only serves to feed conspiracy theories and dr…

> The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked

Although I've been following this story, I am not familiar with this round debunking. I realize that the email headers are not available, but have the emails decisively been shown to be illegitimate? Or just difficult to verify?

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#183

Post by dkural »

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.

My conclusion is the opposite. The Mueller report was heavily redacted, and misrepresented by AG Barr - precisely because it is so damning. Trump got impeached by congress over the Ukraine scandal later on, again enlisting foreign help. Trump asked a foreign power to help him against a political opponent - the Ukraine facts are not in dispute. Trump's campaign took multiple meetings with Russians bearing emails, and multiple members of his campaign are now in jail. These two facts are also not in dispute.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#184

Post by Nacdor »

ehsankia wrote: post #159
Nacdor wrote: post #138

On the one hand, this is shocking because Glenn co-founded the Intercept as a response to the rampant partisan censorship happening at other media outlets. On the other hand, I had been reading The Intercept regularly since at least 2016 and there was a very noticeable lack of "independent" journalism as the years went by. At some point this year I stopped visiting their website because the worthwhile articles were f…

Who knew that even when you fund a company, if you get qualified people with integrity, they'll stop you from peddling foreign nation misinformation even if you're the boss.

You seem to have insider info that the rest of us are not privy to. What misinformation was he attempting to spread?

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#185

Post by thrill »

starkd wrote: post #115
ivalm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is about emails which have no headers, that are impossible to verify, that were “known to fbi” for a long time but didn’t produce any action (because likely fake), and that are specifically being pushed to change outcome of election despite, again, no real evidence of their veracity.

Those issues could be addressed in the article. In open debate. That's the way the first amendment works. There are reasons to not think its purely garbage storage, as many have pointed out. Not to mention a business partner, and someone who was sentenced to jail who has released their gmail account to the public.

The first amendment has nothing to do with activities outside Congress making laws.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#186

Post by haberman »

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…

In this thread I am seeing both "this story is already running non-stop on Fox, there's no censorship", and "if the editors didn't censor this, it would poison the election, and that's too big of a risk."

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#187

Post by dragonwriter »

gfodor wrote: post #125
ehsankia wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supposit…

> There was a time when journalists cared about the truth

There have always been journalists who cared about the truth, but there has never been a time when that was generally dominant over the business, political, etc., interests of publishers, who have always been, for the entire history of journalism (which has been entirely embedded within the capitalist age), very deeply intertwined with those of the capitalist ruling class, of whom publishers, especially of major, highly-visible media outlets, are generally a part.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#188

Post by jrochkind1 »

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…

In the general sense, it's not a new problem.

One of the main points I got from Chomsky & Herman's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988, analyzing news from a decade earlier), is that journalists print what the government says because it's convenient -- it's less work to print what the government (or anyone else) says at a press conference than to do your own research -- AND even when it comes to privately given info, because they need to maintain the relationships with government (and other powerful) sources, if you make a government source mad, and they stop giving info, how are you going to get that privileged info to write your stories?

Journalists develop "sources", and relationships with those sources, and then there are pressures to serve the interests of those sources. Sources are usually powerful people (whether government or "socialites"), because that's who has valuable info on an ongoing basis, generally.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#189

Post by otikik »

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…

"Letting readers decide who is right" is always good thing. But they rarely do that. Most take the spicy title (or out-of-context incorrect quote from Twitter) which reaffirms their opinion and run with it. They share, like and subscribe. And the article keeps being shared, liked and subscribed for months, even if it was disproven minutes after it was published. So instead of being a way to find the truth the article ends up being a way to validate missinformation.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Just wanted to point out that "letting them decide" has a lot of problems.

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