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My Resignation from the Intercept

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#841

Post by throwawayvv »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #691
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist is quickly losing that reputation. I cancelled my subscription. The FT is still pretty good, though they shy away from anything critical of powerful corporations/individuals.

What about the economist made you cancel? My impression is that they're still doing a great job of providing trustworthy news which avoids sensationalism

Never been a subscriber, but the claims made in this article [0] are pretty damning for The Economist. Those claims are made by a conservative political journalism outlet [1], so make of that what you will.

[0] https://freebeacon.com/coronavirus/economist-failed-to-discl...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Free_Beacon

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#842

Post by Natsu »

AaronFriel wrote: post #350
TearsInTheRain wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you watch the Tony Babulinksi interview with Tucker Carlson? It shows that Joe Biden had an ownership stake in and was directly involved with his son's company that received a 5-10 million forgivable loan from a top member of the Chinese Communist party. This directly contradicts claims Joe Biden has made throughout his campaign and at the last debate.

Fox News argued before Mary Kay Vyskocil, United States District Judge, well, to use the court's words: "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes." My question to you is: are you arriving with an appropriate amount of skepticism? Tucker Carlson is not a credible source, and nothing aired on tha…

> the statement he makes.

You're not parsing the legalese finely enough. It says the statement in that quote. Not every statement, but just one in paritcular. They defended one particular statement Tucker made on air in that lawsuit as "rhetorical hyberbole" which is a defense against defamation that has been used in, e.g. the Larry Flint case.

You can read more about what rhetorical hyperbole if you wish:

https://www.virginiadefamationlawyer.com/rhetorical-hyperbol...

https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1796/rhetorical-hyp...

This is not the sort of argument you should make if you want people to take your opinions on legal matters seriously.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#843

Post by dillondoyle »

ciarannolan wrote: post #369
uncoder0 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The elephant in the room (which Greenwald barely acknowledges in this essay) is that many mainstream news organizations have concluded that the evidence for this story was too weak to publish, and some believe it was fabricated by Russian intelligence. Senate Homeland Security committee and DNI director both said that this was not an issue of foreign disinfo. In addition there is an interview from one of the co-cons…

> Senate Homeland Security committee and DNI director [...] Both of these are partisan, unreliable sources. The DNI used to be a nonpartisan that you could at least trust somewhat. Not anymore.

Goes onto a Fox News morning talk show lol.

Far too many provable examples of political appointees in this administration outright lying and gaslighting the Fox News MAGA-ites into some alternative reality.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#844

Post by Arainach »

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?

A Pulitzer-winning journalist who grew more and more detached from reality as his worldview was overtaken by hatred for Hillary Clinton.

Greenwald's emphasis here is completely unplaced. It is once again an attempt to make things seem equal. Unsubstantiated stories like this get no news time - and yet the fact that the opposite is undeniably true - Trump's children have not only been actively involved in the administration but have been coordinating deals for Trump's businesses, making millions of dollars, and even receiving international quid pro quo such as Chinese patent approvals - is ignored and treated as nothing. If Trump is anything less than an utter disaster, it's seen as a success. If the democratic nominee (Biden or Clinton before him) does anything less than perfect, it dominates the news cycle for weeks.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#845

Post by spaceribs »

groby_b wrote: post #625
dash2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Substack allows you to subscribe (paid) to an individual journalist or publication. They can then post long-form stories to your inbox. That gives them the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with you where credibility matters. At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expen…

> "buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive" Yes and no. It is if you want to get all of your daily news that way. But if it's an area you care about and you're somewhat affluent, it's well worth the money. (I'd think a good chunk of HN e.g. has a subscription to Stratechery) It's a workable strategy for a few extremely good journalists. But there are a lot of issues with it. Societally, this is pr…

See: the entire art world.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#846

Post by raxxorrax »

tomnipotent wrote: post #715
HNthrow22 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement KPI for whose benefit? Shareholders or the 'public good'? Why would a for-profit entity optimize for the public good over profits? Fox news is crushing all their competitors optimizing for engagement. Who is winning optimizing for trust?

And a vast majority of Fox's growth has been from talking faces, not news. Tucker Carlson has mentioned several times that he's "not the news", but an opinion commentator. I think this reinforces the OPs point. Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.

Many journalists lobbied themselves into a position where they can only be seen as opinion commentators, so we have little else anymore. You just have to pick the opinion you like most. This is not an endorsement of Carlson, just for the record.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#847

Post by austhrow743 »

zarkov99 wrote: post #181
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.

It's not like there can be only one news organisation. You could say that the incentives point to making a product that most people can afford but there are still companies making $50k watches and million dollar cars.

Sure the largest news organisations will always be serving up garbage for the unwashed masses but there should still be room for one optimising for trust.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#848

Post by raxxorrax »

chongli wrote: post #756
whimsicalism wrote: post #58

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.

There is no royal road to trust in journalism, to paraphrase a famous mathematician. If venerable institutions such as the New York Times can be corrupted by the transition to new media and the excesses of the zeitgeist, then there is no quick fix in the form of trust in institutions. The web, more than any other medium before it, has elevated the individual. Therefore, it stands to reason that we ought to place our…

Agreed. It is the best approach. I think it is laughable that editorial reasons for publishing are brought to front. I actually remember the political articles I read from the last years. I wouldn't have released the Biden story but certainly not because of alleged editorial reasons. Everyone lies, but you should set sensible limits.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#849

Post by raxxorrax »

rat87 wrote: post #483
nightowl_games wrote: post #103

This breaks my heart for the world, but it increases my respect of Glenn. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi are my only two journalists I really seek out and follow. Glenn especially. I was of the belief that The Intercept was a valid source solely because of Glenn. I believe Glenn. I will follow Glenn.

I don't know why Both of them seem to have bought into insane conspiracy theories about the actual Russian collision with the Trump campaign

It isn't an insane conspiracy. Not even the deep state is one. It does exists in form of political networks in Washington. That isn't some malicious hydra, but on contrast to that the Russian collusion story is an actual conspiracy and hit job on political opponents.

Get a tin foil hat if you fear Russians behind every tree, but the story got old pretty quickly.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#850

Post by Thorrez »

joe_the_user wrote: post #764
zaroth wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an op-ed and was supposed to be published by the Intercept as an op-ed... The NY Times reports; > In a phone interview, Mr. Greenwald said he had received emails from Intercept editors outlining what the publication would allow and not allow in his article. “My arrangement with The Intercept since it began is my opinion pieces are not edited by anyone,” he said.

Sure and as an op-ed, the journal itself makes a decision whether it wants to front that opinion. The journal has stopped being close to Mr. Greenwald's perspective. Sure, maybe they changed the rules on him since it had become their publication. But that's a King Lear story, not a journalism story. "You broke your promise that I'd have unlimited publication rights" is a sad story of broken promises but it's not a st…

Glenn said he also tried to publish it somewhere else and they forbid him from doing so, even though his contract says he has the right to publish stuff elsewhere if The Intercept doesn't want it.
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