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My Resignation from the Intercept

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#921

Post by Ensorceled »

hluska wrote: post #489

Honestly HN, what in the fuck?? The comments here have run the gamut from conspiracy to arguing there’s a purge coming against the media. If this is the state of ‘hacking’, I’m cancelling my internet access.

Yeah, this whole discussion is a train wreck. I'm kind of fearful for the US right now, this illogical polarization is off the charts.

This article really struck home for me, it's what I've been observing for a while now:

Study: Republicans and Democrats hate the other side more than they love their own side

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-republicans-democrats-side.htm...

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#922

Post by talkingtab »

A good example of the principle of distraction.

Let us not talk or discuss Covid. Let us not discuss the number of people who have lost their jobs. Let us not discuss the suppression of voting. Let us not discuss that the USA now needs a Pro Democracy movement. Instead, in the guise of freedom of the press, let us discuss some issue, which whether true or not, of substance or not, will cause us to focus in a way that is divisive.

I can as easily claim without proof that Donald Trump intends to flee to Russia if not re-elected. And what about my freedom to express my opinion? OMG. Oh yes, and I am resigning my from job in protest! Virtuous Victims Unite!

My apologies for the sarcasm, but this country has serious issues.

[edited for spelling]

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#923

Post by JeremyNT »

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…

The thing is, Greenwald is an editorialist and a pundit.

I don't mean to give the intercept a pass here, but what Greenwald was doing wasn't "journalism" in the sense that most people think of it. This isn't "his" story - he didn't break it and he didn't do the primary research.

Does his background give him insights that could make for a good editorial? Perhaps, and the Intercept used to pull no punches on that kind of content. But it's not like he deserved any real "credit" or "blame" for the story itself, which was reported by other outlets.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#924

Post by Ensorceled »

gorgoiler wrote: post #825

The emails are interesting. I’m surprised Greenwald’s editors give such detailed written feedback instead of, say, over the phone. The language used offers some scope for compromise, but in general it’s pretty forthright. In my experience the back and forth of an email chain thread will only further entrench positions rather than engender persuasiveness. We all know this, right? It’s nothing new and it happens all th…

Do you do code reviews over the phone? In a professional setting, why would feedback of this nature not be in a written format? Editor feedback is often very detailed ... why would you have a phone call to say "you used your instead of you're on line 40".

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#925

Post by bsenftner »

pibechorro wrote: post #920
dmix wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade. I'm still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website. WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it's not as e…

NYT is not an objective publication, they have a heavy bias.

Same with Wall Street Journal - the bias is ridiculously bare.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#926

Post by Ensorceled »

emmelaich wrote: post #669

For those arguing caution before an election :- you cannot both argue that AND argue that the story is very unconvincing.

Ummm, yes you can. The story is unconvincing because it is unsubstantiated and of suspicious provenance, both VERY subtle points with less than week before an election.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#927

Post by mcv »

joe_the_user wrote: post #749
jrochkind1 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, becau…

You can go further back from Chomsky. I'm currently reading Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami, which gives a grim portrait of journalists in 19th France as lazily serving the interests of those in power[1]. The thing about the situation is historically journalists have always served interests and ideologies. American journalism has a long and storied history but the idea of purely objective journalism is itself a particula…

> "If some piece of pure dirt, a politically contentless but deeply embarrassing true fact about this honestly good candidate surfaced, would consider those who pushed this fact relentlessly to be paragons of virtue?"

I think the way to report on this is fairly obvious: provide context. Any fact on its own is easily taken out of context and can be spun one way or the other. Context helps. And in the context of an election, dirt on one candidate provided by a close ally of the other candidate, comes with a ton of context. And even if the dirt is true, the context is still: how does that compare to the corruption of the other candidate.

It seems like there's a lot of attention for possible but uncertain corruption by Biden, exactly because it's uncertain; it's a question people want to know the answer to. Meanwhile, there's tons of evidence for corruption by Trump that nobody pays attention to because it's obvious, it's already known, there's no interesting question to speculate about.

But the end result is that the cleanest candidate gets associated with corruption while the dirty candidate doesn't.

Context would mean whenever there's a story on corruption by one candidate, you also report on the comparable cases of corruption by the other candidate. Then readers will always see what the balance of corruption between the two is.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#928

Post by mcv »

ece wrote: post #807
joe_the_user wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go further back from Chomsky. I'm currently reading Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami, which gives a grim portrait of journalists in 19th France as lazily serving the interests of those in power[1]. The thing about the situation is historically journalists have always served interests and ideologies. American journalism has a long and storied history but the idea of purely objective journalism is itself a particula…

> That journalist serve their sources, their ideologies, the interests of the owners of the journal and so-forth isn't bad unless you think everyone with power is evil (which is plausible but if you believe this, then you would be supporting some ideology outside the mainstream, which also has it's spin). This needs to be repeated more often, Chomsky's point is that ad-serving businesses are turning the reader into t…

Yeah, honest journalism and capitalism are hard to combine. In capitalism, companies provide a service that their customers want to pay for. So a paid newspaper publishes news that their readers want to read. Ad-driven news writers what their advertisers want to be associated with. There's little room for reports that are controversial with the readers or advertisers, yet those reports might well be the most important ones.

Well, if they're true. But nobody pays for the truth anymore.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#929

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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…

> 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.

Watch The Post, and you'll see this sort of thing goes (at least) back to The Pentagon Papers. I'm not old enough to have watched this play out in real time, so it was an eye opener. The owner of The Washington Post was cozy in the circles the President ran around in, and had to weigh what it would mean to him personally to run that series of articles.

Re: My Resignation from the Intercept

#930

Post by bart_spoon »

jkhdigital wrote: post #827
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…

I paid $50 for a year of Matt Taibbi. Literally the first time I have ever paid money for journalism, and it has been worth every penny.

I did too, until I realized that Taibbi is basically the exact same thing we are all railing against here. It quickly becomes clear that Taibbi puts out almost nothing but counter-outrage porn. Virtually every article was some variation on how the media is stoking public anger against wrongthink.

And it’s not that I think he’s wrong. I think he’s absolutely right. The problem is that it’s basically nothing but opinion pages from someone I already agree with. That’s not news, and it’s not journalism. The problem with modern journalism is that opinion columns seem to have completely overtaken plain, boring reporting. It’s text media outlets mirroring the strategies of 24 hour news networks, in which simply reporting the news is given an increasingly small amount of attention, in favor of “analysis” from pundits and panelists who basically tell an individual what to think. People simply find the outlet or panelist that most closely agrees with what they already feel.

Taibbi doesn’t fix this, he is literally just more of the same. He just does it with a less mainstream viewpoint that appeals to people like you and me.

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