MATT TAIBBI MEDIA
Glenn Greenwald on His Resignation from the Intercept
October 29, 2020
24 Commentson Glenn Greenwald on His Resignation from the Intercept
The Pulitzer winner founded The Intercept to challenge official narratives
and protect editorial freedom. When editors spiked a controversial story he
wrote, he concluded they had abandoned those principals and so he quit.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald quit his job this morning.
In a bizarre, ironic, and disturbing commentary on trends in modern media,
the celebrated reporter was forced to resign after writing a story
criticizing both the Biden campaign and intelligence community - only to
have it spiked by the editors of The Intercept, the news outlet he
co-founded six years ago with the aim of preventing pretty much this exact
situation.
"The irony," Greenwald says, "is that a media outlet I co-founded, and which
was built on my name and my accomplishments, with the purpose of
guaranteeing editorial independence, is now censoring me in the most
egregious way - about the leading presidential candidate, a week before the
election."
Greenwald becomes the latest high-profile journalist to leave a well-known
legacy media organization to join Substack. You'll be able to read the piece
rebuffed by The Intercept at his new site here.
In a nutshell, the fatal sequence of events went as follows:
Greenwald, after commenting pointedly about the reaction by press and
Democratic Party officials to the New York Post story, reached out to
Intercept editor Betsy Reed to float the idea of writing on the subject.
The first hint of trouble came when Reed suggested that yes, it might be a
story, if proven correct, but "even if it did represent something untoward
about Biden," that would "represent a tiny fraction of the sleaze and lies
Trump and his cronies are oozing in every day."
When Greenwald retorted that deciding not to report on one politician's
scandals because those of another politician are deemed worse is a "corrupt
calculus" for reporters, Reed expressed concern. Based on this, on his
comments on Twitter, and other factors, she worried that "we are headed for
a conflict over the editing of this piece."
Greenwald insisted he wasn't planning an overwhelming amount of coverage but
wanted to do a single article, reviewing the available facts and perhaps
asking the Biden campaign to comment on the veracity of the Post story. Reed
agreed that he should write a draft, then they could "see where we are."
An aside: when reporters and editors interact, they speak between the lines.
If an editor only ever suggests or assigns stories from a certain angle,
you're being told they don't particularly want the other angle. If your
editor has lots of hypothetical concerns at the start, he or she probably
won't be upset if you choose a different topic. Finally, when an editor lays
out "suggestions" about things that might "help" a piece "be even stronger,"
it's a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in
before the editor will send the thing through.
Reed explained that any piece Greenwald wrote on the Biden/Burisma subject
would have to go through "the editorial process and fact-checking that we do
with any story with this kind of high profile." Peter Maass would edit, but
Reed also noted that there was a lot of "in-house knowledge" they could all
"tap into."
By "in-house knowledge," she meant the work of Robert Mackey and Jim Risen,
two Intercept reporters with whom Greenwald clashed in the past. Risen had
already loudly denounced the Post story not only as conspiracy theory, but
foreign disinformation. Essentially, Reed was telling Greenwald his piece
would be quasi-edited by people with whom he'd had major public
disagreements about Russia-related issues going back years.
To this, Greenwald responded that this was a double-standard: when Risen
wrote an article credulously quoting intelligence officials like James
Clapper, John Brennan, and Michael Hayden (more on the extreme irony of this
later) describing the Post story as having "the classic earmarks of Russian
misinformation," he could do so willy-nilly. But when Greenwald wanted to
write an op-ed piece questioning the "prevailing wisdom on Biden and
Burisma," a team of people would would be summoned.
"The only reason people are getting interested in and ready to scrutinize
what I write is because everyone is afraid of being accused of having
published something harmful to Biden," Greenwald told them. "That's the
reality."
Then Greenwald wrote the piece - essentially an opinion piece, drawing upon
publicly available information. In it, he criticized the media response to
the Post story and noted, among other things, that the history of the Hunter
Biden/Burisma story did not reflect well on any of the Bidens. Reed and
Maass refused to publish it. Maass wrote:
Betsy agrees with me that the draft's core problem is the connection it
often asserts or assumes between the Hunter Biden emails and corruption by
Joe Biden. There are many places in which the explicit or implied position
is a) the emails expose corruption by Joe Biden and b) news organizations
are suppressing their reporting on it. Those positions strike me as
foundations to this draft, and they also strike me as inaccurate.
Maass added that he didn't believe Greenwald had done enough to address the
"complexity" of the "disinformation issue":
Lastly, I think the disinformation issue should be handled with greater
complexity. I think it's totally right to point out the haste with which
some journalists and experts are talking about Russia's hand. But the
argument that some people make about disinformation, and that I think you
should address, is the way the materials are being used by Giuliani, the
rightwing media, and Trump, to support an exaggerated and false narrative -
a narrative that is not supported by the materials themselves.
Maass suggested Greenwald cut the piece and stick to a narrower essay about
whether or not the press was directly asking Biden enough questions. Another
irony: Greenwald was trying to criticize the rush to describe the Post story
as disinformation, and Maass was essentially asking that he address the
"disinformation issue," even though the material's veracity had not been
denied, and the editors themselves didn't seem to believe the laptop
material was fake. Reed at one point wrote to Greenwald, "I agree with you
that [the emails] appear to be mostly or entirely genuine, though
authentication has been difficult in part because of the Biden camp's
refusal to address questions about authenticity."
Greenwald, by then furious, noted that neither Maass nor Reed had identified
a factual inaccuracy in the article, but rather disagreed with its
conclusions and his assessments of the facts - his "positions," rather than
his information.
Greenwald added:
What a healthy and confident news organization would do - as the New York
Times recently did with its own Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project - is air the
different views that journalists have about the evidence and let readers
decide what they find convincing, not force everyone to adhere to a top-down
editorial line and explicitly declare that any story that raises questions
about Biden's conduct is barred from being published now that he's the
Democratic nominee.
In the end, Maass and Reed would not budge, and Greenwald resigned rather
than accept what he described as being censored. The Intercept quickly put
out an icy statement describing him as a "grown person throwing a tantrum,"
adding that Greenwald was laboring under the assumption that "anyone who
presumes to edit him is a censor."
Anticipating the obvious criticism that the Intercept had betrayed its
founding mission, they wrote, "It is Glenn who has strayed from his original
journalistic roots, not the Intercept." Mourning the reporter he "used to
be," the Intercept editors defined the value that Glenn supposedly lost
sight of as "an investigative mission. that involved a collaborative
process." In other words, absolute editorial freedom - but by group consent.
They then pulled out the go-to rhetorical device of media hall monitors in
the Trump era, accusing him of being a secret Trump partisan, trying to
"recycle. the Trump campaign's. dubious claims, and launder them as
journalism."
I reached out to both Reed and Maass for comment this afternoon. Neither has
responded.
In the last few weeks I've heard from multiple well-known journalists going
through struggles in their newsrooms, with pressure to avoid certain themes
in campaign coverage often central to their worries. There are many
reporters out there - most of them quite personally hostile to Donald Trump
- who are grating under what they perceive as relentless pressure to publish
material favorable to the Democratic Party cause. Greenwald's story mirrors
some of these stories, but his is more striking than some others on a few
levels.
Many outside the media world will miss the subtleties of what makes this
tale so crazy. Some may even think it's unreasonable for a reporter to quit
rather than "accept editing." To understand why that's not what's going on
here, one has to know the unique history of The Intercept.
On February 10th, 2014, Greenwald, documentarian Laura Poitras, and fellow
reporter Jeremy Scahill announced the creation of an aggressive new
investigative outlet, backed by the deep pockets of eBay founder and
billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
It was big news in the media world. Greenwald and Poitras had been working
on one of the great scoops in recent times, helping former NSA contractor
and whistleblower Edward Snowden come forward about a secret, illegal mass
surveillance program conducted by the U.S. government. After bringing the
story to light, Snowden was forced into exile, and Greenwald in particular
became the subject of denunciations by colleagues and politicians alike,
with some prominent officials openly calling for his prosecution and
jailing.
The Intercept was designed specifically to be a place where journalists
would be protected from such intimidation and editorial interference. As
they wrote in their introduction:
Over the past seven months the journalists who have reported on these
documents from the National Security Agency have been repeatedly threatened
by a wide range of government officials. None of this will deter the
journalism we are doing. A primary function of The Intercept is to insist
upon and defend our press freedoms from those who wish to infringe them.
Greenwald recalls today: "We saw in the media, reporters were quoting CIA
officials about Snowden and about me. They were essentially stenographers.
The Intercept was created to avoid that."
Again as noted in the announcement six years ago, Intercept writers were to
be encouraged at all times to speak their minds, no matter who might take
offense. This, they said, was another core part of the organization's
mission:
The editorial independence of our journalists will be guaranteed. Our
journalists will be not only permitted, but encouraged, to pursue stories
without regard to whom they might alienate.
The whole idea of The Intercept was to create a hands-off, journalist-run
enterprise where mistakes like the WMD fiasco could never happen. If the
journalists themselves were put in charge, the thinking went, there could be
no pressure from above to conform to clearly flawed official narratives like
the WMD case, or to back off stories like the Snowden affair.
The traditional method of controlling the press - as described by legendary
independent journalists like I.F. Stone - was the quiet aside by the boss,
"a little private talk," where a "hint that the reporter seems
irresponsible, a little bit radical" would be dropped. Getting the message,
and fearing for his or her job, the reporter would back off. Or, in cases
like the Iraq war runup, the strategic dismissal of a big name with the
wrong views - Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura - makes sure the rest of the
employees get the message.
Greenwald co-founded the Intercept with this exact scenario in mind,
building a structure where "little private talks" with bosses would never
happen, and there couldn't be high-profile dismissals for ideological
reasons.
What he didn't guess at was that even in an atmosphere where managerial
interference is near zero, a collective of independent journalists can
themselves become censors and enforcers of official orthodoxies. In some
cases, free journalists will become more aggressive propagandists and
suppressors of speech than the officials from whom they supposedly need to
be protected. This Lord of the Flies effect is what happened with The
Intercept.
It's a long story, but the punchline is that the self-editing journalists at
the Intercept somewhere along the line began to fall for what will look,
years from now, like a comically transparent bait-and-switch operation. They
were suckered into becoming parodies of their original incarnation.
In the Obama years, progressive journalists were infuriated by the
disclosures of whistleblowers like Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and aimed
their professional ire at the federal government for war crimes, drone
assassination, and mass abuse of surveillance authority. The bugbears of the
day were intelligence officials who ran these programs and deceived the
public about them: people like CIA directors Hayden and Brennan, and
Director of National Intelligence Clapper.
These intelligence community leaders only a few short years ago served an
administration that sought a "reset" with the systematic human rights
violator that was Vladimir Putin's Russia, a country then-President Obama
dismissed throughout his tenure as a "regional power" that acts "not out of
strength, but out of weakness." The consistent posture of the Obama
administration - the Obama-Biden administration - was that Russia ranked far
below terrorists as a potential threat to the United States.
After 2016, however, these officials presented themselves as norms-defending
heroes protecting America against the twin "existential" threats of Donald
Trump and Vladimir Putin. Russia, just a few years ago described by Rachel
Maddow as a harmless "gnat on the butt of an elephant," was now reinvented
as an all-powerful foe mounting an influence campaign of unprecedented
reach, with everyone from Trump to the Green Party to blogs like Truthdig
and Naked Capitalism, to congresswoman and war veteran Tulsi Gabbard, to
Bernie Sanders, all potentially doing the bidding of a Cold War foe bent on
"sowing discord" on our shores.
Akey part of this propaganda campaign was the continual insistence that any
criticism of the Democratic Party was, in essence, aid and comfort to our
Red Enemy. Would-be progressive journalists horrified by Donald Trump
accepted this logic with enthusiasm. Over the course of four years they
abandoned their traditional mistrust of the security state to transform
themselves into a squad of little Pavik Morozovs, anxious to stamp out
traitors to the cause and keep the news business clean of "Russian"
misinformation that might help Donald Trump get re-elected.
Greenwald never bought this line. In July of 2017, he reported on the
creation of new organizations like the Alliance For Securing Democracy, that
united Bush-era neoconservatives like Jamie Fly with Democrats like Hillary
Clinton foreign policy advisor Laura Rosenberger. Groups like this, and the
Atlantic Council, advocated for more aggressive foreign policy aims and
tighter controls over Internet content, using new paranoia about Russia as
the glue for the expanding alliance.
As press enthusiasm for the Trump-Russia story widened, progressives began
to invite old enemies back into the fold. People like "Axis of Evil"
speechwriter David Frum and Weekly Standard editor and key Iraq War
proponent Bill Kristol became regular guests on CNN and MSNBC, while
ex-spooks like Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, and a long list of others were
given TV contributor deals, now serving as the press instead of facing
criticism from it.
"The prevailing power center is Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the
Democratic Party," Greenwald says. "In the Trump era, they managed to
convince everyone to view anyone who opposes Trump as allies."
Greenwald's opinions on these issues attracted indignation from former
friends and colleagues alike, who denounced his criticism of Democrats as
unpatriotic and unacceptably immoral behavior for an ethical reporter in the
Trump era. He began to be criticized, by journalists, for refusing to take
the word of secret services.
When the New Yorker wrote an astonishingly vicious profile of Greenwald,
describing his refusal to accept theories of Russian subversion as a
pathology inspired by a difficult childhood and confusion over his
sexuality, his nominal boss and co-worker, Reed, was happy to chime in about
things Greenwald does that are "not helpful to the left."
She talked about Greenwald having inspired social media followers "who are
so convinced that they are being lied to all the time that anything that the
intelligence community says can't possibly be true." She added that "it's
not helpful to the left and to all the candidates and causes we favor to
continue to doubt the existence of some kind of relationship between Russia
and the Trump campaign."
Meanwhile, Greenwald's former editor at Salon, Joan Walsh, said Greenwald's
refusal to buy the Russia story was "motivated by real disdain for what the
Democratic Party has become," which she explained meant:
The ascendance of women and people of color in the Party, and the fact that
that coalition defeated Bernie Sanders.
All agreed that Greenwald couldn't possibly just have a different opinion,
or be insisting on seeing evidence before believing a collusion story that,
by the way, turned out to be wrong. His ideas came from being sexually
confused, misogynistic, racist, and financially desperate.
Or was it even worse? Glenn more than anyone got the treatment other
reporters like myself, Aaron Mate, and Ken Vogel of the New York Times got,
for crossing established narratives on Russia or Ukraine: he was accused of
being a Russian stooge, even a literal spy. His favorite critics on that
score have been those same old, once-disgraced neoconservatives, as well as
officials in the Democratic hierarchy, and, of course, other reporters:
Throughout the last four years, Greenwald has been one of the only people in
the media world to speak out about some of the more preposterous claims made
by Democratic Party partisans, from the pee tape to charges that Tulsi
Gabbard is a Russian asset to walked-back bombshell stories like the Afghan
bounty story. One of his consistent themes is that only a person like him,
with fame and financial security, is able to safely challenge orthodoxies in
this business.
The significance of what's happened with the Intercept is that even
journalists working in companies they foundedcan't get away from these
pressures. For every public story like Greenwald's, there are dozens more
you don't hear about, involving media members who can't speak out. Not all
of them are dealing with the same issues, but dynamics are often similar.
The Intercept and many media outlets have gotten turned around by the Trump
phenomenon. It's a difficult time for reporters, with an unstable and
potentially dangerous president. Some have been convinced to change the way
they used to do business, to make sure they are not accused of having helped
such a person get elected.
Many in the press have therefore talked themselves into the proposition that
questioning things like the Trump-Russia collusion theory, or the reflexive
dismissal of adverse information about politicians like Biden as foreign
disinformation, can have no purpose beyond pro-Trump partisanship. In
service of this, they've surrendered their own traditional roles as
questioners and arbiters of fact, giving that power over to the same people
and institutions whose poor performance, record of deception, and corruption
helped inspire voters to make such a desperate choice in Trump in the first
place. They've not only allowed intelligence community narratives to drive
the press, they've invited it.
When the likes of Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden wrote a joint letter decrying
the recent Post story as a seeming Russian mischief, they were very careful
in what they said. They used the term "information operation" instead of
"misinformation," and prominently included the line, "We do not have
evidence of Russian involvement."
However, in the recent Intercept story quoting that letter, describing the
Post story has having "the classic earmarks of Russian misinformation," the
the line about not having evidence was left out.
"The CIA letter was more honest than The Intercept," is how Greenwald puts
it.
A few years ago, reporters had the intelligence community on the defensive.
Now, reporters are ratting each other out on their behalf, with the aim of
creating an absolute political monoculture. Having pushed out one of
journalism's most accomplished members, they've nearly succeeded.
Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi is a veteran and award-winning reporter for Rolling Stone and
other outlets. He's written multiple books for Spiegel and Grau, a
Penguin/Random House imprint, including four New /York Times bestsellers, as
well as OR Books. He is a regular on the Useful Idiots podcast.
