I can't remember which podcast I was listening to, but on one of them, someone
pointed out that there was a time when journalists adhered to the formula for a
news story: What, where, who, How, and when, or something similar. I remember
learning it when I took a high school English class in journalism and joined
the school newspaper. That person said that we need a place where we can go to
read a factual report of what is happening.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2020 1:15 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Glenn Greenwald on His Resignation from the
Intercept Matt Taibi
"...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..."
Can there ever be such a thing as Freedom of the Press?
Carl Jarvis
On 11/2/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
