Journalist Glenn Greenwald, the left-wing, anti-establishment muckracker who founded The Intercept after the mainstream media rejected his stories involving Edward Snowden in the early days of the Obama administration, has now resigned from the very outlet he started. Greenwald ran into strong resistance from the editors of The Intercept when he pushed to publish a story criticizing Twitter and the rest of the media for its treatment of The New York Post’s bombshell report on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Greenwald, who has been ruthlessly contrarian when it comes to the media’s obsession with “Russian interference,” said this week that he is moving to an independent journalism model in the wake of his conflict with The Intercept.
“The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” Greenwald wrote. “Modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it.”
Greenwald accused the New York-based editors of The Intercept of being beholden to the liberal establishment in the media.
“They have a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert,” he wrote.
Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed turned the tables in a statement, saying that is just trying to make himself “appear a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.”
“While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle a political campaign’s—the Trump campaign’s—dubious claims and launder them as journalism,” Reed said. “We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be.”
Greenwald fired back in an interview with Joe Rogan on Wednesday.
“They’re all desperate for Trump to lose,” Greenwald said. “They don’t want to be scorned in their social circles. And so they’re willing to abdicate their journalistic function, which is reporting on one of the most powerful people in the world, and Joe Biden in part because they want to manipulate and tinker with the election using journalism, but a much bigger part because they’re scared of being yelled at on Twitter.”
Fact is, this all goes back to 2016. The media looked at its many, many failures of coverage that year and decided that the only real crime was their coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails. That’s what got Trump elected, they concluded, and that’s the mistake they won’t make again. Thus, the unbelievable refusal to cover this scandal involving Hunter, his father, and international financial schemes that are unethical if not outright criminal. If there is a story there, they’ll cover it when – and only when – the election is over and Joe Biden has safely removed Donald Trump from office.
Until then, mum’s the word, and any journalist who doesn’t abide the code of silence will just have to find work elsewhere.
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