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Glenn Greenwald resigns from the Intercept over site’s refusal to publish a story about Hunter Biden docs

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« The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality…are by no means unique to The Intercept. »
Here’s a 2020 twist I didn’t see coming. Glenn Greenwald is a co-founder of the Intercept, a progressive news site that leans toward the far left. Today Greenwald announced he had resigned from his own site after editors attempted to force him to remove criticism of Joe Biden from a story before publication. The exact content that offended the editors isn’t spelled out but it certainly sounds as if it’s related to the Hunter Biden documents. Here’s the first part of Greenwald’s explanation on his new substack site: Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media. 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, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression. The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication. I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose. He also had a broader criticism of the Intercept as having problems common to left-leaning media outlets: The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. This is all part of an introduction. The rest of his piece recounts how he came to co-found the Intercept and how the site was handed over to a group of editors to run so that the founders could continue to focus on journalism. But as Greenwald describes it, that gradually meant working at a site that was happy to capitalize on his name and reputation but which gave him relatively little input into what the site was doing.

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