Glenn Greenwald, Co-Founder of The Intercept, Resigns To Maintain Journalistic Integrity

I have been in the process of writing an article that I will title, “Everything Is Becoming Religion.” This morning, while writing, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded. Here is an except from Greenwald’s announcement:

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. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Greenwald’s resignation comes on the heels of his riveting three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan earlier this week. During that discussion, Greenwald (and Rogan) aimed Greenwald’s criticisms at our most prominent legacy media outlets across the entire political spectrum. And now our social media overlords are actively getting into the game. Three hours is a lot of time, but I would urge you to watch every minute of this. It would be a small investment, given that this discussion offers an accurate diagnosis of America’s Dys-information Pandemic and some moral clarity about what needs to happen going forward.

Our prominent legacy news outlets have become sad jokes with regard to many critical national issues. Our “news” is now pre-filtered to protect us from basic facts and it treats thinking as though it is a team sport, much like the dogma people are offered in churches. It treats us like we are babies, as though we aren’t able to think for ourselves. Our prominent legacy media outlets have so thoroughly choked off meaningful non-partisan information and discussion that this has ripped open up a dangerous information chasm—many of us now inhabit only one of two mostly non-overlapping factual worlds. This has, in turn, led to two exceedingly disappointing choices for President of this Duopoly. If I needed to hire an employee for any type of job in any business, I would never hire either of these candidates and neither would you. But this is where we are, unable to talk with one another about this sad situation with nuance. In fact, too many of us have been convinced that we should hate each other for having differing opinions, even when we are mostly “on the same side of the aisle.”

Somehow, there are many Americans who are still convinced that they can uncritically sit back and “turn on the news.” What they will actually be exposed to, for the most part, is reporters who are afraid to ask the same basic questions on the job that they actually and instinctively do ask each other in private. Instead of informing us with a wide range of facts and opinions, they are driven to please their bosses and audience. This is not news. This is Not-News. This parallels the deep dysfunction driven by social media, an issue address in the excellent new documentary, “The Social Dilemma.”

We now have a News-Industrial Complex that is driven by money and ideology instead of integrity and courage to engage with inconvenient facts. This system is designed to please you, to give you more of what your intuitive side, your System 1, craves. Once you have this epiphany about what is really going on, you will no longer be able to stop seeing it. If you continue watching the “news,” you will increasingly think, “Garbage in, Garbage out.” It will increasingly realize that prominent legacy news outlets are fucking with our brains to make money and steer elections. Once you have this epiphany, you will experience a greatly heightened annoyance at what passes for “news” Once a critical mass of people have this epiphany, this will be our first step in a long slow recovery.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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  1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth October 29, 2020 Reply

    Matt Taibbi’s comment on Glenn Greenwald’s resignation from The Intercept (this is an excerpt and Taibbi’s entire response can (and should) be read at Taibbi’s Substack website):

    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 founded can’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.

  5. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth October 30, 2020 Reply

    Glenn’s entire discussion with Katie Helper and Matt Taibbi:

  7. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath October 31, 2020 Reply

    The constitution was written to protect the citizens from their government. In the end, it’s just a document and needs enforcement. The Founders left us three:

    First, law. “Because Trump” has justified horrific precedents to be established, such as weaponizing government, allowing of perjury, attempting not just one but three coups, denial of due process, and the list goes on. The power of precedent to shape the law is awesome and awful. One down.

    Second, freedom of expression and especially of the press. Without a free and independent press there can be no other freedoms. The Founders never contemplated a press co-opted by tribalism. Two down.

    The third is almost too terrible to contemplate: the Second Amendment. I had always trusted that the “almost too terrible to contemplate” aspect would prevent any single force from upending both the first and second enforcement mechanisms. I’ve never been so sorry to be wrong in my life.

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