The Intercept's co-founder Glenn Greenwald, who recently resigned after he was censored by his own publication for covering the Hunter Biden scandal, has revealed the internal emails between him and the editors now posted on Substack.
In an email dated Oct. 27, editor Peter Maas wrote: "Glenn, I have carefully read your draft and there is some I agree with and some I disagree with but am comfortable publishing. However, there is some material at the core of this draft that I think is very flawed. Overall I think this piece can work best if it is significantly narrowed down to what you first discussed with Betsy — media criticism about liberal journalists not asking Biden the questions he should be asked more forcefully, and why they are failing to do that."
"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," Maas emphasized, invoking The Intercept's editor-in-chief Betsy Reed.
The message continued to outline the "problem" in Greenwald's draft that asserts there exists "a massive suppression attempt by the entire major media to not report out these accusations, but then doesn’t explore how major news organizations have done significant stories, and those stories, such as the Journal’s, have not found anything of significance. "
Maas insisted that Greenwald's reporting needs to be revised and shortened to "focus on the sections about liberal media bias" that tend to shy away from asking the Democratic challenger direct questions about the New York Post bombshell and "how all of this contributed to sub-optimal amounts of reporting on the corruption allegations, which, although they aren’t backed by any evidence implicating Joe Biden himself, nonetheless reveal greater detail about how his family has used his name for profit."
In rebuttal, Greenwald fired back: "I don't agree that the sections regarding the serious questions raised by the emails that Biden should have to answer are either unnecessary or inaccurate.
"While I'm willing to talk about any specific factual inaccuracies you think are present, I'm not willing to remove those sections -- in part because I think that discussion is important in its own right, but also because the discussion of why the media should be pursuing this story more aggressively, and why they were wrong to try to bury it, requires demonstrating that there's a real story here that deserves coverage," Greenwald replied.
Greenwald acknowledged that he is always willing to modify factual inaccuracies, but he does not see any faults pointed out in his memo. "But if the Intercept's position is that it won't publish any article by me that suggests that there are valid questions about whether Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing, then I think we should agree that the Intercept's position is that it is unwilling to publish the article I want to publish about the Democratic front-runner," he clarified.
Under his contract, if The Intercept were to decide against running his piece, Greenwald stressed that he has the right to publish his article elsewhere.
Then on the following morning, Greenwald noted the "glaring irony" to Maas that this is the first time in his political writing career that he has been censored by the news outlet that I created with the specific and explicit purpose of ensuring that journalists are never censored by their editors -- is disturbing to me in the extreme."
Greenwald then accused The Intercept of publishing "more articles than I can count that contain factually dubious claims if not outright falsehoods that are designed to undermine Trump's candidacy or protect Joe Biden," which is now telling to someone who has self-reportedly never experienced an article retraction or serious correction in 15 years.
He also highlighted how the crackdown is occurring less than a week before the presidential election. "[T]his censorship is being imposed by editors who eagerly want the candidate I'm writing about critically to win the election," Greenwald levelled.
"Note that I'm not making claims there about motives: I'm just stating facts that are indisputably true," he dug deeper. "I'm not saying your motive or anyone else's is a desire to suppress critical reporting about the Democratic presidential candidate you support in order to help him win. I obviously can't know your internal motives."
Greenwald speculated his "intense eagerness for Biden to win" shared by other editorial staffers that "colors your editorial judgment (just as it's possible that my view that the Democratic Party is corrupt may be coloring mine: that's why no journalist has a monopoly on truth sufficient to justify censoring others)."
"What's happening here is obvious: you know that you can't explicitly say you don't want to publish the article because it raises questions about the candidate you and all other TI Editors want very much to win the election in 5 days," Greenwald alleged.
He went on to expose The Intercept for taking the lead in "falsely claiming" that The New York Post's reporting on the Biden family corruption scandal is part of a "Russian disinformation" campaign. Greenwald pointed to his former publication "uncritically citing the allegations of ex-CIA officials as truth" and "omitting the sentence in the letter from the ex-CIA officials admitting they had no evidence for that claim."
"In other words, the Intercept -- in the only article that it bothered to publish that makes passing reference to these documents -- did so only by mindlessly repeating what CIA operatives say. And it turned out to be completely false," Greenwald concluded.
Reed responded succinctly: "Our intention in sending the memo was for you to revise the story for publication. However, it's clear from your response this morning that you are unwilling to engage in a productive editorial process on this article, as we had hoped. It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere."
She added that Greenwald's comments about The Intercept and his colleagues are "offensive and unacceptable. "
Then Greenwald resigned, testifying that he has been "extremely disenchanted and saddened by the editorial direction of The Intercept under its New York leadership for quite some time."
"The publication we founded without those editors back in 2014 now bears absolutely no resemblance to what we set out to build -- not in content, structure, editorial mission or purpose," he snapped back. "I have grown embarrassed to have my name used as a fund-raising tool to support what it is doing and for editors to use me as shield to hide behind to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes."
Greenwald called attention to the Reality Winner debacle, "which I was publicly blamed despite having no role in it," while the editors responsible for those mistakes allegedly "stood by silently," allowed for Greenwald to be blamed for their errors, and covered up any public account of what happened "knowing that such transparency would expose their own culpability."
He also disclosed how he repeatedly over the past several months brought Reed's attention to "false claims" published by The Intercept in articles that were "designed to protect Biden and malign Trump." Greenwald stated, "Some have been corrected or quietly deleted, while others were just left standing."
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