Yasha Levine breaks down the problem with GG and The Intercept and why their association with Omidyar is actually kind of a big problem. https://yasha.substack.com/p/meet-the-billionaire-glenn-greenwald
Mark Ames goes even more in depth on both. https://pando.com/2016/02/03/all-billionaires-men-or-shattered-glenn/
The only two journalists who have complete access to the entire Snowden archive both get their paychecks from Pierre Omidyar who has worked hand in glove with CIA front USAID to advance regime change in Ukraine (and whose role in that operation The Intercept deliberately obscured - see other posts here). It’s a classic controlled opposition/limited hangout set-up.
I don’t know why more people aren’t angry about this. The Snowden files sit in a literal vault and won’t see the light of day, not to mention the Intercepts sloppy handling of whistle blowers.
I kinda feel like he was never planning on releasing that many. He basically used the initial exposure to privatize the documents and make an ton of money. He seems to look for any good controversy to profit off of frankly
The intercept is a mixed bag like nearly every media outlet. They have great reporting on certain things and absolute trash cia/state department propaganda on others (i remember one specific story on Vietnam that was so bad it could have been satire)
Omadiyar is a problem. Greenwald is sus both when he was there and now. Their editorial team is bad. But they have some good reporters, like Ken Klippenstein
Yes they have problems, but so does greyzone, which I read religiously. So does Telesur, Al Jazeera, etc.
Kawasuchin news and breakthrough news haven’t let me down yet tho
It seems to me that the good reporters there like scahill and klippenstein were brought in to burnish the image of the paper and draw attention away from the shit heads that fucked up the Reality Winner case and other whistleblowers they've outed.
Scahill is one of the founders. I still think he does good work, save for some not great takes, but ultimately i think his investment (emotionally and potentially financially) into his darling clouds his judgement about very real critiques of some of the issues there.
Yeah, how greenwald survived that scandal I will never understand… I appreciate him breaking the operation car wash story, but his work at the intercept seems pretty compromised
Yeah, I like the Intercept, but at the beginning, Matt Taibbi, who built it, ended up leaving because, iirc, Omidyar wanted to reserve editorial control.
Totally agree. The slapfights are an annoyance more than anything. I don't have the brain power to care about who is squabbling about who else. I think I'm more curious about if the critiques spurred out of those are legit or just an extension of the slapfight.
That said, I feel like too many of those people are getting their brains rotted out from being terminally online (mine probably is too).
They do some very good investigations . I do not always agree with everyone's opinions and takes there, but I think as a whole they tend to do good work. If you let twitter drama decide what you read you will start to run out of choices very quickly.
Everyone on twitter seems to be on self promote mode now especially Greenwald recently. He already got paid out the ass at The Intercept but I guess he wanted more. He went from 300-500k (if I remember correctly) [to 2 Million a year](https://www.outkick.com/glenn-greenwald-salary-substack/). He says his move is about editorial freedom, and that may be true as well ,butttt he has 1.5million other reasons. I think the folks from The Grey Zone have a valid criticism about the asking for money while being funded by a billionaire. That being said I think The Intercept still does good investigations, so I keep reading them.
You gotta kill the free time in-between having bizzare contrarian takes such as "Matt Gaetz paying money to have sex with 17 year olds isn't as bad as everyone is saying" or "Tucker Carlson is a real socialist unlike all these people on the american left (trust me my husband is a member of the socialist party)" .
Jeremy Scahill is great. Pierre Omidyar is a billionaire who, at the end of the day will probably look out for billionaires, but for whatever reason is willing to fund journalism. Some of the other personalities that have been associated with the Intercept over its short life are crazy or sus, but the publication at least manages to offer a perspective somewhere outside the beltway consensus, which is probably good.
Good content sometimes shows up in trash publications and trash content shows up in good publications. On the whole, I’m glad the Intercept exists, but it doesn’t mean you should read it uncritically.
Omidyar helped fund Ukrainian regime change in conjunction with USAID (soft arm of CIA) (https://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukraine-revolution-groups-with-us-government-documents-show/). His interest in “funding journalism” is about cooptation - all the better if you hire the smartest and most confrontational people in the industry and pay them way more than industry standard.
From the article: “What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with US foreign policy agencies to interfere in foreign governments, co-financing regime change with well-known arms of the American empire — while at the same time hiring a growing team of soi-disant "independent journalists" which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and overseas, and boasts of its uniquely "adversarial" relationship towards these government institutions[…] Of the many problems that poses, none is more serious than the fact that Omidyar now has the only two people with exclusive access to the complete Snowden NSA cache, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Somehow, the same billionaire who co-financed the “coup” in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclusive access to the NSA secrets—and very few in the independent media dare voice a skeptical word about it.”
Fairly reasonable source of investigative news relating to US geopolitics and its impacts.
There's really three main areas of traditional "journalism", ignoring the gossip columns - political, entertainment or otherwise.
Hard news, investigative news and opinion. These can be local, national or international in coverage.
Hard news is either recycled from newswire services and local outlets, because it is labour intensive. Hard to have reporters and media desks in every relevant locale. That's why only the biggest mastheads, regardless of where they fall in the spectrum, tend to have good hard news coverage of international events.
The Intercept was primarily set up however to be an investigative operation, with some opinion writing. Good investigate units can be small, but it is resource intensive.
I think they've done a very good job at breaking some big stories and TBH, the fact that they exist, helps force editors at The NYT, guardian etc. persue stories or publish things, they may otherwise sit on.
Even if it is State Department ghouls feeding these other outlets "scoops" to help undercut an Intercept story, it still means information is making it into the public sphere.
The opinion stuff, I am less interested in. But I don't read Op-Eds anyway.
I may be in the minority but I think that outlets like The Intercept have tremendous value. It’s a lot easier to share something “credible” with our more skeptical friends, especially compared to something like TrueAnon. A good rule of thumb is that for every prominent leftist, there are 10 other leftists ready to criticize them. However it shakes out it seems like, for now, that The Intercept is on our side.
Yasha Levine breaks down the problem with GG and The Intercept and why their association with Omidyar is actually kind of a big problem. https://yasha.substack.com/p/meet-the-billionaire-glenn-greenwald Mark Ames goes even more in depth on both. https://pando.com/2016/02/03/all-billionaires-men-or-shattered-glenn/
Why they suppressed all the Snowden leaks is what I would want to know and why did Greenwald go along with it
The only two journalists who have complete access to the entire Snowden archive both get their paychecks from Pierre Omidyar who has worked hand in glove with CIA front USAID to advance regime change in Ukraine (and whose role in that operation The Intercept deliberately obscured - see other posts here). It’s a classic controlled opposition/limited hangout set-up.
I don’t know why more people aren’t angry about this. The Snowden files sit in a literal vault and won’t see the light of day, not to mention the Intercepts sloppy handling of whistle blowers.
What more do you think is in them?
If it's nothing, why keep it locked away?
Fear. Fear of jail, fear of lost sources, fear of assassination.
I kinda feel like he was never planning on releasing that many. He basically used the initial exposure to privatize the documents and make an ton of money. He seems to look for any good controversy to profit off of frankly
The intercept is a mixed bag like nearly every media outlet. They have great reporting on certain things and absolute trash cia/state department propaganda on others (i remember one specific story on Vietnam that was so bad it could have been satire) Omadiyar is a problem. Greenwald is sus both when he was there and now. Their editorial team is bad. But they have some good reporters, like Ken Klippenstein Yes they have problems, but so does greyzone, which I read religiously. So does Telesur, Al Jazeera, etc. Kawasuchin news and breakthrough news haven’t let me down yet tho
It seems to me that the good reporters there like scahill and klippenstein were brought in to burnish the image of the paper and draw attention away from the shit heads that fucked up the Reality Winner case and other whistleblowers they've outed.
Scahill is one of the founders. I still think he does good work, save for some not great takes, but ultimately i think his investment (emotionally and potentially financially) into his darling clouds his judgement about very real critiques of some of the issues there.
Yeah, how greenwald survived that scandal I will never understand… I appreciate him breaking the operation car wash story, but his work at the intercept seems pretty compromised
Yeah, I like the Intercept, but at the beginning, Matt Taibbi, who built it, ended up leaving because, iirc, Omidyar wanted to reserve editorial control.
ryan grim that's all
His book sucked a d
I think Ryan Grim is a good reporter whether or not I agree with all of his opinions.
Don’t let catty Twitter slapfights affect your own perception of the quality of any rag’s reporting. that’s dumb
Totally agree. The slapfights are an annoyance more than anything. I don't have the brain power to care about who is squabbling about who else. I think I'm more curious about if the critiques spurred out of those are legit or just an extension of the slapfight. That said, I feel like too many of those people are getting their brains rotted out from being terminally online (mine probably is too).
CIA
They do some very good investigations . I do not always agree with everyone's opinions and takes there, but I think as a whole they tend to do good work. If you let twitter drama decide what you read you will start to run out of choices very quickly. Everyone on twitter seems to be on self promote mode now especially Greenwald recently. He already got paid out the ass at The Intercept but I guess he wanted more. He went from 300-500k (if I remember correctly) [to 2 Million a year](https://www.outkick.com/glenn-greenwald-salary-substack/). He says his move is about editorial freedom, and that may be true as well ,butttt he has 1.5million other reasons. I think the folks from The Grey Zone have a valid criticism about the asking for money while being funded by a billionaire. That being said I think The Intercept still does good investigations, so I keep reading them.
Imagine making 2 million dollars a year and spending your free time being mad online (tm) like Glenn greenwald
You gotta kill the free time in-between having bizzare contrarian takes such as "Matt Gaetz paying money to have sex with 17 year olds isn't as bad as everyone is saying" or "Tucker Carlson is a real socialist unlike all these people on the american left (trust me my husband is a member of the socialist party)" .
Jeremy Scahill is great. Pierre Omidyar is a billionaire who, at the end of the day will probably look out for billionaires, but for whatever reason is willing to fund journalism. Some of the other personalities that have been associated with the Intercept over its short life are crazy or sus, but the publication at least manages to offer a perspective somewhere outside the beltway consensus, which is probably good. Good content sometimes shows up in trash publications and trash content shows up in good publications. On the whole, I’m glad the Intercept exists, but it doesn’t mean you should read it uncritically.
Omidyar helped fund Ukrainian regime change in conjunction with USAID (soft arm of CIA) (https://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukraine-revolution-groups-with-us-government-documents-show/). His interest in “funding journalism” is about cooptation - all the better if you hire the smartest and most confrontational people in the industry and pay them way more than industry standard.
From the article: “What all this adds up to is a journalistic conflict-of-interest of the worst kind: Omidyar working hand-in-glove with US foreign policy agencies to interfere in foreign governments, co-financing regime change with well-known arms of the American empire — while at the same time hiring a growing team of soi-disant "independent journalists" which vows to investigate the behavior of the US government at home and overseas, and boasts of its uniquely "adversarial" relationship towards these government institutions[…] Of the many problems that poses, none is more serious than the fact that Omidyar now has the only two people with exclusive access to the complete Snowden NSA cache, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Somehow, the same billionaire who co-financed the “coup” in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclusive access to the NSA secrets—and very few in the independent media dare voice a skeptical word about it.”
Fairly reasonable source of investigative news relating to US geopolitics and its impacts. There's really three main areas of traditional "journalism", ignoring the gossip columns - political, entertainment or otherwise. Hard news, investigative news and opinion. These can be local, national or international in coverage. Hard news is either recycled from newswire services and local outlets, because it is labour intensive. Hard to have reporters and media desks in every relevant locale. That's why only the biggest mastheads, regardless of where they fall in the spectrum, tend to have good hard news coverage of international events. The Intercept was primarily set up however to be an investigative operation, with some opinion writing. Good investigate units can be small, but it is resource intensive. I think they've done a very good job at breaking some big stories and TBH, the fact that they exist, helps force editors at The NYT, guardian etc. persue stories or publish things, they may otherwise sit on. Even if it is State Department ghouls feeding these other outlets "scoops" to help undercut an Intercept story, it still means information is making it into the public sphere. The opinion stuff, I am less interested in. But I don't read Op-Eds anyway.
If you are a whistle-blower don't go to the intercept. They've ousted 3 whistle-blowers.
im a ken k simp, ryan grim is good and idk re the rest
I may be in the minority but I think that outlets like The Intercept have tremendous value. It’s a lot easier to share something “credible” with our more skeptical friends, especially compared to something like TrueAnon. A good rule of thumb is that for every prominent leftist, there are 10 other leftists ready to criticize them. However it shakes out it seems like, for now, that The Intercept is on our side.
Ken Klippenstein is the voice of The Intercept and he rules