The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.
Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we're going to get are "tabloids for politics" - and that is what we see. It's just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.
Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the "opposite side" media as tabloid-like, it's been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it's still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam's Razor to their own.
This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it's critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.
This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They're expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational.
All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.
> Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now
WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.
I'm still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.
WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it's not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.
The Economist is quickly losing that reputation. I cancelled my subscription. The FT is still pretty good, though they shy away from anything critical of powerful corporations/individuals.
I have print subscriptions to the first 2 but I disagree because what I recall from working in blue collar jobs is that people who would benefit from that world view will not bother. they spend their days thinking about basic survival and when they pick up a paper (on the bog) just want to be entertained. Sadly the typical reader of the Economist never had to deal with anyone from the "lower" classes. They consider them as something they need protection from. A minimum wage, social safety net and working health care system usually goes a long way in preventing this divide from growing into a normal (like in the US - or very poor countries that share that class divide as a common property with the US).
note that the economist, ft and wsj are neither impartial nor a well-rounded balance of daily record. but yes, wapo and nyt--and i'll add npr--have largely turned into partisan opinionating (which i'd coin covidizing, if i had any such clout), save a few longer-form investigative pieces (which have a leaning via editorial discretion, but aren't typically editorialized).
I've stopped caring about institutions' reputations because I don't need them to gatekeep for me anymore.
If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.
But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.
WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.
I still don't understand why (apart from money) the major cable news networks allow Paid Partner trash to fill up the bottom of the front page of their websites. "Leading gut doctor: I beg every American to throw out this vegetable NOW!" type nonsense.
Do you actually read the economist? The publication has downgraded quality enormously since 2004, when I first start reading the economist as a subscriber and not casually.
For the economist to make sense you have to accept reality in very simplistic terms, e.g. "US/NATO good, Iran/Russia/China bad". If you can live with this simple worldview, than the ecconomist is fine.
Well said. I think there is an element were individuals in the system, say journalists like Greenwald, may understand and see how dishonest their organization has become, and how it’s turning into a partisan tabloid, and some of the audience do too. However, they can’t easily voice their opinion or disagree without paying a price. Granted in this case he did speak up and put his job on the line, but many others probably just stay quiet and employed. So the tabloidization just spreads like cancer.
On another level I think they are selling their ability to change public opinion. That’s for to anyone willing to pay. Large companies, governments, political campaigns and so on.
Chomsky said somewhere that with media like this, you can often invert what they are saying to find the truth. Especially if they say “don’t look here, nothing to see here, look over there instead”. That could be a clue there is something really interesting they are hiding. The more effort they are expending, the more interesting the information. This laptop story has that kind of a vibe to it.
If there was nothing to it, and it was a fabrication, they would gladly turn it into a 24/7 advertisement money maker, exposing the fakery and showing everyone their journalistic investigative skills. But this level of suppression certainly raises my eyebrows...
Why would Substack solve this? It's just a more refined Medium with better monetization opportunities. Being on Substack doesn't mean the author is trustworthy, only that they have content that people will engage with (and potentially pay for), which is still the same KPI you're referring to.
Substack allows you to subscribe (paid) to an individual journalist or publication. They can then post long-form stories to your inbox. That gives them the opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with you where credibility matters.
At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expensive. The better approach is the Apple News Plus or Google News one, where you pay a single subscription for a very wide range of outlets.... But, their idea isn't crazy.
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. It may turn out that the "V" in MVP here necessarily required monetization, for those who see journalism as the search for truth, not the search for clicks, to take the leap of going indie. Certainly if that trend continues we ought to expect larger organization - where solo-indies merge into mini-guilds, and so on, hopefully to the point where these become large organizations comparable to the 'old' media companies before they shifted away from journalism. Certainly Taibbi and Greenwald could be the first "dyad" to collaborate within this alternative media universe, so that might give us a clue of what organizing principles this new world may operate under, with these new incentives.
Being on Substack solves the problem of censorship by way of one's editor or organization. It re-introduces the problem of unedited journalism; i.e journalism that isn't passed through a degree of peer review to ensure rigour. It seems as though it's no longer guarantee both full journalistic freedom and rigour at the same time.
A nitpick on technical language: what you describe is a _positive_ feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is one that is able to calibrate its output by applying corrections to fluctuations. On the other hand, a positive feedback is one which can grow out of control, because it does the opposite. I think that's what you meant when describing how failing media outlets will double-down on the wrong strategy.
> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.
That's a big 'if'. The 'media's value prop is not to promote a free press. Those that believe that to be the case are quickly going extinct.
> This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. [...] I think the market will correct this error
If it's true (I don't think it is), and to the degree that you can sustain a business over many years. I don't think it's even possible to be true, because the money itself is corrupting. The market cannot correct what doesn't require correction.
I think where your analysis fails is that you presume that the media has shifted their position on their own. They haven't; they've reacted to the public. It's actually a positive feedback loop, not negative -- it's just that it's positive in the direction you dislike. We cannot depend on or hope for market correction. A free press in modern times requires public funding.
And a vast majority of Fox's growth has been from talking faces, not news. Tucker Carlson has mentioned several times that he's "not the news", but an opinion commentator. I think this reinforces the OPs point.
Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.
It goes back to what a company's value proposition is. Media companies certainly benefit from optimizing this KPI, but it means they are now going to become entertainment companies. This isn't necessarily "bad" from the standpoint of the media companies or their shareholders, but insofar as the people who make up those organizations still want the company's value proposition to their customers to be providing journalism, the company has failed. Given the culture of journalism being a mission-oriented pursuit, it's fair to assume that many people will feel remorse at these changes occurring within these organizations, even if those organizations become very valuable entertainment companies.
It's not a trap, it just is. In the end you're forced to choose: revenue or something else?
"Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value ... when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we by default actively optimize against Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
They are an alternative, but not a substitute for institutional journalism.
News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
It won't work, we will simply just have a collection of disparate, narrowly focused and financially limited sources, from which anyone can draw to reinforce whatever view of the world they already have. You need an instution with the resources to look deep and wide and enough of a reputation that people will listen when it reports something they do not like.
It isn’t reasonable to expect independent journalists to take over the work that news media currently engages in. While there are legitimate criticisms of media companies becoming too large and being driven by outrage based engagements, they also provide the resources for some of the best journalists to spend a large part of their lives dedicated to digging into a story rather than worrying about how to make ends meet.
The press is a pillar of American democracy. Independent journalists are great but they just won’t have the same power or credibility as they do when they’re organized.
If I take your argument at face value (that you want to maximise trust), publishing an article which is critical of someone is likely to reduce the audience's trust in you - I believe this holds true in personal interactions, whether or not they agree and whether or not you are being truthful.
So it doesn't seem to me that it's "trust" you are aiming for here.
Agree, but maybe "the market" will NOT correct this error, maybe we need some key regulations, or maybe we need a little more infusion of money to public-funded journalism?
Call me a pessimist, but this core issue is a threat to democracy, and I'm not sure we can rely entirely on "the market" to auto-correct itself.
This is a really great way of looking at the problem. Unfortunately it’s also really hard to balance the incentives throughout a media org in a way that works - see pg’s famous “submarine” article. There’s just too much value in manipulating your audience, selling or trading access, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk Glenn Greenwald on fox news (starting with 4:00) My summary: During the last four years the left lost its scepticism towards the secret service, this as the CIA has tried to topple Trump. Now they are in the same boat (in his words 'full union with') the CIA/security state. Snowden was motivated by his anger at the interference of the NSA in internal affairs (who are all supposed to deal in foreign affairs only), now the whole lot is deep within internal matters and 'telling Americans what to think'. He says the whole thing is very dangerous - as the CIA guys are professional disinformation specialists with an authoritarian mindset, and they are likely to gain a lot of influence.
I agree there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism. But who would anyone trust? The incentives in the media point towards pandering and outraging. Left to the shareholders a news organization is mandated to maximize short term profit in whatever way it can. So capitalism is out. Perhaps a benevolent billionaire could support such an effort? But again, who would trust him? Its a pikle.
there is a huge opportunity for a trusted institution to do journalism
There are new media organizations that do very good work, independently. But you have to look for them, and most people are too lazy to bother seeking out quality journalism when the garbage is forced in front of them every waking second by social media.
The other problem is that most of the good work is regional. WTTW in Chicago, The Texas Tribune in Texas, various public radio stations around the country. There's plenty of good journalism. But it's an effort to piece it all together.
This is among the oddest conversation for a startup focused board.
What is the market size ?
Recently there was a debacle in India where a news channel corrupted the ratings system.
In the discussions that followed, it turns out that the news industry pays peanuts.
If there is no real market, and just passion projects and idealism- then what’s going on?
Matter of fact India is a good example of what happens. Small independent teams making good news content and the vast majority of the news corrupted into ratings farms.
It's not like there can be only one news organisation. You could say that the incentives point to making a product that most people can afford but there are still companies making $50k watches and million dollar cars.
Sure the largest news organisations will always be serving up garbage for the unwashed masses but there should still be room for one optimising for trust.
I think you just need to find a way to align incentives. Capitalism can work just fine. The reason we're in this situation in part is because the skills and resources you garner for delivering journalism happen to overlap with those needed to deliver political tabloids. We don't worry about air conditioner manufacturers magically becoming insurance companies, because its hard to do so. So ultimately if you align incentives enough I think you can make it increasingly unlikely a specific 'truth seeking' organization will slide into tabloids. But I don't know the formula. It might boil down to re-baking the culture which awards good journalism and bootstraps itself off of valid credentialism.
the danger when we do change who is President in the US is we get a complicit press, a press that does not look, and worse a press that prevents looking
This is why the antri trust against Google is so important, to make it easier for the media to sell subscriptions so as not to have to resort to clickbait.
That's not the issue here. Greenwald just doesn't like having editors and thinks he's above having them, when he's clearly not after desperately pushing a clear propaganda story.
IDK what you're talking about here since First Look Media is a non-profit that runs no ads. You talk about the need to maximize trust and stringent editorial guidelines are part of that. This is a story that even most conservative media didn't want to touch because it was so fishy. Greenwald has always worn his bias on his sleeve and the article and editorial objections (both linked from this post) are pretty clear on that. His entire article is saying the media are covering a poorly-sourced and inconclusive story aggressively enough. His opinion is larded with weaselly statements about how there's no evidence of wrongdoing but there could be. That's terrible journalism and the editor knows it. Greenwald has absolutely always been like this. He's the sensationalist and The Intercept was trying to keep him in line.
Glenn had a 3 hour long conversation on a podcast a few days ago where he laid out the problem really well:
Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat, because the people they are friends with are the ones that own that boat, invite them to parties, and are a part of their friend groups.
The reporting around this story has been absolutely unbelievable to me. This story seems like the type of thing that would normally make peoples' entire journalistic career, and yet the journalists, the people who are supposed to be a part of our protection and sense-making system are actively trying to suppress it.
It's also the kind of story that can break someone's journalistic career.
Even Fox News wouldn't run the story because it wasn't supported by facts.
And last I heard, there still has been no concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Tucker Carlson claims that his evidence "got lost in the mail". In the age of the internet, they didn't snap any photos of this so-called proof?
There is no "there" there. Just a bunch of internet sleuths with MS paint red circles and theories about deep states. And your comment falls into this category.
Further, the NY Post struggled to find in-house writers that would put their name to the story because they weren't confident about the story's credibility. Of the two bylines, one found out after the fact.
Glenn Greenwald is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. He broke the Snowden story--another sensational-sounding scoop which likely sounded like total bullshit at first.
Is it possible that Mr. Greenwald is a better judge of whether or not there is a story here?
If you read Greenwald’s piece, you will understand why he disagrees with you. I, personally, credit his ethics more than I credit TheIntercept’s editor and this is why I immediately subscribed his substack.
Tucker Carlson claims that his evidence "got lost in the mail"
No he didn't - where did that come from? He claimed the mail had been intercepted, someone had ripped open the parcel in transit and stolen the documents, and that the courier firm had even shown them pictures of the ripped-open package. He then made a series of remarkably precise claims about their interaction with the courier, the search the courier firm mounted to try and find the stolen documents and so on.
According to sibling comments this story was now confirmed in its entirety by UPS.
Ironically, I learned what Tucker Carlson said by reading the Guardian. Their top story yesterday (in terms of views) was something like "Tucker Carlson mocked after claiming evidence was lost in the mail". Obviously the Guardian, and those people who mocked him or lied about his claims now look very foolish and naive indeed, because his claims have been verified in their entirety by the courier firm themselves. The real story here is that UPS has been corrupted by the same kinds of win-at-any-cost leftists who blocked the story at Twitter and other places: they are so desperate for this to go away that they're actually destroying their own customer's valuables in transit. In the USA every line of communication is being shut down by these radicals, even postal mail.
Even Fox News wouldn't run the story because it wasn't supported by facts.
Run what story? Fox news has been covering the hard drive since it was released.
And yes, no concrete evidence of wrong doing, but if you read Glenn's email, he clearly states that "something smells rotten" and the editors response is "we won't even allow pointed questions about Biden".
Glenn is offering the Biden camp more benefit of the doubt than the MSM has offered Trump when random allegations arise.
That's the issue - the MSM holds up "journalistic integrity" when it suits their political candidate. That's not integrity at all. That's just corruption of the what journalism is supposed to be.
The DOJ has acknowledged that it has had a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden "and associates" for money laundering since 2019, and there is evidence and a credible witness that the Biden's (including Joe Biden) were involved in a bribery scheme with foreign governments.
One of the main points I got from Chomsky & Herman's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988, analyzing news from a decade earlier), is that journalists print what the government says because it's convenient -- it's less work to print what the government (or anyone else) says at a press conference than to do your own research -- AND even when it comes to privately given info, because they need to maintain the relationships with government (and other powerful) sources, if you make a government source mad, and they stop giving info, how are you going to get that privileged info to write your stories?
Journalists develop "sources", and relationships with those sources, and then there are pressures to serve the interests of those sources. Sources are usually powerful people (whether government or "socialites"), because that's who has valuable info on an ongoing basis, generally.
Chomsky & Herman's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988, analyzing news from a decade earlier),
While it may be good work, it's so out of date it's useless as a tool for evaluating the media landscape of today.
I spent 20 years as a journalist and can tell you from first-hand experience and the contacts I have kept in the industry that the media today is not the same as the media of 2010, or 2000, or 1990, and certainly not the 1970's.
You can go further back from Chomsky. I'm currently reading Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami, which gives a grim portrait of journalists in 19th France as lazily serving the interests of those in power[1].
The thing about the situation is historically journalists have always served interests and ideologies. American journalism has a long and storied history but the idea of purely objective journalism is itself a particular kind of rhetoric and particular kind of spin that was a fine product of early 20th America. In reality, 90% of journalism is "spin" and 90% of journalism has always been spin - or interpretation or perspective or context or whatever spin you want to give spin. That journalist serve their sources, their ideologies, the interests of the owners of the journal and so-forth isn't bad unless you think everyone with power is evil (which is plausible but if you believe this, then you would be supporting some ideology outside the mainstream, which also has it's spin).
It's fairly well documented that Julian Assange worked quite actively to make the release of the Clinton emails serve Donald Trump (coordinating with the Trump and other no-nos) - not even that there was lying involved but here he went from citizen journalist to propagandist. But I don't think becoming a propagandist makes someone worse than the cause they serve. In the case of Trump, I happen think made that made him viciously evil but that's happenstance relative to the question of journalism.
Forget about the current election. Suppose you had your ideal candidate running against a definite evil, someone who pursue policies that would hurt or kill your friends and family, in a close race. If some piece of pure dirt, a politically contentless but deeply embarrassing true fact about this honestly good candidate surfaced, would consider those who pushed this fact relentlessly to be paragons of virtue?
There are some articles, a few, where pure truth can prevail- the Snowden revelations were a happy example. But many of even the revelations of journalism rest as much on power politics as they do on truth. Watergate wouldn't have mattered if there wasn't a sufficient consensus in Washington, among powerful people, that Nixon had gone too far. Equivalent scandals can evoke yawns without powerful backers, etc.
Now, go to the current election and you have a candidate of the corrupt permanent government against something like psychopathic candidate of a particular dubious right wing power complex; hardly inviting as a choice. How much are journalists "sacrificing their ethics" to push an arguably less evil? I assume quite a bit but how much should be concerned? I leave that question to you.
> Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat, because the people they are friends with are the ones that own that boat, invite them to parties, and are a part of their friend groups.
To the extent this is arguably true of etablishment journalist, the mirror image seems to be true of anti-establishment journalists. Instead of being unreasonably resistant to publishing stories that rock the boat, they are unreasonable eager to do so, taking sources that validate this pre-established bias uncritically, opening themselves up for manipulation and as agents of propaganda, because the people they are friends with, and that invite them to parties are more interested in capsizing the boat than the truth.
Wow, exactly what I was thinking but probably more articulate than I could have put it. That there are a lot of people building a journalistic career on being anti-establishment, saying that the "mainstream media" et al are lying to us and censoring us and are crooked...and gaining followers as a result. Often telling us to not trust groups A-Y, and only trusting them, the Z.
At the end of the day, I have to trust someone to be doing the legwork, research, investigation to verify the stories and to report it to me as honestly as they can.
For me, I mostly trust the vast majority of professional journalists and institutions to do that work together, to check and balance each other most of the time to make sure something is as true as it can be, and feel skeptical when someone tells me to distrust them so strongly.
(I worry that sometimes I post things that may be too charged or opinionated or just inappropriate for HN, so if you think this is, I'd be grateful if you let me know why in a reply)
That's a really good and fair point, but we're at a junction where looking at the Ukraine situation and saying "yeah but that looks fucked tho" is met with ABSOLUTE OPPROBRIUM. Come on.
The same people who'd happily get someone fired for tweeting something insensitive are all closing ranks against any criticism of Mr. "You ain't black". Come on.
"Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat,"
There have been a virtually uncountable number of high-profile investigative pieces that criticise people in power published in the last 6 months! This argument is nonsense.
Yeah, and they are published either by socialites from a group that hates the group being exposed, or by "freaks" like Greenwald that no one with a public persona wants near them because they know he's a time bomb.
It's not nonsense, because you're missing that if you criticize someone who you are allowed to criticize, there is no risk to yourself. It's going against the herd and criticizing someone like Joe Biden that will get you thrown out of the club.
So, if it's a high-profile investigative piece on a senior trump admin official, everyone will applaud you. But as soon as you start investigating the Biden family or, on the other hand, write something positive about Trump & Co, then you'll quickly find yourself out of the club.
Can you say with a straight face that the NY Times or WaPo has done that with liberals or Democratic candidates? Outside of tearing down Bernie Sanders I'd say it's a firm no.
> There have been a virtually uncountable number of high-profile investigative pieces that criticise people in power published in the last 6 months! This argument is nonsense.
They have been attack dogs of one political party or the other. But its always been this way. Social media ( especially twitter ) has shown people that journalists are political actors, not dispensers of "truth". They are part of the power structure, not a counterweight to the power structure.
At this point most newspapers should just be part of the democratic, republican or intelligence agency because that's all they are.
I can almost guarantee that most of the people here attacking greenwald and partaking in the downvote brigade are news employees or members of a particular political party. It's hilarious.
Australian journalist Emma Alberici[0] was eventually forced out of the national broadcaster the ABC due primarily to a single article she wrote that was critical of the Government's economic policies, pointing to historic evidence that the policies being pursued were ineffective against the problem the Government were attempting to solve.[1][2].
There are strong implications that the ABC was pressured into editing the articles and putting Emma on the outer until finally letting her go. The ABC is a government-funded but independent media organisation, but has been subject to budget cuts and unprecedented pressure from the current Government since it came to power in 2013 under Tony Abbott.
Coincidentally or otherwise, the current Australian Government is known to have a cosy relationship with News Corp, who frequently bash the ABC for, ironically, biased reporting.
I'll have to listen to the podcast, but I think you're way off in thinking this kind of story makes careers. Journalists take their credibility very seriously and this story doesn't have it, at least not yet if it ever will.
Going with a story that hasn't been vetted marks a serious journalist as a dupe for the rest of their lives.
What do you mean this story hasn't been vetted? One of the major players in the story has gone on record, giving an approximately 45 minute long interview verifying the claims.
The FBI and DNI have also both confirmed the validity of the laptop. How much more "verified" than that would you need?
You're propagating disinfo - in the real sense of the word, not the modern Orwellian meaning - with this line of criticism. Because this is a story that has absolutely been vetted, but the issue is all of the left-leaning mainstream media (read: literally everyone except parts of Fox News) have absolutely refused to cover this story.
Do you really believe if the same story were about a member of the Trump family, that NPR would refuse to cover it?
One more point on credibility - we literally have videos, images, text messages, e-mails of which the other recipients have been confirmed - this is all basically undeniable at this point. So the only question is, is the actual story of how the material was obtained (the laptop repair shop) true, or was the material hacked and then they basically used parallel construction to hide the true origins? That's a fine question to ask, but if you think that the material itself is false that's just completely incredible.
> Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat, because the people they are friends with are the ones that own that boat, invite them to parties, and are a part of their friend groups.
Sounds like they are taking the path that academia took.
Can you be a bit more specific on what you believe to be so important/surprising/relevant about this story that would make an entire journalistic career? What is the story that is not being told, and actively being suppressed? I have been following this quite closely and can't see it.
Did you watch the Tony Babulinksi interview with Tucker Carlson? It shows that Joe Biden had an ownership stake in and was directly involved with his son's company that received a 5-10 million forgivable loan from a top member of the Chinese Communist party. This directly contradicts claims Joe Biden has made throughout his campaign and at the last debate.
I'm curious about this too. It definitely doesn't help that every single person involved in the story has zero credibility left, starting with a "lawyer" who has time and time again been caught peddling the president's lies, has exposed himself to a "15yo" reporter, and who the intelligence community say is being used by foreign nations to meddle in our elections.
> This story seems like the type of thing that would normally make peoples' entire journalistic career, and yet the journalists, the people who are supposed to be a part of our protection and sense-making system are actively trying to suppress it.
This story is the type of thing that would make peoples' entire journalistic career if it was true. And if a journalist pushes it, and it turns out false, it would ruin their entire career—for instance, see Dan Rather. So journalists have to assess how likely they feel that it's true, and I think we've seen a pretty consistent response to those assessments.
> Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat, because the people they are friends with are the ones that own that boat, invite them to parties, and are a part of their friend groups.
Watch The Post, and you'll see this sort of thing goes (at least) back to The Pentagon Papers. I'm not old enough to have watched this play out in real time, so it was an eye opener. The owner of The Washington Post was cozy in the circles the President ran around in, and had to weigh what it would mean to him personally to run that series of articles.
The thing is, Greenwald is an editorialist and a pundit.
I don't mean to give the intercept a pass here, but what Greenwald was doing wasn't "journalism" in the sense that most people think of it. This isn't "his" story - he didn't break it and he didn't do the primary research.
Does his background give him insights that could make for a good editorial? Perhaps, and the Intercept used to pull no punches on that kind of content. But it's not like he deserved any real "credit" or "blame" for the story itself, which was reported by other outlets.
Greenwald was not claiming he is breaking the story. He was trying to shed light into the media blacklisting of the story. It is indeed Ironic that his story got blacklisted as well!
I think some editors are perhaps trying to avoid a repeat of the 'Hillary email/Comey announcement of 2016' scenario but didn't anticipate the Streisand effect.
In hindsight, best approach may have been to cover the story, get a sound bite from Biden denying that he benefitted, say there is no evidence he benefitted and leave it at that.
> Glenn had a 3 hour long conversation on a podcast a few days ago where he laid out the problem really well:
....
> The reporting around this story has been absolutely unbelievable to me
OK, here's the thing though. This is what I call the "Jordan Peterson school of thought."
You begin with a premise. Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair store, some files were found on it, and these were delivered to a Republican Party muck-raker (and that is the most neutral thing you can say about Giuliani).
But, before you examine the premise, you are invited to look at the implications. If this is true then Hunter Biden has traded on his father's name! If this is true then Hunter Biden has gotten involved with some shady characters in Ukraine! If this is true, why hasn't Joe Biden ever recused himself from his dealings with these self-same shady characters?! And the biggest thing... why isn't the Main Stream Media (MSM) doing something about this? What do they have to hide?!
In short, you are set a premise, you are required to accept the truth of this premise, then you are pulled on an emotional journey about where the premise leads you...
But the premise is garbage. In Jordan Peterson's case, the US military is not the same in terms of complexity as real life, for instance. In this case, the Hunter Biden forgot his laptop story does not appear to hold water. You would have to assume a range of additional entities for it to make sense.
The reason the media are not reporting on this is because they want evidence that Hunter owned that laptop and that it is, as the US Intelligence community already pointed out, likely Russian interference. (No additional entities assumed here, since their intention to disrupt the US election is well documented, videoed and demonstrated).
Why this story is gaining so much traction on HN is beyond me. I am sure that Biden does not have the pearly white hands of a saint, nor is Trump as evil as he is sometimes painted, but I need you to pay the coin of logic before you expect me to invest in your emotional stock.
Does the method of collection matter for determining the truth of the matter? This is the same defense or reasoning as the HRC emails in 2016.
Does it matter if HRC emails were a DNC insider or a foreign agent hacking?
Does it matter Hunter emails, msgs and videos were from an abandoned laptop, a chinese blackmail operation, or another source?
Isn't the real question: are the emails authentic? Or have they been manipulated? What do the emails and private messages tell us? What can other sources corroborate? I think this is Glenn's point. There are sources coming forward saying the emails and meetings that involve them are authentic.
The Biden campaign has never disputed the authenticity of the contents of the HDD (because that is a trap. they know that the trump campaign has evidence, and they are smart to not get caught in a lie. then the lie about the laptop becomes the story)
We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails,
provided to the New York Post by
President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are
genuine or not and that we do not have
evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our
experience makes us deeply suspicious that the
Russian government played a significant role in this
case.
"The social capture of media plays a huge role in how media operates, dictating what gets reported and which voices are heard. To some degree this is overt – if you you have drinks with the right people in media, that improves your ability to get published. That’s a fact; just a fact, a plain fact. And if you retweet the right people’s tweets that helps too. But there’s a deeper and subtler element to this. What you must show is not that you are talented, or that you’re principled, or that you’re hard working, or even that your arguments are correct. You have to show that you are one of them. You have to have the right social and cultural signifiers. They are innumerable and stretch from performing the right woke posturing and commenting on the correct TV shows to (especially, especially) telling the same kind of shitty, inside-dealing jokes, the kind that say to everyone “I am a member of a club, and it is very important.” Professional, political, and moral considerations have been consumed. There is only idenitification with the group, now. The sole criterion for having a successful career in media today is the degree to which you can signal to the crowd that you are one of them, that you share their values and petty obsessions."
There have always been socialite-class journalists, and under-class journalists. The problem is that the people coming out of journalism schools these days want fame and to become YouTube stars, rather than change the world for the better. And the schools optimize for this desire in order to keep the tuition money flowing in.
It's more that journalists don't want to upset their boss and their boss doesn't want to upset their boss and all the way up the chain. Somewhere in that chain is someone that is aligned with getting that particular story suppressed. The issue here is that somewhere along the way, keeping your job became more valuable than keeping your integrity. Happens in tech all the time in my experience.
Greenwald’s piece has some good points about lazy and biased journalism on the Hunter Biden story, but goes off the rails when he misrepresents what actually happened with Joe Biden firing the Ukraine prosecutor.
The system set up by people ignorant to its effects many many years ago has succeeded in making everything a choice between two factions. It's no longer just guaranteeing you forever get two parties, two candidates, you now also need to join a side individually.
It's silly watching from afar because as is highly likely, both choices are bad so embracing one of them so wholeheartedly just comes across as uninformed and plain mental. Not much more needs to be said on Trump but it also doesn't take a history diploma to know Biden wrote the 1994 "tough on crime, law and order" bill.
Just because a story can rock the boat doesn't mean it passes the journalistic bar to be published.
My take based on all parties' responses is that Glenn threw a tantrum because his editors were doing their job (stopping unsubstantiated lies from being published).
Glenn earned 400k a year at the intercept and has no end of opportunities now that he's quit and blamed the mythical "liberal bias" on his unceremonious departure.
Trump for years has attacked the media - what do you expect?
And now I'm supposed to suddenly accept this "scandal" conveniently placed right before the election in a literal tabloid with a huge conservative bent?
I mean how can anyone who doesn't support Trump already buy in? And then it's "oh my god censorship!!!". Give me a break.
I read through Glenn's draft after seeing the outrage on this thread and... it reads like a generic opinion piece.
I think he makes some good points and some dumb ones, but that's besides the point in all honesty - most of the article is him just complaining about the state of the media, making accusations of double-standards, and full of inflammatory language. There's little investigative journalism, no interviews with backing sources, no new facts laid out, just complaining about supposed wrong-doings and coverups. Some of which can be easily refuted.
Look I don't read The Intercept, but this is not newsroom material. I'm not journalist or have any kind of editing experience, but I wouldn't even run this in a school newspaper if I was put in charge. This is editorial material, pure and simple. The fact that he's complaining about censorship is eye-rolling.
I think it's pretty clear that most people here don't understand that the op-ed page and newsroom are different organizations, run by different people, and have different standards, even though they appear on the same newspaper. it's scary that these lines are being blurred more and more by the day.
But honestly, what's really probably going on is that Glenn Greenwald is tired of The Intercept and wants move full-time to his substack page. To do that he's bootstrapping his audience on his new site by manufacturing outrage. I would think most people should see through this...
It is an op-ed and was supposed to be published by the Intercept as an op-ed...
The NY Times reports;
> In a phone interview, Mr. Greenwald said he had received emails from Intercept editors outlining what the publication would allow and not allow in his article. “My arrangement with The Intercept since it began is my opinion pieces are not edited by anyone,” he said.
Sure and as an op-ed, the journal itself makes a decision whether it wants to front that opinion. The journal has stopped being close to Mr. Greenwald's perspective. Sure, maybe they changed the rules on him since it had become their publication. But that's a King Lear story, not a journalism story.
"You broke your promise that I'd have unlimited publication rights" is a sad story of broken promises but it's not a story of journalistic decline.
Oh my bad. I scanned his blog post to see if this was indicated and didn't notice any mention of it being an op-ed. Well to be honest in that case, I guess ignore what I said about newsroom standards - he may have a point against the Intercept if they're arbitrarily holding him to a higher (newsroom) standard than they normally would for op-ed pieces.
Keep in mind we're just seeing Greenwald's side of this. It sure sounds like he's trying to paint it a way that makes him look good and the Intercept look bad. Lots of claims of "censorship" etc.
I want to hear their side of it as well. My guess is that there's a lot more to this story. My guess is if all his peers thought the claims were not solid enough to publish, there is probably a reason for that -- not simply a desire to "censor" someone they've worked with for years.
Remember also that the NY Post writer behind the original "Hunter Biden laptop" story refused to put their name behind the article, probably due to the flaws in the claims and evidence presented.
She attacks him personally without ever refuting any of his points. She hand waves that they will correct the record "in time." Her response is riddled with sensationalist language.
I'm gonna go with Greenwald's version of events on this one. This person seems fully compromised.
There we go. A journalist is supposed to follow the facts wherever they go -- even if it reveals something they're uncomfortable with. They build a reputation by researching and checking their stories, and not running stories unless the facts hold up.
Greenwald made his name with quality investigative journalism. It sounds like he has fallen from this standard by trying to run a story with dubious political talking points and pass it off as factual news. We have a term for people like this: tabloid writers or opinion commentators. This is a sad decline to see.
He's free to do whatever he likes in his own name -- and it sounds like this is the path he has chosen.
Greenwald published the letters he received from The Intercept and their edits seem thoroughly reasonable. Greenwald's counterargument is that he never has had to accept edits before and he'd rather quit than listen to anyone else.
> not simply a desire to "censor" someone they've worked with for years.
This reads as though you're implying The Intercept existed independently of Greenwald. They didn't, he co-founded The Intercept. He ought to (and I imagine, he does) have seniority on any editor.
I think it speaks volumes about him as a journalist and his journalistic integrity that he setup The Intercept as an outlet where he and his co-founders don't rule with iron fists. His submissions aren't treated specially. It's not his mouthpiece.
So your argument is that Greenwald's latest submission should be treated specially because he founded The Intercept as a media outlet where his submissions aren't treated specially?
> He ought to (and I imagine, he does) have seniority on any editor.
He may or may not have some contractual guarantee of independence, but his own statement of the situation indicates that he and his cofounders deliberately chose not to have the authority and responsibility that goes with running the show but to leave that to others so that they could keep being reporters.
From what I have observed anything even tangentially related the Biden stories gets to the front page quickly and sometimes it sticks there for a few minutes then gets flagged enough to start dropping down the ranks. This one lasted a lot longer on the front page than most have.
FYI this sob story has some precedent:
In 2014:
"I absolutely refuse to be exiled from my own country for the crime of doing journalism and I'm going to force the issue just on principle. And I think going back for a ceremony like the Polk Awards or other forms of journalistic awards would be a really good symbolic test of having to put the government in the position of having to arrest journalists who are coming back to the US to receive awards for the journalism they have done."
He wasn't arrested. He wasn't even menaced by authorities. The dude has a serious persecution complex.
The NBC article is focused on an anonymously drafted report, which was mostly a dump of open source intel. The article criticizes that report for using a fake persona as its author. The initial disseminator of the report (who may or may not be the author of it as well) cites privacy and fear of retribution as reasons for publishing anonymously.
What the NBC article does not do is address or refute any of the facts in the report. It also ignores a lot of relevant back story and fails to make connections between this report, Hunter's laptop, and Tony Bobulinski.
If you want/need to publish anonymously, you use an obvious pseudonym (for a famous example, see The Federalist Papers). If you use a fake identity that's not obviously a pseudonym, people can reasonably suspect fraud.
Nothing against you or GP, but this illustrates my personal difficulties with "the news" perfectly. As most of us here know full well, in modern application development, most of the time, there are MANY ways to accomplish particular "thing" that will WORK, but I want to find the most-efficient and most-maintainable way. So when I need to find an approach to something new, I'll search and read many things about it, until I find consensus. I've approached news like programming, looking for consensus. The problem is that no one agrees on anything any more. There is no overlap between the two sides. Each side just says the other is completely wrong.
As the intelligentsia discuss what Greenwald's move implies about the state of American journalism, and even what the facts are about Hunter Biden's laptop, people in the middle, like me, despair of ever getting to the truth in these matters any more. We are forced to simply forget about it, because we have no hope of reading enough materials, and spending enough time on it, to sort out what the most-probable conclusion is. Every article argues the complete opposite of the other. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE JOB OF THE JOURNALIST.
You are correct that it doesn't address the laptop emails directly. The issue here is that this provably false dump that NBC identified is pushing the same basic story the laptop email attempted to expose. You're seeing domestically coordinated smear campaign. It was organized by a domestic PR firm and wrongly characterized as Russian disinformation. Certainly foreign assets (its not just Russia)have amplified it like anything else that is divisive, but at its core it was a plot to make an October surprise. NYPost broke embargo on the story and published ahead of the plan, and that kind of threw everything into chaos. They've been trying to get something out of it, but there is nothing but outrage over supression of a non-story. Emails are a remarkably verifiable thing, and ones these just aren't.
Tony Bobulinski's tale has not been corroborated, even by Murdock's own WSJ journalists.
I find this whole thrust rather remarkable anyhow. If true, Biden's family committed nepotism and would do so again if they were put into power. Really? Coming from an administration which is openly profiting from the office and giving insane amounts of power to their family members?
Did you read his story? It's good, it's serious and it calls out the democrats about some real bullshit like inventing a fake Russian intelligence operation to not respond to allegations that come from the emails.
I don't care if a journalist has a paranoid delusion as long as they are doing good writing and due diligence, and Glenn's story has both. He's not the most stable individual and he has made mistakes in the past, but he's a journalist he writes and we read and make our minds. I'm not going to doubt him because he's a "freak".
I read it, or at least as much of it as I could get through. Good writing and due diligence are the last words I would use to describe that piece. It was more of a rant than an article.
Glenn has been pushing the boundaries more and more every year, and it's not surprising that this is the article that finally made his editors draw a line in the sand. I even think he has several good points buried in there, but it reads like a screed from an unhinged man.
I read it, but did not see any new reporting. It makes a bold claim in the lede - "a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories" and offers no specific evidence for it.
It seems like Greenwald's gist is that circumstantial evidence is enough proof - that this story is so obviously important that not covering it prominently is <i>prima facie</i> evidence of bias. That's a reasonable opinion, but that's all it is, and if you didn't already believe it, I don't think there's anything here to change your mind.
Personally, I don't see the bombshell part. All I see here is that most journalists want Biden to win, and sometimes politicians' kids get sinecures they don't deserve. I knew both of those things last year. The whole debacle like an obvious attempt to smear Biden Sr with salacious stuff that his kid did, and the only reason it's getting this much attention is that, unlike Trump, Biden doesn't have any other scandals to talk about.
I have read it, and it's not good. It is an example of the worst aspects of pearl-clutching, can-you-imagine-what-this-means, ignore-the-actual-facts tendencies of the media today. He starts from a ludicrous premise and then doubles down on the ramifications, all without actually addressing the question of whether or not it is true.
You certainly don't question the suspect if you already know their answer, and you have no proof to the contrary. At least not unless you are ready to cede to that suspect the moral high ground.
Firstly, Glenn focuses on the fact this "de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community" is not asking the Bidens questions about the nature of these allegations. The simple answer is that "union" is focusing on questions of merit, unrelated to this fictional reality Greenwald is portraying.
If one were to accept the premise that these are questions of merit, then one must believe the predicates - that Hunter Biden would send a personal computer to be fixed, thousands of kilometers from his home, by a coincidently pro-Republican repairman, who is coincidently blind but is coincidently also able to confirm that it was Hunter Biden who dropped this computer off, and that coincidently this repairman has a speed dial to Rudolph Giuliani, and that the proof of all of this was coincidently stolen by the USPS. By now the product of all these low-probability events is vanishingly small.
> I don't care if a journalist has a paranoid delusion as long as they are doing good writing and due diligence, and Glenn's story has both.
Due diligence would require Mr Greenwald to start with a neutral or cynical mindset. Who is to gain from this story, what is required for this to be true.
It is telling that Mr Greenwald thinks there is the cabal against him, that the famously apolitical intelligence services are taking a stand contrary to his. And the thing it might tell him is this: start from the facts, and follow from there.
The form of your comment is a continuation of the censorship trend he is referring to.
Rather than engage his writing and journalistic perspective by providing your own, you have pigeonholed and dismissed it outright without even reading it.
And rather than back up your own argument, you have chosen to attack his character as your support.
1. I don't think you understand the word "censorship". OP of the comment doesn't have the power for it, and Greenwald certainly wasn't censored if everyone is able to read his opinions spearately
2. You don't know that the person didn't read it. That's an unprovable assumption.
3. OP's explaining why the article isn't worth running. This really doesn't amount to a real character attack unless you're new to the internet...
I don't see what the story you linked has to do with Hunter Biden's emails. They can't refute that, so they refute some other story that supposedly was "disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump"?
Oh and that Greenwald feared getting arrested by a government whose unconstitutional spying he helped expose, a government that is still trying to arrest snowden - that proves he has a "serious persecution complex"? What a pathetic attempt at character assasination.
How does this nbc news related to Glenn's writing?
Because there is a fake story on Biden, so all Biden stories should be censored? Wow, I hope you discovered this principal at the time of the golden showers story.
Kimberley Strassel
@KimStrassel
I can say i have never seen this document, nor have i read anything quoting it.
I can also say it therefore bears zero relevance on the legitimate evidence about Hunter Biden’s biz, via laptop and Bobulinski.
It seems impossible to hold a strong opinion on this without reading the article, and in particular, seeing how it is sourced.
The elephant in the room (which Greenwald barely acknowledges in this essay) is that many mainstream news organizations have concluded that the evidence for this story was too weak to publish, and some believe it was fabricated by Russian intelligence. If Greenwald has evidence to the contrary, great, the world wants to see it, and (claims of "censorship" notwithstanding) he will have no trouble getting the word out. If all he has is salacious hearsay, it's hard to fault his former editors.
>The elephant in the room (which Greenwald barely acknowledges in this essay) is that many mainstream news organizations have concluded that the evidence for this story was too weak to publish, and some believe it was fabricated by Russian intelligence.
Senate Homeland Security committee and DNI director both said that this was not an issue of foreign disinfo.
In addition there is an interview from one of the co-conspirators that's 45 minutes long and he's provided documents that could be easily verified if the journalists did the leg work and asked the people who received or sent those emails if they were legitimate.
Does this explain why the tried to stop him from publishing elsewhere? Relevant section:
>Worse, The Intercept editors in New York, not content to censor publication of my article at the Intercept, are also demanding that I not exercise my separate contractual right with FLM regarding articles I have written but which FLM does not want to publish itself. Under my contract, I have the right to publish any articles FLM rejects with another publication. But Intercept editors in New York are demanding I not only accept their censorship of my article at The Intercept, but also refrain from publishing it with any other journalistic outlet, and are using thinly disguised lawyer-crafted threats to coerce me not to do so (proclaiming it would be “detrimental” to The Intercept if I published it elsewhere).
Stupid circular argument. That is exactly the reasoning that he was arguing against. Based on this reasoning, you don’t publish unless mainstream news organizations publish first. Also you only publish what mainstream news organizations publish.
The "Steele Dossier" was reported on ad-nauseum, and its bona fides were suspect from the start. There little real denying the authenticity of the materials involved in this Biden case, yet suddenly new standards emerge preventing reporting? I fault the editors very much.
It is undeniably not fabricated Russian intelligence. We have:
- e-mails which have been confirmed by the others on the e-mails
- videos of hunter biden engaging in sexual activity while doing hard drugs
- text messages between hunter and various family and associates
- audio tapes of Hunter Biden's voice talking about his Chinese business partner disappearing
- financial documents of the agreement between various parties (Hunter Biden, Bobulinski, and others)
It is so obviously not "fabricated by Russian intelligence". By the way, the original claims of Trump being compromised by Russia have been proven absolutely false - something Greenwald himself has written about. Greenwald is incredibly critical of the democrat establishment for the entire Russia Hoax - and it is a hoax - and he is equally critical of their coverage of the laptop story which is at this point undeniable.
Oooh! What kind of sex? Which drugs? ...yes, that would be the salacious hearsay I was referring to. If there's evidence that Joe Biden did something corrupt, I'd like to see it, but without the rest of the chaff.
Reading the full article really puts me firmly on Greenwald's side of this thing.
Given the controversy, I expected it to the inflammatory.
Instead, this is solid, restrained reporting on the simple facts of the matter, along with completely fair critiques of the way those facts have been handled by other media.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24933054&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24933054&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24933054&p=4
Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it's also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we're going to get are "tabloids for politics" - and that is what we see. It's just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.
Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the "opposite side" media as tabloid-like, it's been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it's still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam's Razor to their own.
This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it's critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.
All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I'm not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.
WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.
I'm still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.
WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it's not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.
I have print subscriptions to the first 2 but I disagree because what I recall from working in blue collar jobs is that people who would benefit from that world view will not bother. they spend their days thinking about basic survival and when they pick up a paper (on the bog) just want to be entertained. Sadly the typical reader of the Economist never had to deal with anyone from the "lower" classes. They consider them as something they need protection from. A minimum wage, social safety net and working health care system usually goes a long way in preventing this divide from growing into a normal (like in the US - or very poor countries that share that class divide as a common property with the US).
If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.
But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.
WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.
Could you explain what you meant with it?
Do you actually read the economist? The publication has downgraded quality enormously since 2004, when I first start reading the economist as a subscriber and not casually.
For the economist to make sense you have to accept reality in very simplistic terms, e.g. "US/NATO good, Iran/Russia/China bad". If you can live with this simple worldview, than the ecconomist is fine.
The economist has some of the worst journalism I have ever seen. Lots of snark and no information.
Dead Comment
On another level I think they are selling their ability to change public opinion. That’s for to anyone willing to pay. Large companies, governments, political campaigns and so on.
Chomsky said somewhere that with media like this, you can often invert what they are saying to find the truth. Especially if they say “don’t look here, nothing to see here, look over there instead”. That could be a clue there is something really interesting they are hiding. The more effort they are expending, the more interesting the information. This laptop story has that kind of a vibe to it.
If there was nothing to it, and it was a fabrication, they would gladly turn it into a 24/7 advertisement money maker, exposing the fakery and showing everyone their journalistic investigative skills. But this level of suppression certainly raises my eyebrows...
At any rate, that is the argument. I don't think it will work, because buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive. Hell, buying it one paper at a time is too expensive. The better approach is the Apple News Plus or Google News one, where you pay a single subscription for a very wide range of outlets.... But, their idea isn't crazy.
That's a big 'if'. The 'media's value prop is not to promote a free press. Those that believe that to be the case are quickly going extinct.
> This does mean that there's a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. [...] I think the market will correct this error
If it's true (I don't think it is), and to the degree that you can sustain a business over many years. I don't think it's even possible to be true, because the money itself is corrupting. The market cannot correct what doesn't require correction.
I think where your analysis fails is that you presume that the media has shifted their position on their own. They haven't; they've reacted to the public. It's actually a positive feedback loop, not negative -- it's just that it's positive in the direction you dislike. We cannot depend on or hope for market correction. A free press in modern times requires public funding.
KPI for whose benefit? Shareholders or the 'public good'? Why would a for-profit entity optimize for the public good over profits?
Fox news is crushing all their competitors optimizing for engagement.
Who is winning optimizing for trust?
Maybe we need to have more strict regulations on what can call itself a "news agency", when most of its programming is entertainment opinion commentary.
Advertising goes to the place with most eyeballs.
If you had to choose between the super bowl and Tucker Carlson, it’s not hard to guess where the ad will go.
The internet killed off the classifieds so that leaves even less money for news firms.
Add in consolidation and king making functions under Murdoch - and media firms like Fox have a very different purpose now.
The business of News is losing to the business of entertainment.
No one wants to pay to be bored.
The only people who will pay for boring news are people who get more value out of it than boredom.
This is a society level issue, not industry level issue.
"Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value ... when we optimize for X but are indifferent to Y, we by default actively optimize against Y, for all Y that would make any claims to resources" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
News exists to give you an approximate representation of what is happening without having to invest too much effort in actual investigation. It is built on trust. If you have to build trust with each individual journalist you follow a la carte, then that makes the entry barrier to following the news much higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone
The press is a pillar of American democracy. Independent journalists are great but they just won’t have the same power or credibility as they do when they’re organized.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
So it doesn't seem to me that it's "trust" you are aiming for here.
Call me a pessimist, but this core issue is a threat to democracy, and I'm not sure we can rely entirely on "the market" to auto-correct itself.
There are new media organizations that do very good work, independently. But you have to look for them, and most people are too lazy to bother seeking out quality journalism when the garbage is forced in front of them every waking second by social media.
The other problem is that most of the good work is regional. WTTW in Chicago, The Texas Tribune in Texas, various public radio stations around the country. There's plenty of good journalism. But it's an effort to piece it all together.
What is the market size ?
Recently there was a debacle in India where a news channel corrupted the ratings system.
In the discussions that followed, it turns out that the news industry pays peanuts.
If there is no real market, and just passion projects and idealism- then what’s going on?
Matter of fact India is a good example of what happens. Small independent teams making good news content and the vast majority of the news corrupted into ratings farms.
There may not be any market here.
Sure the largest news organisations will always be serving up garbage for the unwashed masses but there should still be room for one optimising for trust.
Dead Comment
Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat, because the people they are friends with are the ones that own that boat, invite them to parties, and are a part of their friend groups.
The reporting around this story has been absolutely unbelievable to me. This story seems like the type of thing that would normally make peoples' entire journalistic career, and yet the journalists, the people who are supposed to be a part of our protection and sense-making system are actively trying to suppress it.
It's actually surreal to see this happening.
Even Fox News wouldn't run the story because it wasn't supported by facts.
And last I heard, there still has been no concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Tucker Carlson claims that his evidence "got lost in the mail". In the age of the internet, they didn't snap any photos of this so-called proof?
There is no "there" there. Just a bunch of internet sleuths with MS paint red circles and theories about deep states. And your comment falls into this category.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...
Is it possible that Mr. Greenwald is a better judge of whether or not there is a story here?
No he didn't - where did that come from? He claimed the mail had been intercepted, someone had ripped open the parcel in transit and stolen the documents, and that the courier firm had even shown them pictures of the ripped-open package. He then made a series of remarkably precise claims about their interaction with the courier, the search the courier firm mounted to try and find the stolen documents and so on.
According to sibling comments this story was now confirmed in its entirety by UPS.
Ironically, I learned what Tucker Carlson said by reading the Guardian. Their top story yesterday (in terms of views) was something like "Tucker Carlson mocked after claiming evidence was lost in the mail". Obviously the Guardian, and those people who mocked him or lied about his claims now look very foolish and naive indeed, because his claims have been verified in their entirety by the courier firm themselves. The real story here is that UPS has been corrupted by the same kinds of win-at-any-cost leftists who blocked the story at Twitter and other places: they are so desperate for this to go away that they're actually destroying their own customer's valuables in transit. In the USA every line of communication is being shut down by these radicals, even postal mail.
Run what story? Fox news has been covering the hard drive since it was released.
And yes, no concrete evidence of wrong doing, but if you read Glenn's email, he clearly states that "something smells rotten" and the editors response is "we won't even allow pointed questions about Biden".
Glenn is offering the Biden camp more benefit of the doubt than the MSM has offered Trump when random allegations arise.
That's the issue - the MSM holds up "journalistic integrity" when it suits their political candidate. That's not integrity at all. That's just corruption of the what journalism is supposed to be.
Plausible motive for the thief could have been risk assessment for the documents.
The DOJ has acknowledged that it has had a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden "and associates" for money laundering since 2019, and there is evidence and a credible witness that the Biden's (including Joe Biden) were involved in a bribery scheme with foreign governments.
Just start here: https://abc3340.com/amp/news/nation-world/tony-bobulinksi-i-...
One of the main points I got from Chomsky & Herman's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988, analyzing news from a decade earlier), is that journalists print what the government says because it's convenient -- it's less work to print what the government (or anyone else) says at a press conference than to do your own research -- AND even when it comes to privately given info, because they need to maintain the relationships with government (and other powerful) sources, if you make a government source mad, and they stop giving info, how are you going to get that privileged info to write your stories?
Journalists develop "sources", and relationships with those sources, and then there are pressures to serve the interests of those sources. Sources are usually powerful people (whether government or "socialites"), because that's who has valuable info on an ongoing basis, generally.
While it may be good work, it's so out of date it's useless as a tool for evaluating the media landscape of today.
I spent 20 years as a journalist and can tell you from first-hand experience and the contacts I have kept in the industry that the media today is not the same as the media of 2010, or 2000, or 1990, and certainly not the 1970's.
The thing about the situation is historically journalists have always served interests and ideologies. American journalism has a long and storied history but the idea of purely objective journalism is itself a particular kind of rhetoric and particular kind of spin that was a fine product of early 20th America. In reality, 90% of journalism is "spin" and 90% of journalism has always been spin - or interpretation or perspective or context or whatever spin you want to give spin. That journalist serve their sources, their ideologies, the interests of the owners of the journal and so-forth isn't bad unless you think everyone with power is evil (which is plausible but if you believe this, then you would be supporting some ideology outside the mainstream, which also has it's spin).
It's fairly well documented that Julian Assange worked quite actively to make the release of the Clinton emails serve Donald Trump (coordinating with the Trump and other no-nos) - not even that there was lying involved but here he went from citizen journalist to propagandist. But I don't think becoming a propagandist makes someone worse than the cause they serve. In the case of Trump, I happen think made that made him viciously evil but that's happenstance relative to the question of journalism.
Forget about the current election. Suppose you had your ideal candidate running against a definite evil, someone who pursue policies that would hurt or kill your friends and family, in a close race. If some piece of pure dirt, a politically contentless but deeply embarrassing true fact about this honestly good candidate surfaced, would consider those who pushed this fact relentlessly to be paragons of virtue?
There are some articles, a few, where pure truth can prevail- the Snowden revelations were a happy example. But many of even the revelations of journalism rest as much on power politics as they do on truth. Watergate wouldn't have mattered if there wasn't a sufficient consensus in Washington, among powerful people, that Nixon had gone too far. Equivalent scandals can evoke yawns without powerful backers, etc.
Now, go to the current election and you have a candidate of the corrupt permanent government against something like psychopathic candidate of a particular dubious right wing power complex; hardly inviting as a choice. How much are journalists "sacrificing their ethics" to push an arguably less evil? I assume quite a bit but how much should be concerned? I leave that question to you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel-Ami
To the extent this is arguably true of etablishment journalist, the mirror image seems to be true of anti-establishment journalists. Instead of being unreasonably resistant to publishing stories that rock the boat, they are unreasonable eager to do so, taking sources that validate this pre-established bias uncritically, opening themselves up for manipulation and as agents of propaganda, because the people they are friends with, and that invite them to parties are more interested in capsizing the boat than the truth.
At the end of the day, I have to trust someone to be doing the legwork, research, investigation to verify the stories and to report it to me as honestly as they can.
For me, I mostly trust the vast majority of professional journalists and institutions to do that work together, to check and balance each other most of the time to make sure something is as true as it can be, and feel skeptical when someone tells me to distrust them so strongly.
(I worry that sometimes I post things that may be too charged or opinionated or just inappropriate for HN, so if you think this is, I'd be grateful if you let me know why in a reply)
The same people who'd happily get someone fired for tweeting something insensitive are all closing ranks against any criticism of Mr. "You ain't black". Come on.
I can't wait until the election is over.
There have been a virtually uncountable number of high-profile investigative pieces that criticise people in power published in the last 6 months! This argument is nonsense.
So, if it's a high-profile investigative piece on a senior trump admin official, everyone will applaud you. But as soon as you start investigating the Biden family or, on the other hand, write something positive about Trump & Co, then you'll quickly find yourself out of the club.
Prominent liberals like Alan Dershowitz say they're being socially blacklisted for not taking part in a pile on against Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/alan-dershowitz-martha...
Even being "neutral" is apparently not enough. It's easy to see why journalists and editors would succumb to that social pressure.
They have been attack dogs of one political party or the other. But its always been this way. Social media ( especially twitter ) has shown people that journalists are political actors, not dispensers of "truth". They are part of the power structure, not a counterweight to the power structure.
At this point most newspapers should just be part of the democratic, republican or intelligence agency because that's all they are.
I can almost guarantee that most of the people here attacking greenwald and partaking in the downvote brigade are news employees or members of a particular political party. It's hilarious.
There are strong implications that the ABC was pressured into editing the articles and putting Emma on the outer until finally letting her go. The ABC is a government-funded but independent media organisation, but has been subject to budget cuts and unprecedented pressure from the current Government since it came to power in 2013 under Tony Abbott.
Coincidentally or otherwise, the current Australian Government is known to have a cosy relationship with News Corp, who frequently bash the ABC for, ironically, biased reporting.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Alberici
[1]:https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-14/why-many-big-companie...
[2]:https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/more-to-jobs-and-grow...
Going with a story that hasn't been vetted marks a serious journalist as a dupe for the rest of their lives.
The FBI and DNI have also both confirmed the validity of the laptop. How much more "verified" than that would you need?
Do you really believe if the same story were about a member of the Trump family, that NPR would refuse to cover it?
One more point on credibility - we literally have videos, images, text messages, e-mails of which the other recipients have been confirmed - this is all basically undeniable at this point. So the only question is, is the actual story of how the material was obtained (the laptop repair shop) true, or was the material hacked and then they basically used parallel construction to hide the true origins? That's a fine question to ask, but if you think that the material itself is false that's just completely incredible.
Sounds like they are taking the path that academia took.
This story is the type of thing that would make peoples' entire journalistic career if it was true. And if a journalist pushes it, and it turns out false, it would ruin their entire career—for instance, see Dan Rather. So journalists have to assess how likely they feel that it's true, and I think we've seen a pretty consistent response to those assessments.
Watch The Post, and you'll see this sort of thing goes (at least) back to The Pentagon Papers. I'm not old enough to have watched this play out in real time, so it was an eye opener. The owner of The Washington Post was cozy in the circles the President ran around in, and had to weigh what it would mean to him personally to run that series of articles.
I don't mean to give the intercept a pass here, but what Greenwald was doing wasn't "journalism" in the sense that most people think of it. This isn't "his" story - he didn't break it and he didn't do the primary research.
Does his background give him insights that could make for a good editorial? Perhaps, and the Intercept used to pull no punches on that kind of content. But it's not like he deserved any real "credit" or "blame" for the story itself, which was reported by other outlets.
I think some editors are perhaps trying to avoid a repeat of the 'Hillary email/Comey announcement of 2016' scenario but didn't anticipate the Streisand effect.
In hindsight, best approach may have been to cover the story, get a sound bite from Biden denying that he benefitted, say there is no evidence he benefitted and leave it at that.
....
> The reporting around this story has been absolutely unbelievable to me
OK, here's the thing though. This is what I call the "Jordan Peterson school of thought."
You begin with a premise. Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair store, some files were found on it, and these were delivered to a Republican Party muck-raker (and that is the most neutral thing you can say about Giuliani).
But, before you examine the premise, you are invited to look at the implications. If this is true then Hunter Biden has traded on his father's name! If this is true then Hunter Biden has gotten involved with some shady characters in Ukraine! If this is true, why hasn't Joe Biden ever recused himself from his dealings with these self-same shady characters?! And the biggest thing... why isn't the Main Stream Media (MSM) doing something about this? What do they have to hide?!
In short, you are set a premise, you are required to accept the truth of this premise, then you are pulled on an emotional journey about where the premise leads you...
But the premise is garbage. In Jordan Peterson's case, the US military is not the same in terms of complexity as real life, for instance. In this case, the Hunter Biden forgot his laptop story does not appear to hold water. You would have to assume a range of additional entities for it to make sense.
The reason the media are not reporting on this is because they want evidence that Hunter owned that laptop and that it is, as the US Intelligence community already pointed out, likely Russian interference. (No additional entities assumed here, since their intention to disrupt the US election is well documented, videoed and demonstrated).
Why this story is gaining so much traction on HN is beyond me. I am sure that Biden does not have the pearly white hands of a saint, nor is Trump as evil as he is sometimes painted, but I need you to pay the coin of logic before you expect me to invest in your emotional stock.
Isn't the real question: are the emails authentic? Or have they been manipulated? What do the emails and private messages tell us? What can other sources corroborate? I think this is Glenn's point. There are sources coming forward saying the emails and meetings that involve them are authentic.
The Biden campaign has never disputed the authenticity of the contents of the HDD (because that is a trap. they know that the trump campaign has evidence, and they are smart to not get caught in a lie. then the lie about the laptop becomes the story)
Dead Comment
Here's how Frederik deBoer puts it (https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/10/30/only-the-club-remains/):
"The social capture of media plays a huge role in how media operates, dictating what gets reported and which voices are heard. To some degree this is overt – if you you have drinks with the right people in media, that improves your ability to get published. That’s a fact; just a fact, a plain fact. And if you retweet the right people’s tweets that helps too. But there’s a deeper and subtler element to this. What you must show is not that you are talented, or that you’re principled, or that you’re hard working, or even that your arguments are correct. You have to show that you are one of them. You have to have the right social and cultural signifiers. They are innumerable and stretch from performing the right woke posturing and commenting on the correct TV shows to (especially, especially) telling the same kind of shitty, inside-dealing jokes, the kind that say to everyone “I am a member of a club, and it is very important.” Professional, political, and moral considerations have been consumed. There is only idenitification with the group, now. The sole criterion for having a successful career in media today is the degree to which you can signal to the crowd that you are one of them, that you share their values and petty obsessions."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...
Greenwald’s piece has some good points about lazy and biased journalism on the Hunter Biden story, but goes off the rails when he misrepresents what actually happened with Joe Biden firing the Ukraine prosecutor.
It's silly watching from afar because as is highly likely, both choices are bad so embracing one of them so wholeheartedly just comes across as uninformed and plain mental. Not much more needs to be said on Trump but it also doesn't take a history diploma to know Biden wrote the 1994 "tough on crime, law and order" bill.
My take based on all parties' responses is that Glenn threw a tantrum because his editors were doing their job (stopping unsubstantiated lies from being published).
Glenn earned 400k a year at the intercept and has no end of opportunities now that he's quit and blamed the mythical "liberal bias" on his unceremonious departure.
And now I'm supposed to suddenly accept this "scandal" conveniently placed right before the election in a literal tabloid with a huge conservative bent?
I mean how can anyone who doesn't support Trump already buy in? And then it's "oh my god censorship!!!". Give me a break.
I think he makes some good points and some dumb ones, but that's besides the point in all honesty - most of the article is him just complaining about the state of the media, making accusations of double-standards, and full of inflammatory language. There's little investigative journalism, no interviews with backing sources, no new facts laid out, just complaining about supposed wrong-doings and coverups. Some of which can be easily refuted.
Look I don't read The Intercept, but this is not newsroom material. I'm not journalist or have any kind of editing experience, but I wouldn't even run this in a school newspaper if I was put in charge. This is editorial material, pure and simple. The fact that he's complaining about censorship is eye-rolling.
I think it's pretty clear that most people here don't understand that the op-ed page and newsroom are different organizations, run by different people, and have different standards, even though they appear on the same newspaper. it's scary that these lines are being blurred more and more by the day.
But honestly, what's really probably going on is that Glenn Greenwald is tired of The Intercept and wants move full-time to his substack page. To do that he's bootstrapping his audience on his new site by manufacturing outrage. I would think most people should see through this...
The NY Times reports;
> In a phone interview, Mr. Greenwald said he had received emails from Intercept editors outlining what the publication would allow and not allow in his article. “My arrangement with The Intercept since it began is my opinion pieces are not edited by anyone,” he said.
"You broke your promise that I'd have unlimited publication rights" is a sad story of broken promises but it's not a story of journalistic decline.
Both the Aspen/Typhoon document and the laptop hoax documents involve Hunter and China, but are they connected in any other way?
I want to hear their side of it as well. My guess is that there's a lot more to this story. My guess is if all his peers thought the claims were not solid enough to publish, there is probably a reason for that -- not simply a desire to "censor" someone they've worked with for years.
Remember also that the NY Post writer behind the original "Hunter Biden laptop" story refused to put their name behind the article, probably due to the flaws in the claims and evidence presented.
https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...
I'm gonna go with Greenwald's version of events on this one. This person seems fully compromised.
Greenwald made his name with quality investigative journalism. It sounds like he has fallen from this standard by trying to run a story with dubious political talking points and pass it off as factual news. We have a term for people like this: tabloid writers or opinion commentators. This is a sad decline to see.
He's free to do whatever he likes in his own name -- and it sounds like this is the path he has chosen.
This reads as though you're implying The Intercept existed independently of Greenwald. They didn't, he co-founded The Intercept. He ought to (and I imagine, he does) have seniority on any editor.
I think it speaks volumes about him as a journalist and his journalistic integrity that he setup The Intercept as an outlet where he and his co-founders don't rule with iron fists. His submissions aren't treated specially. It's not his mouthpiece.
He may or may not have some contractual guarantee of independence, but his own statement of the situation indicates that he and his cofounders deliberately chose not to have the authority and responsibility that goes with running the show but to leave that to others so that they could keep being reporters.
> His submissions aren't treated specially. It's not his mouthpiece.
These two statements are contradictory.
Dead Comment
Edit: I'm a moron and it just dropped a bunch suddenly. Was not removed.
FYI this sob story has some precedent: In 2014: "I absolutely refuse to be exiled from my own country for the crime of doing journalism and I'm going to force the issue just on principle. And I think going back for a ceremony like the Polk Awards or other forms of journalistic awards would be a really good symbolic test of having to put the government in the position of having to arrest journalists who are coming back to the US to receive awards for the journalism they have done."
He wasn't arrested. He wasn't even menaced by authorities. The dude has a serious persecution complex.
What the NBC article does not do is address or refute any of the facts in the report. It also ignores a lot of relevant back story and fails to make connections between this report, Hunter's laptop, and Tony Bobulinski.
As the intelligentsia discuss what Greenwald's move implies about the state of American journalism, and even what the facts are about Hunter Biden's laptop, people in the middle, like me, despair of ever getting to the truth in these matters any more. We are forced to simply forget about it, because we have no hope of reading enough materials, and spending enough time on it, to sort out what the most-probable conclusion is. Every article argues the complete opposite of the other. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE JOB OF THE JOURNALIST.
Tony Bobulinski's tale has not been corroborated, even by Murdock's own WSJ journalists.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/29/tony-bobulins...
I find this whole thrust rather remarkable anyhow. If true, Biden's family committed nepotism and would do so again if they were put into power. Really? Coming from an administration which is openly profiting from the office and giving insane amounts of power to their family members?
I don't care if a journalist has a paranoid delusion as long as they are doing good writing and due diligence, and Glenn's story has both. He's not the most stable individual and he has made mistakes in the past, but he's a journalist he writes and we read and make our minds. I'm not going to doubt him because he's a "freak".
Glenn has been pushing the boundaries more and more every year, and it's not surprising that this is the article that finally made his editors draw a line in the sand. I even think he has several good points buried in there, but it reads like a screed from an unhinged man.
It seems like Greenwald's gist is that circumstantial evidence is enough proof - that this story is so obviously important that not covering it prominently is <i>prima facie</i> evidence of bias. That's a reasonable opinion, but that's all it is, and if you didn't already believe it, I don't think there's anything here to change your mind.
Personally, I don't see the bombshell part. All I see here is that most journalists want Biden to win, and sometimes politicians' kids get sinecures they don't deserve. I knew both of those things last year. The whole debacle like an obvious attempt to smear Biden Sr with salacious stuff that his kid did, and the only reason it's getting this much attention is that, unlike Trump, Biden doesn't have any other scandals to talk about.
I have read it, and it's not good. It is an example of the worst aspects of pearl-clutching, can-you-imagine-what-this-means, ignore-the-actual-facts tendencies of the media today. He starts from a ludicrous premise and then doubles down on the ramifications, all without actually addressing the question of whether or not it is true.
You certainly don't question the suspect if you already know their answer, and you have no proof to the contrary. At least not unless you are ready to cede to that suspect the moral high ground.
Firstly, Glenn focuses on the fact this "de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community" is not asking the Bidens questions about the nature of these allegations. The simple answer is that "union" is focusing on questions of merit, unrelated to this fictional reality Greenwald is portraying.
If one were to accept the premise that these are questions of merit, then one must believe the predicates - that Hunter Biden would send a personal computer to be fixed, thousands of kilometers from his home, by a coincidently pro-Republican repairman, who is coincidently blind but is coincidently also able to confirm that it was Hunter Biden who dropped this computer off, and that coincidently this repairman has a speed dial to Rudolph Giuliani, and that the proof of all of this was coincidently stolen by the USPS. By now the product of all these low-probability events is vanishingly small.
> I don't care if a journalist has a paranoid delusion as long as they are doing good writing and due diligence, and Glenn's story has both.
Due diligence would require Mr Greenwald to start with a neutral or cynical mindset. Who is to gain from this story, what is required for this to be true.
It is telling that Mr Greenwald thinks there is the cabal against him, that the famously apolitical intelligence services are taking a stand contrary to his. And the thing it might tell him is this: start from the facts, and follow from there.
Intercept's decision has nothing to do with this nbc article. Here's the emails exchange between Greenwald and Intercept editors: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...
Rather than engage his writing and journalistic perspective by providing your own, you have pigeonholed and dismissed it outright without even reading it.
And rather than back up your own argument, you have chosen to attack his character as your support.
Dude... really?
Deleted Comment
Oh and that Greenwald feared getting arrested by a government whose unconstitutional spying he helped expose, a government that is still trying to arrest snowden - that proves he has a "serious persecution complex"? What a pathetic attempt at character assasination.
Because there is a fake story on Biden, so all Biden stories should be censored? Wow, I hope you discovered this principal at the time of the golden showers story.
Kimberley Strassel @KimStrassel I can say i have never seen this document, nor have i read anything quoting it. I can also say it therefore bears zero relevance on the legitimate evidence about Hunter Biden’s biz, via laptop and Bobulinski.
Update: long response from one of the authors of the draft: https://mobile.twitter.com/BaldingsWorld/status/132193469593...
Really it's just sad how cattle-like some people are.
Edit: Here it is: https://www.baldingsworld.com/2020/10/22/report-on-biden-act...
Every claim is footnoted with a direct link to a cited source that is publicly available.
The elephant in the room (which Greenwald barely acknowledges in this essay) is that many mainstream news organizations have concluded that the evidence for this story was too weak to publish, and some believe it was fabricated by Russian intelligence. If Greenwald has evidence to the contrary, great, the world wants to see it, and (claims of "censorship" notwithstanding) he will have no trouble getting the word out. If all he has is salacious hearsay, it's hard to fault his former editors.
Senate Homeland Security committee and DNI director both said that this was not an issue of foreign disinfo.
In addition there is an interview from one of the co-conspirators that's 45 minutes long and he's provided documents that could be easily verified if the journalists did the leg work and asked the people who received or sent those emails if they were legitimate.
Both of these are partisan, unreliable sources. The DNI used to be a nonpartisan that you could at least trust somewhat. Not anymore.
Deleted Comment
>Worse, The Intercept editors in New York, not content to censor publication of my article at the Intercept, are also demanding that I not exercise my separate contractual right with FLM regarding articles I have written but which FLM does not want to publish itself. Under my contract, I have the right to publish any articles FLM rejects with another publication. But Intercept editors in New York are demanding I not only accept their censorship of my article at The Intercept, but also refrain from publishing it with any other journalistic outlet, and are using thinly disguised lawyer-crafted threats to coerce me not to do so (proclaiming it would be “detrimental” to The Intercept if I published it elsewhere).
I think you can suggest it was careful pressure or negotiation, but it didn't read as a demand to me.
- e-mails which have been confirmed by the others on the e-mails
- videos of hunter biden engaging in sexual activity while doing hard drugs
- text messages between hunter and various family and associates
- audio tapes of Hunter Biden's voice talking about his Chinese business partner disappearing
- financial documents of the agreement between various parties (Hunter Biden, Bobulinski, and others)
It is so obviously not "fabricated by Russian intelligence". By the way, the original claims of Trump being compromised by Russia have been proven absolutely false - something Greenwald himself has written about. Greenwald is incredibly critical of the democrat establishment for the entire Russia Hoax - and it is a hoax - and he is equally critical of their coverage of the laptop story which is at this point undeniable.
Dead Comment
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...
And here is the content of emails with the editors, discussing the alleged censorship:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...
Given the controversy, I expected it to the inflammatory.
Instead, this is solid, restrained reporting on the simple facts of the matter, along with completely fair critiques of the way those facts have been handled by other media.