#Glenn Greenwald exits Intercept, damning the lockstep liberal media

Pulitzer-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald just quit the publication he co-founded, The Intercept, after its editors refused to let him publish an article on Hunter Biden’s e-mails that defended The Post’s reporting.

He wrote about his decision at Substack, where he’ll be joining other left-leaning iconoclasts such as Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi, living off subscriptions to uncensored content.

His comments are blisteringly incisive — utterly eviscerating the lockstep left-of-center media:

“Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, [The Intercept] is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties, a rigid and narrow range of permitted viewpoints (ranging from establishment liberalism to soft leftism, but always anchored in ultimate support for the Democratic Party), a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.”

He also addresses how that attitude led the site’s editors to expose the identity of Reality Winner (now doing hard time as a result), who had leaked to them a National Security Agency report on Russian interference in the 2016 election: “It was Intercept editors who pressured the story’s reporters to quickly send those documents for authentication to the government — because they was [sic] to prove to mainstream media outlets and prominent liberals that The Intercept was willing to get on board the Russiagate train.

“They wanted to counter-act the perception, created by my articles expressing skepticism about the central claims of that scandal, that The Intercept had stepped out of line on a story of high importance to U.S. liberalism and even the left. That craving — to secure the approval of the very mainstream media outlets we set out to counteract — was the root cause for the speed and recklessness with which that document from Winner was handled.”

Yet the final straw was “the brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the ‘intelligence community,’ to suppress its revelations,” which “eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying.”

More, he notes: “The Intercept published some of the most credulous and false affirmations of maximalist Russiagate madness, and, horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as ‘Russian disinformation’ by mindlessly and uncritically citing — of all things — a letter by former CIA officials that contained this baseless insinuation.”

Greenwald says he asked the New York staff, rather than censoring his arguments, “to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would.”

It was a no-go: “Modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it.” Appalling.