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World News See other World News Articles Title: Glenn Greenwald Escapes His $100 Million Webzine Several years ago during the height of the Edward Snowden/NSA spying scandal, Glenn Greenwald was sometimes described as the world’s most famous journalist. I think that characterization was probably correct, at least if we exclude Julian Assange from consideration. The American government has emphatically denied that Assange was ever a journalist, now working to prosecute him for espionage and sentence him to life in a maximum security prison. Meanwhile, it did grudgingly concede that protective status to Greenwald. So the fates of the two most famous figures who revealed American crimes to the world sharply diverged, and the year after Assange was forced to desperately seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and begin his long period of miserable confinement to a single room, Greenwald made worldwide headlines as founding editor of a lavishly-funded new journalistic enterprise that captured the imagination of the world. That venture was First Look Media, established by Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who pledged $250 million in financial support. Its first and only visible project has been The Intercept, an outlet intended to provide a home for fearless investigative journalism, free from the pressures and dishonest compromises so often found in traditional media outlets. Greenwald’s two fellow founding editors were Laura Poitras, an award-winning documentarian who had collaborated on the Snowden project, and Jeremy Scahill, whose best-selling books had lacerated the American crimes committed during our disastrous Iraq War, focusing especially upon the huge growth of international mercenary outfits, now euphemistically styled as “military contractors.” Numerous other veteran journalists also soon eagerly came on board at a time when so many of American’s traditional media outlets were losing their advertising revenue to the Internet, resulting in crippling waves of layoffs and cut-backs. Backed by such enormous and apparently disinterested financial support, The Intercept seemed poised for an extremely bright future. Unfortunately, the reality has been quite different. Creating a successful media outlet is a far more difficult and complex undertaking than merely hiring experienced journalists and providing them with heavy funding. Late last week Greenwald announced his resignation from The Intercept, explaining that the top editorial staff had repeatedly blocked him from publishing his lengthy article analyzing the huge corruption-scandal now swirling around Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Greenwald was thus forced to abandon the high-profile publication that he himself had co-founded in order to regain his journalistic freedom, and that irony was hardly lost upon many other independent Internet voices, including his former colleague Matt Taibbi, Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog, and the Moon of Alabama blogger. Greenwald himself explained the situation in his scathing letter of resignation. According to him, in recent years The Intercept had increasingly abandoned its original stated mission and instead become more and more indistinguishable from all the other left-leaning publications on the Internet, adopting a fiercely partisan party-line and demonstrating Procrustean tendencies to shape its journalistic output in support of its ideological goals and favored candidates. The large crew of New York editors eventually brought on board tended to measure their success by the accolades they attracted from mainstream outlets while they lived in fear of Twitter denunciations. As a result, they soon came to closely resemble the establishmentarian media that their publication had originally been created to challenge. They and most of their mainstream media peers regarded the defeat of Donald Trump as an overriding goal and therefore seem to have somehow persuaded themselves that any temporary sacrifice of honest journalistic standards was a price well worth paying. Julian Assange may soon be spending the rest of his life in a small prison cell, and compared to that outcome Greenwald’s humiliating treatment is a mere bagatelle, but both figures fell from ideological grace for similar reasons. As an anti-secrecy campaigner, Assange had become the toast of our liberal elite by exposing the crimes of the Bush era American military, but when he evenhandedly released DNC emails deeply embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, he was reviled as a traitor and a Russian stooge. Although Greenwald remains left-liberal in his personal views, his staunch refusal to avert his eyes from the flagrant political and media corruption on his side of the aisle has provoked deep resentments among his one-time ideological admirers. Many details of Greenwald’s resignation can be found in the following articles, and he also explained the circumstances in an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight: My Resignation From The Intercept Emails With Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of My Joe Biden Article Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept Matt Taibbi: Glenn Greenwald On His Resignation From The Intercept Although I’d mostly lost track of both Greenwald and The Intercept over the last few years, the story of his sudden resignation didn’t particularly surprise me. Donald Trump had always struck me as an ignorant buffoon and most of his proposed policies were ridiculous, but I felt that his establishmentarian political critics had almost been driven insane by their loathing for him. Since I regarded both Trump and Biden as such exceptionally awful candidates, I’d paid relatively little attention to the many months of heated presidential campaigning. However, the recent charges of massive financial corruption against the Biden family seemed pretty credible to me, and the unified media efforts to drag the Democratic ticket across the finish line by hiding the scandal from the American voters was utterly outrageous. The New York Post is America’s oldest newspaper and after it broke the Biden corruption story a couple of weeks ago, both Facebook and Twitter took the unprecedented step of banning all links to the published account of that potentially massive political scandal. Compared to such absurd censorship, the unwillingness of The Intercept‘s Trump-hating editors to publish Greenwald’s article was shameful but hardly surprising. However once I looked into the background, other surprises did appear. Every now and then I had read a story mentioning The Intercept in my morning newspapers, but few of the details stuck in my mind, so I browsed around a little, and found a Columbia Journalism Review article from last year describing some of the difficulties at that publication. Apparently, Omidyar had been fulfilling his financial commitments, donating nearly $90 million to First Look Media between 2013 and 2017, and apparently almost all of that massive funding had gone to The Intercept, whose staff compensation alone reached $9.3 million by 2017. The CJR article noted that the salaries paid “dwarf those at other center-left, nonprofit outlets.” My casual browsing didn’t uncover any detailed financial information for the last three years, but the webzine must surely have absorbed well over $100 million by now, perhaps even closer to $150 million. With such enormous financial inputs, I wondered why I had heard so little about the publication in recent years, just an occasional story here and there in my newspapers, so I decided to take a look. Their website seemed no different in design or content than that found on dozens of other left-liberal webzines. Almost none of the writers were familiar to me while the topics they presented were all too familiar. So it wasn’t clear to me why anyone would read their publication. I soon discovered that most of the world apparently had the same reaction. I had naturally assumed that such a lavishly-funded publication captained by highly-paid all-stars and having a large writing staff would possess a readership vastly larger than that of our own website, with traffic perhaps twenty or thirty times greater. Instead, I found to my utter astonishment that their Alexa Traffic Rank of 11,542 was less than 50% larger than that of our own small opinion webzine. Indeed, if not for our having been banned by Facebook and Google earlier this year, we might have even caught up with them by now. And according to SimilarWeb, although their website does get almost three times as many monthly visits as ours, the total time spent on our website is actually slightly higher, with most of their visitors quickly departing. This brought to mind the old story about the dog-food that dogs just won’t eat. Although a few natural Internet monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon seem impervious to easy challenge, the web has become a great leveler for opinion journalism, with the interest and quality of content material far outweighing many millions of dollars in bloated expenditures. The dilemma encountered by the decision-makers at The Intercept is that if you mostly publish articles that are exactly the same as found everywhere else on the Internet, you provide people few reasons to favor your website over so many others. Moreover, it’s quite possible that very heavy staff funding can itself become counter-productive. For example, an outraged Max Blumenthal revealed in a Tweet that The Intercept‘s top editor Betsy Reed is paid well over $400,000 per year, an extremely sizable sum in the world of non-profit journalism: Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
You can't bite the hand that feeds you and get away with it. ;) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Superb -- best article by Unz I can remember. Rich and tho't provoking. But how can he be so naive -- "With such enormous financial inputs, I wondered why I had heard so little about the publication in recent years". Tho't the consensus was instantly more like "With such enormous financial inputs, it's no wonder The Intercept is just another brick in the peecee wall" as soon as Omidyar started buying the guys off. _____________________________________________________________ USA! USA! USA! Bringing you democracy, or else! there were strains of VD that were incurable, and they were first found in the Philippines and then transmitted to the Korean working girls via US military. The 'incurables' we were told were first taken back to a military hospital in the Philippines to quietly die. – 4um
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