My Resignation from the Intercept | Hacker News Reader

My Resignation from the Intercept

greenwald.substack.com

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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.

What do you make of the idea that independent journalists on the web being the future?

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 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.

While this may be true theoretically, it's already been disproven in practice. People believe almost anything posted on the Internet, whether it is a no-name website or a random tweet that goes viral.

> People believe almost anything posted on the Internet,

Some people certainly do. Whether the majority of voters as a whole do has not been proven to me.

There are still millions of loyal subscribers to the big institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, etc.

There is no royal road to trust in journalism, to paraphrase a famous mathematician. If venerable institutions such as the New York Times can be corrupted by the transition to new media and the excesses of the zeitgeist, then there is no quick fix in the form of trust in institutions.

The web, more than any other medium before it, has elevated the individual. Therefore, it stands to reason that we ought to place our trust in the individual alone, for whom reputation remains meaningful, and for whom the holding of accountability remains possible.

Agreed. It is the best approach. I think it is laughable that editorial reasons for publishing are brought to front. I actually remember the political articles I read from the last years. I wouldn't have released the Biden story but certainly not because of alleged editorial reasons. Everyone lies, but you should set sensible limits.

One source of news that I find particularly trustworthy and impartial (partially because there is no way to financially profit from twisting it, AFAIK) is Wikipedia's current events page[0].

Someone else shared this on HN in the last few weeks, and I've been looking at it almost daily.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

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.

And, to the degree that they're actually doing investigative journalism, it's really hard to see how the finances work out. I guess there's patronage of various sorts but that tends not to work very well and certainly isn't very scalable.

My sense is that trust is the invariant in the reader-writer relationship. (Lack of) financing is one method to undermine trust, and a method that news organizations are not immune to. Just look at what the internet has done to them!

I'm curious about independent accreditation that journalists can attain and what kind of signal that could provide to contemporary distribution methods. It's easier for Twitter's algorithm to trust such an agency than it is to somehow infer credibility from the lame like/retweet signals it has direct access to.

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.

Same is it ever was; IF Stone was one of the greats of his era, and he basically fed himself with a private newsletter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone

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.

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.

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.

> "buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive"

Yes and no. It is if you want to get all of your daily news that way. But if it's an area you care about and you're somewhat affluent, it's well worth the money. (I'd think a good chunk of HN e.g. has a subscription to Stratechery)

It's a workable strategy for a few extremely good journalists. But there are a lot of issues with it.

Societally, this is problematic in that it makes decent reporting a luxury good. Long-term, this is a problem because there's no institution where junior journalists can learn the trade. In terms of information, it's a problem because there'll likely be no way to get a wider overview of world news in that way.

See: the entire art world.

You can sell on a piece of art though.

Here are licensing the right to consume text without any ownership or ability to redistribute. It's more akin to Netflix.

And people are already complaining about having to pay too many aggregators, paying per TV episode is completely out of the question as the way forward.

>buying journalism one journalist at a time is too expensive.

I think this closed view is partially do to how we consume media as a service vs. a cheap one time payment/view. I'm not sure if substack is a solution or if micropayments will ever kick off, but I don't see how it is more expensive to pay the journalist directly if the mass publishing mechanism is solved.

I paid $50 for a year of Matt Taibbi. Literally the first time I have ever paid money for journalism, and it has been worth every penny.

I did too, until I realized that Taibbi is basically the exact same thing we are all railing against here. It quickly becomes clear that Taibbi puts out almost nothing but counter-outrage porn. Virtually every article was some variation on how the media is stoking public anger against wrongthink.

And it’s not that I think he’s wrong. I think he’s absolutely right. The problem is that it’s basically nothing but opinion pages from someone I already agree with. That’s not news, and it’s not journalism. The problem with modern journalism is that opinion columns seem to have completely overtaken plain, boring reporting. It’s text media outlets mirroring the strategies of 24 hour news networks, in which simply reporting the news is given an increasingly small amount of attention, in favor of “analysis” from pundits and panelists who basically tell an individual what to think. People simply find the outlet or panelist that most closely agrees with what they already feel.

Taibbi doesn’t fix this, he is literally just more of the same. He just does it with a less mainstream viewpoint that appeals to people like you and me.

I also subscribe to Taibbi. I have a slightly more positive impression than you.

Yes, it's true that his thing is meta-journalism with dollops of amusingly worded outrage - "the first pebbles from the towering Matterhorn of bullshit that was the Steele dossier" was an enjoyable sentence in a recent article.

But it isn't just opinion. He backs up his statements with references, facts, summaries of what's going on and generally puts what's happening in context, which is exactly what a journalist is meant to do. I can't possibly follow the whirlwind of immediately forgotten "scandals" that typify American political news, nor can I or do I want to spend all my time watching CNN or obsessively following other US news outlets. I'm not even in the US. But the summarisation of what's happening Taibbi does is useful to me because the meta-story of what's happening with the distribution of news is interesting and relevant. For instance, I learned about how the US media were ignoring the Hunter Biden story via Taibbi. I'm not interested in Hunter Biden but I am interested in the descent of the US media landscape into being an arm of the Democrats. That's what Taibbi (and Greenwald) are currently providing, and it's worth paying for.

> But it isn't just opinion. He backs up his statements with references, facts, summaries of what's going on and generally puts what's happening in context, which is exactly what a journalist is meant to do.

No it’s not. Most opinion pieces have some kind of facts or summaries included to make their argument. The difference between journalism and the newsroom is that they stop at the facts and the summaries, and opinions go on to tell you how you should interpret them (in the author’s view). That’s what Taibbi does. I too tend to agree with his opinions, but people here are confusing “agreeing with his opinions” with “he’s a much better journalist than those found in standard media outlets”. He shouldn’t be considered a journalist, as he exclusively writes opinion pieces.

I think you mean he shouldn’t be considered a reporter, which is the term for a journalist who reports the news with minimal interpretation. There are very few reporters left.

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.

The "peer review" being provided by most media outlets appears to be worse than useless, as Greenwald's experience shows. Typos and spelling errors can be fixed by machines for a very long time already. Editing for space is less necessary when writing for the infinitely long pages of the web - a good writer knows how much detail their audience wants better than an editor does. It's not clear why news has to be filtered through biased editors anymore when technology has eliminated space and distribution constraints.

> The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement

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?

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.

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.

Many journalists lobbied themselves into a position where they can only be seen as opinion commentators, so we have little else anymore. You just have to pick the opinion you like most. This is not an endorsement of Carlson, just for the record.

The conversation here is missing this point and the actual market dynamics - news pays crap.

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.

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.

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.

Not every problem can be solved by the free market. You need to be driven by something more than greed to become the eyes and ears of the nation.

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.

I have looked, many times, and I have not been able to find a single institution I would trust to keep me broadly informed. I do not think the problem is lazyness. What would you recommend for US coverage?

US coverage

...and there lies the problem/laziness.

The United States is far to large, populous, and diverse to expect a single entity to do a good job covering the entire country.

It's like reading an encyclopedia entry about wine and expecting to get insights into how 1,000 different varieties taste.

Or closer to the point, I don't expect to understand what's happening in Bangkok by reading the news in Tokyo. It's all Asia, right?

Your last point is really good but there is still such a thing as a national political scene and federal government in the US, and it's a beat that we can expect a journalistic institution to cover. (despite an entire continent rolling up to those 535+ really important people).

This was a story about one of two people running for President, and an allegedly corruption-focused outlet wouldn't run it. Wtf. "Trump is worse" isn't a reason not to run that, we all know, it's everywhere all the time in all media.

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.

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.

There may not be any market here.

There is a market, but probably not as good as the market for selling influence and peddling outrage.

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.

> WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly

I would imagine its probably because their advertising revenue has been falling down because of the internet. You have to be flexible with your standards when your revenue is declining.

It's getting harder to buy this line as their financials keep getting better and better. They have nearly 5 million subscribers and aiming to hit 10mil by 2025. The advertising revenue isn't growing much, but subscriptions are.

https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2020-02-06/ny-...

Which could also mean that whatever they are doing when they "fell down" is working for them.

It supports the OP's point. NY Times has switched from a revenues model to a subscriber model, which means they're strongly incentivized to publish articles that reinforce the worldviews of their paying customers. Before, when they were dependent on advertising, they needed to be objective and represent all viewpoints because they needed to reach as large an audience as possible.

Why would subscriptions over advertising change their target audience? It seems that either way they are trying to get as many eyeballs as possible. Getting repeat subscriptions versus repeat page views (or whatever the ad revenue metric) seems irrelevant to me.

Because of the publish something that does not say Orange Man Bad they will loose a bunch of their subscribers. Getting subscribers is much harder then loosing them.

Let’s say they covered Hunter Biden scandal. How much would that cost them? Quite a bit I bet

If that's the case there is no way to save the US. Everyone will keep screaming at each other based on the propaganda they buy into until the guns come out.

There has to be a way to present alternate ways of interpreting facts without immediately getting accused of partisan censorship. US media can't even agree on what the facts are without the partisan accusation coming out.

How to rebuild institutional trust once it's gone?

Not under the current paradigms for media and news. Other countries do somewhat better (Germany) but they too face rising nationalist movements.

The issue, amazingly, is Fox News and it’s ilk. Yet, the conversation here is the NYT.

This is a problem on two grounds

1) people talk about what they know. So like many discussions people nerd out on what they have information on.

2) The issue of Correlation vs causation in Fox’s impact on its viewers is pushed away for another day, when things are worse.

Is conservative pandering media causing a break from reality, or are they simply doing what they need to when dealing with their audience. Or perhaps both?

Is having someone like Rupert Murdoch and his children running the show a good thing ?

How could this be prevented ?

> The issue, amazingly, is Fox News and it’s ilk. Yet, the conversation here is the NYT.

That is because practically everyone on HN agrees Fox is bad, biased, etc. Therefore the debate is going to be implicitly about how bad the NYT is in relation to Fox.

A related factor is that it's hard for an educated person to get suckered by Fox. There are too many garish infographics and obvious nutjobs. It just does not give even a superficial impression of being Legitimate and Unbiased and Supported by the Best Experts. But the NYT does, and that's what makes it more dangerous.

If I go into "Uncle Cletus's Homeopathy Clinick", I kind of deserve whatever I get. But if another con man has a convincingly faked (or even real) Harvard M.D., then sets about poisoning lots of people through incompetence and apathy and greed, then everyone insists it can't possibly be his fault because he has an M.D. from Harvard...

...you can see why "Uncle Cletus is the real problem here" can seem nonresponsive. It is not even especially obvious to me which is "worse", "Uncle Cletus" or Fake M.D., even if we grant that Fake M.D. is somewhat better at medicine. I know I personally could get suckered by the latter but not the former, making the latter more dangerous to me.

> A related factor is that it's hard for an educated person to get suckered by Fox. There are too many garish infographics and obvious nutjobs. It just does not give even a superficial impression of being Legitimate and Unbiased and Supported by the Best Experts. But the NYT does, and that's what makes it more dangerous.

So, same reason why scam emails are rife with spelling errors.

They might actually face more criticism if they don't turn away the part of the audience with half a brain first.

>If that's the case there is no way to save the US. Everyone will keep screaming at each other based on the propaganda they buy into until the guns come out.

You say that like it's hyperbole but there's a hell of a lot of people who think we're on that track. What not everyone agrees on is whether it'll be a problem next Wednesday morning or a problem for our great^N grand kids.

It's not, you can safely ignore anyone so untethered to reality that they either a) parrot "orange man bad" to deflect any criticism of Trump or b) actually believe yet another emails story.

From outside it looks like you have an media establishment that is keen of pitting people against each other.

I don't think removing information can work. You can however provide more plausible information. If you remove anything you might as well give it up because it will always be seen as paternalism not fitting a democracy.

In 2005 we already had insane conspiracies on the net. Instead of using them to elevate yourself to a mundane level, you better ignore them. People will get bored quickly.

The democrats greatest failure was probably not championing freedom and free speech. You don't give such a precious thing to your political enemies.

It is refreshing to see conservatives arguing for it. You shouldn't believe them, but liberals arguing for speech codes should reorient themselves. Best start would be yesterday.

US already had a civil war. It is sort of remarkable just how stable the republic been since founding.

Maybe US is due for another go. Unfortunately this time there will be no neat geographic divide and it will probably resemble Russian civil war. That scares the shit out of me, I am Canadian btw. Delegitimization of the elections, stuffing the court, non-stop riots, armed militias. Good vs Evil narrative.

This Pandemic has not been that bad, imagine if this thing was more deadly.. there is no unity, republic verges on the brink

It's like there's this collective cultural shrug of acceptance whenever someone does something that 1) makes a profit 2) is technically legal.

And people just jump in with explanations of how it totally makes sense to act like that in the given the profit motive.

It sets a pretty low bar for expectations. Also, it gives a lot of power to individuals whose modus operandi is the above.

But why is this the expectation? You could also subscribe to and support a publication because they make the hard choices, also publish the unpopular news. Because you think this is important. However, if you do this, support the publication, but the publication starts chasing profit instead of truth, then in the US, joke's on you! Of course they would chase profit instead of truth, everybody will tell you.

It kind of reminds me of the Ferengi in Star Trek sometimes. Does the Star Trek universe perhaps offer any insight how they run a society when the entirety of this society is doing nothing but chase profit?

Their revenue isn't declining, so the argument can't be based on their survival as a company. They are growing and there's multiple ways to grow. There's no excuse for being 'fallen' anymore.

I think it is the other way around. There are fewer advertisers than subscribers, so the publication's strategy tends to get optimized towards keeping those few(er) people happy.

> Before, when they were dependent on advertising, they needed to be objective and represent all viewpoints because they needed to reach as large an audience as possible.

No, they needed to represent viewpoints that were palatable to their advertisers.

A US-centric, neo-liberal world-view does not really 'represent all viewpoints'.

You don't have to, at least if you're private. There's the option to actually stop. That's not necessarily a horrible thing, even if some people think it is.

What we're really seeing is the difference between those that actually want to "provide the best X possible as a business" and those that "want to make money in the market for X".

Everyone says they are the former, but the difference is that those that actually are sometimes go out of business rather than compromise too far. Those that are the latter may not want to compromise too far but, well, "the goal is to make a profit, right?"

NYT also helped sell America into Iraq.

Right that's who to blame not the party/President that actually executed it.

Good thing events can only ever be blamed on one single individuals actions.

This was supposed to be a joke but it's actually how people here talk about racism.

The op-ed page is not the same as the news, which is what I remember Bill Kristol being hawkish in.

Judith Miller wasn't an op-ed columnist.

OTOH, ISTR that she was at least accused of actively deceiving her editors.

Nope, not op-ed. This is a reference to Judith Miller, and others, that published false information in the New York Times about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction on the front page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War

Oh no. So that's how the aluminum tube information spread. Thanks for pointing this out, I stand corrected.

The two part PBS documentary[1] is a terrific source of information. From the events leading up to the war until the origin of ISIS skirmishes.

They explicitly cover the aluminum tube and how the government used a news paper article to justify their stance. It also covers the famous 16 words from Bush [1].

I found it fascinating to learn about all the internal politics during this period and the war state shapes the opinion of the masses. How does one go about justifying a war that has left millions dead, maimed, and traumatized for life, that has cost (and continues to) trillions of dollars, and continues to shape the world we live in today? Highly recommended.

[1] https://www.pbssocal.org/programs/frontline/frontline-bushs-...

https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-bushs-war-part-2/

[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2004/07/bushs-16-words-on-iraq-ura...

Op-ed is still part of the paper's message, considering they do not just publish a random sample of letters received, and editors can be fired for allowing the wrong op ed to run.

Not just that, they chose to support the Bolshevik regime in Russia while their own correspondents knew about the massive starvation in Ukraine causing millions of deaths but that was not the narrative they want to push to the whole world. They wanted Communism to be a shining star and not report the facts. NYT is as biased as you can go.

So they were wrong 20 years ago, and another 80 years before that?

Even ignoring how these accusations oversell some supposedly uniform position of the the paper, that sounds like a pretty good batting average.

Ignoring how these accusations oversell some supposedly uniform position of the the paper, some countries have not completely recovered from either communism or the invasion, so it's not like it's some minor thing.

That one factoid, namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago, seems to be the extend of criticism people can actually come up with when put on the spot. Even though they had plenty of opposition against the war on staff and on paper, and very few of their readers were likely to change their opinion on that topic. And, not being having the presidency and Congress at that point not being neccessary for a declaration of war, their mostly Democratic audience had little to no influence on events.

It's noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which actually made the decision to invade Iraq. And also to lie to the world, its citizens, and, yes, those people at the Times that were naive enough to believe them.

> It's noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party

2008 brought a Democrat president along with an increased Democrat majority in both houses, so if they weren't faulted at the time (and they were) then they were certainly faulted just a few years later.

Both for continuing the military intervention and for not bringing anyone to trial, nor even a public accounting, for cooking up the false claims used to justify the invasion; nor for the torture; nor for the killing of civilians; nor for the use of depleted uranium and white phosphor; etc.

The Bush administration offered the choice, and a bipartisan majority of congress took it. No need to invoke tribalism and blame an impersonal mass of people--we know the names of the specific individuals involved.

The Bush administration controlled the information used the inform congress (and the media while we're on the subject of the parent posts).

Congress and the media deserve some blame for not digging hard enough... but when assigning blame here, surely we ought blame the liars and misleaders more than the lied to and the misled?

If the lie was one that warranted an invasion sure.

If I tell you that some guy called you fat and you go kick the shit out of him, I'm at way less or even no fault. If I tell you that some guy diddled your kid, sure that's on me.

> Congress and the media deserve some blame for not digging hard enough...

Except that the Bush Administration story was on several key points, including the nature of the “winnebagos of mass destruction” a lie, and that the US knew it to be a lie, and that, they were, in fact, associated with a weather balloons used in artillery spotting and had been sold to Iraq by the UK, was reported, in the media, at the time the story was being presented by the Administration.

The media did not fail to dig hard enough. Neither really did Congress. The media reported the truth, Congress and much of the population had the truth in front of them and choose wilfull pretense of ignorance, and the former gave Bush the authority to decide to go to war—sure, there were factual determinations that had to be made first, but the Administration was already known to be lying about the facts to get authority to go to war, so it was predictable they would lie to exercise that authority.

I think the criticism of media comes down that they only dig if politically favourable and recent behavior made that more transparent. People will loose their conscience at one point because mistakes are repeated.

The more divided a country, the more the media has to pander for the extremes. People expect to get dirt only on the other side so the media has to take sides, or be left hated by both.

The whole world knew there was no WMD, only the American convinced themselves.

That the bush administration controlled the information is the failure of congress and the media.

Why would we give congress war powers if not as a specific check against a commander in chief who would otherwise start undesireable wars? It is congress' job to specifically not just go along with what the administration tells them. They have their own investigative powers, and 59 congress members voted against the invasion so clearly it was possible for congress people to question the validity of the administration's argument.

As for the media, accepting the government's narrative without question is the most heinous sin. That is not journalism, that is propaganda. Of course the government is going to massage the truth, just like any other institution. Most people take it as a given that politicians lie. However when the media, which is supposed to have an antagonistic relationship with the government, reaffirms what the government is saying, then it holds substantially more weight. It would be like if a prosecutor claimed the defendant was guilty and the defense attorney agreed.

You don't get any slack for having been lied to when your entire job is to identify lies.

Not true. The Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee has plenty of power to call witnesses, but its chairperson, one Joseph Biden, would not call anyone critical of the administration's position.

Plus, regardless of that - Congress had, at the very least, the information available to the public, which includes what the UN was saying, what weapons inspectors were saying etc. So they didn't need to "dig" anywhere.

>The Bush administration offered the choice, and a bipartisan majority of congress took it.

And later it came out the administration lied extensively about that, including some in-retrospect ridiculous assessments about how long the war would take (what was that quote, doubt it would take 6 months, doubt it would cost much at all).

> No need to invoke tribalism

Oh yes there is, especially because after that complete and utter fiasco of the worst foreign policy decision by the US ever, was there any honest introspection or learning by the administration and/or Republicans in general? Nope, it just was completely ignored.

> That one factoid

Not one. Russiagate in its many variations was and still is happily peddled by NYT. Coverage of Syria is also straight from warmonger 101 textbook. There is likely more, but I stopped reading them regularly after 2003.

> nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which actually made the decision to invade Iraq

Both parties happily voted to invade. Both bear the blame.

In a democracy public perception of reality directly correlates to your ability to perform as a politician. The Bush administration used the full thrust of the office to knowingly foster false perception of reality in huge swaths of the population. Rendering objections moot. The ultimate blame lays with the deceiver. Even though representatives of all parties votes for the invasion, they acted in a reality manufactured by lies and they represented the will of their supposed voters. You may accuse them as spineless, but there's still magnitude difference between deceiving the public, and failing to convince the public it's all lies. Losing this distinction just makes the crooks stronger.

What is the proof that one party did it against the will of the people, while the other went with the will of the people? Given how much ongoing violence was continued and expanded even once the democrats has a president and congressional majority, it seems like both parties were and are happy to perpetuate imperialist violence in the name of a fictional protection.

The "moot objection" included over 5 Million US residents who attended anti-war protests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War

What the lies manufactured was not a "reality", it was an excuse.

Yeah, that grand conspiracy to make up a story about your opponent, and then leak it to the press after the election.

No, that’s not the extent of the criticism of the NYT. Here’s stratechery from a week ago quoting Columbia Journalism Review (https://stratechery.com/2020/twitter-responsibility-and-acco...)

> In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.

> In this context, 10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.

——

But here’s the real kicker. It’s not that the NYT made a mistake about prioritising the wrong coverage and convincing undecided voters to break for Trump or stay home. People make mistakes and we should forgive them.

The real issue is that since then the NYT has convinced people that it was the Russians and Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that got Trump elected. Their breathless coverage of the email non issue had 0 influence, it was entirely the fault of everyone else.

And it worked! No one blames the NYT now for their mistake in 2016. Which is why Greenwald thinks it’s the right thing to do to start emails 2.0.

I don't know why you got downvoted, this is pretty much on spot without any counter indications.

This was typical elite-orientated journalism that articulated ideas to spread election talking points for Clinton. It was certainly no journalism, it was probably for rubbing some friends in Washington.

It’s actually easy to see why I was downvoted.

If you believe what is being said about the NYT it challenges a couple of core beliefs that many people (especially on this forum) might hold

1. Freedom of speech is not always a good thing. A free press reporting on topics like “but her emails” can have negative consequences, even if those journalists are acting in good faith.

2. People in the aggregate can’t be trusted to make sound judgements, even if that means democracy is built on shaky foundations. Give them all the information and let them take a call is a strategy that can backfire. Flat earth, anti vax, qanon are all ideologies with vast following online, regardless of how stupid they are.

When you challenge people’s core beliefs, it hurts them. They respond with downvotes.

> Flat earth, anti vax, qanon are all ideologies with vast following online, regardless of how stupid they are.

True, but I think that doesn't matter. On the contrary, would be boring if we all believed the earth was some ball, wouldn't it.

>It's noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party,

most people I read seems to fault the Republicans, the Democrats who went along and the Media who reported uncritically in that order.

You also seem to fault the Republicans.

I fault the Republicans, first.

So it's not noticeable to me I guess.

Well you know you fuck one horse and you're a horse fucker for all of eternity

> namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago

It was the editorial board, or perhaps I should say the organization at large. And it wasn't just Iraq, it's US interventions in lots of places that are supported and/or positively spun. Also - AFAIK, there was no process undertaken to try and avoid this occurring again.

Greenwald fully supported the Iraq War as well.

Greenwald didn't become a journalist until 2005

Apparently this is something that has totally stuck with the NYTimes. I respect them (for a mainstream media publication), but no one can get over the fact that they lied blatantly at the time.

> WaPo and NYT aren't trash but they have fallen mightly.

As a Indian, I disagree. The reportage on anything India is the usual mix of patronizing caste-curry-cow (and now 'Hindu terror') BS. The morons in-charge of international news at every one of these outlets (incl. Intercept, Twitter, Google..) think that just because they are white, their imagination of the world is the reality.

That's interesting. It's not just India and it's not about race. The NYT has a problem with Britain too, believe it or not. This article goes into some examples but they aren't the only ones:

https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a...

The "media" isn't optimizing for clicks or engagement. The media is optimizing for advancing the democratic political party. It blocks stories that cover topics where the political right may be correct.

Proof: Stories like the one they are hiding can drive a lot of traffic. They are hidden to advance one political party over another. The stories aren't killed because they want traffic.

As an Indian who reads NYT's international coverage, I disagree with your comment. NYT's India reports have been excellent and evidence based. The right wing extremism is indeed on the rise[1].

Any report I see, they are presenting their statements with ground report backed by statistics, usually by Govt. data.

[1] https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-economist-fin...

If their "ground reporting" had any kernel of truth to it then they would not be covering up the rise of islamic extremism in India using bogeys of "right wing extremism".

Yes. But relativelty that mighty fall makes them reek like trash. At that point, it's a duck.

What's worse is they continue to leverage their once-stellar reputations to sell second-rate "stuff" as "news". They've lowered to bar for the accepted definition of journalism.

They might not suck, but they're intentional pursuit falling has broad societal and cultural implications. Perhaps not 100% tabloid, but they use that tool enough to make it more and more legitimate.

To have a healthy and proper Democracy requires a coherent, honest and transparent Fourth Estate. That ship has sailed, and it was prior to Jan 2017.

Well the film Network deals with this theme and it came out in 1976 so I'd say that ship has sailed around the world a few times by now.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

NYT is not an objective publication, they have a heavy bias.

Same with Wall Street Journal - the bias is ridiculously bare.

> Economist, FT and the WSJ

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).

I do very much love the outstanding clear graphics the Economist does with most of their stories. And I agree with others’ comments about the NYT web design team—awesome talents! But the overt bias of the paper is such turn off. They’ve lost all objectivity. Sad.

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.

What about the economist made you cancel? My impression is that they're still doing a great job of providing trustworthy news which avoids sensationalism

When I read the Economist, I can't help but feel like I'm reading an advertisement for the center of the Anglo-American neoliberal Overton window, drafted by some recent grad who doesn't know who Allen Dulles was.

To rip off a pg-ism, they are intentional moderates. Intentional moderates are boring.

Boring is pretty adequate for news. I think entertainment is better found elsewhere.

There are different types of boring. When I read The Economist, I find their writing unchallenging, never broadening my worldview or making me rethink my preconceived notions.

Good journalism and opinion writing isn't boring, it's absolutely fascinating, and that's something I find The Economist lacks.

> I find their writing unchallenging, never broadening my worldview or making me rethink my preconceived notions.

Why would you want that? Amateurs adding a personal spin on topics they don't understand is bad news. Reading that will just make you more misinformed.

If news is just going to tell me what I already know and regurgitate what I already think, why bother reading it? Am I really more informed in a meaningful way if all I'm viewing is a carefully manicured slice of reality designed to keep me feeling comfortable?

I'm not asking for amateurs throwing in their two cents, I'm asking for actual journalists to do their job and speak truth to power.

As an example here is the type of story I want to see more of https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sta...

Wow methadon as a painkiller?!

> For decades, methadone — a synthetic opioid developed in the 1930s by a German company — was associated not with pain relief but with weaning addicts off heroin and other drugs. The word summoned an image of clinics, often in seedy parts of town.

I mean that's what I know methadon from. Always has been and still is.

And I also know that it's not like a "safe" replacement for heroin to kick yourself off. It's absolute shit. But it helps with the heroin withdrawal, which is absolutely worse.

(not that I have any experience with heroin addiction, but I know some people that work at these addict care centres, that distribute methadon (not sure how this works though))

little addition, the same article says:

> A case from 2009 epitomizes this divide. Two sisters, injured in a car accident in South King County, needed pain relief. One, with private insurance, received OxyContin, an expensive drug. The other, on Medicaid, received methadone — and within a week, overdosed and died.

but OxyContin is also shit.

for very different reasons than methadone, that I won't go into here right now.

but fact of the matter is that neither are commonly prescribed as pain killer meds, outside the US.

our politicians actually want less people to be on oxycodon (the generic) because it's terribly addictive, and campaign against it.

The opposite of "boring" is "interesting". Not "entertainment".

I forgot the law's name, but with the Economist happens that every time I read an article about something I know the article leaves me dissatisfied. It is presented "objectively" but always key information is omitted if it goes against the Economist worldview (Free markets and liberal democracies led by center, center-left parties in USA and the UK is what is best for the world)

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

That's correct! And I've asked myself, if these guys are presenting this lopsided article about Venezuela, Colombia , Costa Rica, what chance do I have to get a better information from them on Nepal, Denmark or Egypt?

I looked it up since I was unfamiliar with the name (but familiar with the concept).

In case anyone is wondering -https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

I had been a subscriber for almost 30 years. Loved their cheeky style and erudite, but clear writing.

In 2015, the publishing house Pearson sold their majority stake to a bunch of globalists: the Agnelli family, the Rotschilds, Cadbury, etc.[1]

I was not aware of this at the time, but noticed the change of direction a year or so later. Cancelled my subscription - sadly there are few real journalists left.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist

Given The Economist's neoliberal bent, why would the sale to "globalists" change their values?

Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional or not - but using the word "Globalists" as a pejorative for the Rothschilds is a very common anti-semitic tactic.

I think you are being paranoid - what has globalism got to do with anti-semitism? There are plenty of globalists of varying nationalities/religions.

Globalist is a commonly used dog-whistle to talk about Jews which itself lacks a clear and useful definition.

Neoliberal has a clear definition. "Top 1% of the 1%" has a clear meaning. "Globalist" does not. "Globalism" isn't an ideology so far so I understand it.

For that reason I understand it to be a word that signals something about the writer more so than it describes something about the subject. But I could be overfitting this curve.

If you are in a card game and you don't know who the patsy is, it's you.

To me globalists - the top 0.1%, with their business interests spread over the world, completely unaccountable to any government (in fact, increasingly influencing/corrupting governments around the world with their money).

And attempting to sprinkle anti-semitism into it is just a (typical) attempt to make the word "globalist" socially unacceptable. Nothing to do with Jews, but hey, nice try.

You are correct in your view of who the globalists are. The only racist idea here is that all of those people are Jews. The idea that saying “globalist” is an anti-Semitic pejorative is just an idea being installed by Globalist Propagandists and their (witting or not) repeaters, to make it socially risky for anyone to discuss their nefarious deeds when labeled in a way that promotes pattern recognition by readers.

I mean, it's not "just" propaganda; but that is a possibility that certainty muddies the waters and would benefit people wanting the topic underdiscussed.

Though generally I just refer to these people as Reptilians.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-ori...

Pearson sold their majority stake of the B shares to the Agnelli family. They have no control over how the paper is run. The A shares are owned by the “globalists” and have been for as long as the paper has really existed. Furthermore, nobody is allowed to sell shares without the approval of an independent board who is able to veto any sale or purchase.

There’s been no change in editorial control or voice in the paper. It’s all you.

Many people (even on this board, in other threads over the past couple of years) made similar observations. So no, it is not "just me".

What is your definition of "globalist"?

Wrong. Wirecard.

Yup they single handedly took down wirecard and risked their reputation for it.

You can choose which bias to read, but you can't read unbiased news. If you think your news is unbiased, then it's the most dangerous kind of pandering.

being unbiased is not something you can be, it is something you can strive towards.

Biases are inescapable, but there is no need to be fatalist about it.

FT has some pretty critical op-ed sections of corporations, almost bitter.

While they are very much in the neo-liberal Anglo-American bent, they still provide the most eclectic and readable collection of global stories in one format.

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).

WSJ has pretty biased opinion section though where they have almost no standards.

I agree (as someone to left of the wsj median), but it's worth knowing that the editorial desk is an entirely different team from the opinion desk (with different standards etc)

Is this good? I don't think so, but it's worth being aware of, like to understand "why is that brand diluting itself with an opinion desk?" (I don't have a satisfying answer though)

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-anything-structurally-differe...

Which is typical of the approach Murdoch takes with his "high brow" media properties. Quality news, batshit crazy opinion.

pretty biased opinion section

Like, that's what an editorial page is? What you are really saying is, they don't have the same bias as you. As for standards, that's really unfair. They have high standards and are much more apt to invite opposing opinions than the NYT, or WaPo. They refused to endorse Trump in 2016. Good people can disagree with you for real reasons, not because they have lower standards.

There's bias and then there's intentional misleading. Providing a platform for the Koch etc funded think-tanks doesn't fit into "just bias". Eg their attempts to undermine climate science.

Again, you’re just confusing disagreement for bias. As if The NY Times or WaPo don’t provide a platforms for left wing think tanks? Are you worried about the bias of The NY Times Editorial page when they undermine the science of gender or IQ? The WSJ editorial page should be the most important thing you read every day so you can actually understand the reasoning (yes reason) of people with different positions than you.

No, there's not a "both sides do it" situation in this production of intentionally misleading content in the most prominent newspapers.

If you believe so, then you should try to break out of your bubble a little more.

see the recent insurrection at WSJ reported eg as " 280+ Wall Street Journal Journalists Sign Letter Blasting Opinion Section for ‘Lack of Fact-Checking’ and ‘Disregard for Evidence’" (https://www.thewrap.com/280-wall-street-journal-journalists-...)

Your comment is fully compatible with my comment above.

The first problem is agreement on facts.

For example, the following are questioned and dismissed by large numbers of opinion pages in the WSJ and other Murdoch papers and media outlets:

* Is COVID a pandemic?

* Is climate change happening at a rate that is unprecedented in archeological and geological time?

* Is that climate change due to human activities?

Let alone ridiculous assertions like claiming that the Democratic party in the US espouses "socialist" policies or that the GOP party has "fiscal conservatism" as an underlying principle.

Do you think climate change is happening at a greater rate now than it did at the K-T boundary?

Which billionaires should I be afraid of the Koch Bros or Bezos and Soros? I'm losing track. Tell me who I should hate.

Depends on if you like the letter R or the letter D.

Hate I'm not sure about, but you should be nervous and distrustful of anyone to whom buying a PR firm is relatively cheap (as in, 2-3 days income cheap).

Every single one of them. But if we are to make a ranking, I think spreading climate denial to protect your oil empire does do a lot make you uniquely loathe worthy.

Might as well add the Masshole, 'strayan and Cheeto in Cheif to that list.

I can't think of a single politically involved billionaire who doesn't have at least a couple very onerous "keep the unwashed masses under control" type policies they are trying to advance.

Edit:typo

That's better than other newspapers whose whole news section is just an opinion section by all metrics.

The great thing about biased opinion in a financial newspaper is that if you trade based on that opinion, chances are you'll lose money.

From 2008 through 2016, WSJ opinion hammered on the supposed fiscal recklessness of the US federal government, warned that inflation and interest rates would skyrocket, and fretted about bond vigilantes.

If you traded on this opinion and shorted long-term bonds, you would have lost a lot of money. Naturally, their promised inflation, interest rates and bond vigilantes never materialized.

Curiously, they've been mostly silent about fiscal recklessness since 2016, despite $3 trillion deficits.

Fortunately, it's likely that they'll again have a chance to start harping on fiscal recklessness, starting on January 21st, 2021.

It makes complete sense to me to not be honest with your opinion on economic predictions. It would be insider trading light. And if you could broadcast misinformation to a broader public of traders...

In fairness, all those things are the expected outcomes of hugely profligate spending and have been seen in other economies that adopted the same policies. It's surely a bit of an open question why the USA, and to some extent other western countries, have been able to sustain such huge deficits for so long apparently in defiance of financial gravity. I think you're implying the WSJ's interest in the topic was entirely political in nature, but it's also possible they just noticed that their predictions kept not coming true and dropped it for that reason. After all, Trump promised big spending with tax decreases, with correspondingly huge deficits, and there doesn't seem to have been any negative effect of that (yet).

Yes, in the same edition of the newspaper, in the news section, the Hunter Biden "story" was evaluated and found without merit.

Meanwhile, in the opinion pages, Strassell promoted it with abandon.

The story is still developing and had several major points that are clearly worth further investigation. Please don't dismiss this issue as without merit, this will be investigated long after the election no matter who wins.

The only ongoing developments in this story are embarrassing revelations that show what an amateur hour version of Russian disinformation this is and the sort of idiots who are prepared to believe it (and the useful idiots like Greenwald who get paid to promote it.) Not only do we have the Tucker Carlson "USPS ate my homework" saga, we have the verification source that turns out to be completely made up.

Totally. Without. Merit.

Glenn Greenwald is probably the last neutral journalist. Respected worldwide for publishing the Snowden story, which the conservative establishment was totally against, he is completely independent of partisan politics, and is after the real story.

Glenn Greenwald is a hack. He stumbled into his one big scoop (Snowden) and since then has not really distinguished himself or shown that one case to be anything more than a lucky break. He is not independent of partisan politics, he is simply partisan on an anti-establishment axis.

Here's ABC news from June of last year: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1322376502403604480?...

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.

For general news, I would still prefer the common touchstone, and diversity of an Economist, FT, Post or NYT. Each of these papers has their weak and strong points (ie. some have covered tech better than others).

In more specialized fields, sure nothing beats an expert.

Those are opinion writers not journalists.

It’s a sad state of affairs when people confuse the two.

You’ve been downvoted but I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s lots of debate in these comments about how journalism is dying due to various monetization schemes, organization and lower dynamics, etc. But I personally think the issue is that we, as news consumers, are becoming lazier and are simply looking for someone to tell us what to think, rather than a comparatively dry report on the facts that then requires the reader to make do their own analysis. Opinion articles seem to be what dominates traditional media outlets like the NYT and WP, while 24 hour news networks don’t even label it as opinion, they just bring on pundits to comment on every single thing that happens.

Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened. Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the internet has accelerated and further enabled it to the point where it feels like journalism as an institution is collapsing.

Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened

And on the other hand, it's about reporting what might happen. What I'm seeing around me is that "news reporting" is more often than not speculation about tomorrow's events, rather than reporting about today's events. Maybe it's for the same reason, reporters feel that today's events have already been covered to death because of the hype news cycle, so they turn to speculation rather than confirmation and contextualization?

> Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened.

No, it hasn't become any more about that than it has been for centuries. How it's changed within the recent past is it's become more diverse in the ideological slant of outlets, so every major outlet isn't telling you the same thing to think about what happened, regardless of slight divergences in the information they select to include about what actually happened. So, more of the difference in outlets is on narrative/spin than fact details. This makes the spin more noticeable.

Ok, so what are your experts on housing policy? On agrarian policy? On international trade? On Newfoundland state politics? On medicine?

The number of areas where you can personally vet your experts is very small. For the rest, you must either choose to be uninformed or you can choose an organization to vet those experts for you. Trust is transitive.

This may be true in general. But the these particular. organizations have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy. So now what? Trusting known liars is a foolish path.

The issue is not everyone can afford to pay for real unbiased journalism

Surely that has never been true.

Why not?

I had never seen the word "parametdynamicser" before. Googling lead me back here. Although it does ask if I meant "parameter dynamics".

Could you explain what you meant with it?

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.

> "Leading gut doctor: I beg every American to throw out this vegetable NOW!" type nonsense.

That and obscure investments into shitcoins. I get that the FDA and every other public health agency worldwide has more pressing problems than quacks, but what are the SEC and their European counterparts doing all day? I'd expect them to investigate scams and questionably legal "investment" opportunities.

>but what are the SEC and their European counterparts doing all day?

Raking in the $$$ fining banks for missing technicalities on reporting and whatnot.

Look at the incentives and you can predict the outcome.

It's the same reason the DOT spends their time harassing scrap haulers and dump trucks for being a few pounds overweight rather than trying to track down the people driving on no sleep or systematically skirting the rules. Fining people for petty BS is the financial meat and potatoes of their operation. Good Old Fashioned Police Work (TM) is just a loss leading sideshow to keep public approval high enough to get money. It's like how Red Bull's primary business is selling energy drinks but they also have a bunch of extreme sports ventures for PR purposes.

Pretty much every enforcement agency is like that. You want to see the EPA, OSHA or SEC or whoever levy big company ending fines that scare everyone into compliance then you need to take away the low effort to enforce petty stuff that is the bulk of their revenue stream.

Short answer is that they pay a lot.

> This is why the Economist

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.

> Economist

The economist has some of the worst journalism I have ever seen. Lots of snark and no information.

What amazing comment.

> 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.

That hasn’t worked recently. Look at NPR. It’s been captured.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 actually surreal to see this happening.

"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.

There’s two social groups, they don’t want to critique their social group.

Many more than two social groups.

Sure, pedantically.

Alternatively, us & them = 2

This is an oversimplification. There's a difference between rocking someone else's boat and rocking the one you're riding on.

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.

You are right, but it goes both ways. If a writer at the Federalist or Breibart tried to publish a piece arguing AOC's economics actually had some merit, they would not be met with an enthusiastic response from their professional and social circles.

Polarization and factionalism on both sides of the media is the problem.

The right doesn't try to get people fired for saying they like AOC. They will just hit back with their own points. That's the way it's supposed to go in a civil society.

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.

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.

> 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...

Not going to directly engage with your argument, but this framing is frankly absurd. Alan Dershowitz is not "neutral" with regards to Trump, he was literally part of his legal defense team!

> Not going to directly engage with your argument, but this framing is frankly absurd. Alan Dershowitz is not "neutral" with regards to Trump, he was literally part of his legal defense team!

That article is dated a year and half prior to Trump’s impeachment. Dershowitz disagrees with Trump on policy matters on just about everything. What he doesn’t do is let his political disagreements pervert his legal opinions on constitutional matters. And hence he gets blacklisted for not joining the hate.

> he doesn’t do is let his political disagreements pervert his legal opinions on constitutional matters

I think the idea of the "apolitical" constitution is more myth than reality. Dershowitz is perhaps a liberal in the classic political philosophy sense, but I would not call him a "prominent liberal" in the American sense.

He also might have been 'blacklisted' because he was at least somewhat credibly accused of pedophilia.

> Dershowitz disagrees with Trump on policy matters on just about everything. What he doesn’t do is let his political disagreements pervert his legal opinions on constitutional matters.

Like when Dershowitz defended Trump during the impeachment hearings, on grounds that he hadn't been shown to commit a crime, that were very tendentious and rejected by constitutional scholars? Give me a break, the man's judgement is completely compromised.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/1/30/legal-experts-r...

Dershowitz defended Trump because he wanted the US Embassy moved to Jerusalem. He played Trump like a fiddle.

NYT consistently reported on Hillary Clinton's e-mails all throughout the 2016 campaign.

That was 4 years ago. The polarization of NYT has significantly advanced since then, culminating in the Tom Cotton op-ed, which set off an internal revolt at the Times, with staffers coordinating pushback across Twitter. This led to the resignation of James Bennet, the editor of the op-ed section, the reassignment of Jim Dao, the deputy editor, and the resignation of Bari Weiss.

Unsurprising though after the duel crises of their deficiencies reporting on the Bush administration and then Trump. People often attempt to correct the wrong problem, like having a kid to save a marriage.

I recall the editorial team publishing a statement suggesting their neutralist approach (including publishing news that hurt Hillary’s campaign) was providing Trump too much of an advantage and commuting themselves to a more or less activist angle.

And her loss seems to have been a turning point for how they cover democratic candidates.

> Prominent liberals like Alan Dershowitz

While at least notionally a Democrat (and one who claims to be a liberal one) Dershowitz is to the right of even the mainstream of the dominant corporatist neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party. And sometimes quite far to the Right, such as his eager advocacy for (not defense of something already being done, but advocacy for a new and novel policy) a systematic and public policy of specific collective punishment by Israel against the Palestinian population in violation of international humanitarian law, or his proposal for "torture warrants" in the early 2000s.

> say they're being socially blacklisted for not taking part in a pile on against Trump

Dershowitz has been one of the right-wing's favorite "liberal Democrats" for a lot longer than the Trump Administration, and has been marginalized by the left of center and increasingly the Democratic mainstream for that from the early 2000s, even before the accusations that he wasn't just Epstein's lawyer, but also a significant client, and his recent campaign against the ACLU.

He's not been marginalized just because he hasn't taken part is a "pile on" against Trump.

The irony of claiming that the NY Times never tears down liberals by posting a link to the NY Times publishing criticism of liberals on Martha's Vineyard is quite amusing.

> 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.

A nihilist regarding truth, I see. You might want to watch this video to see why that's a dangerous attitude, and one that plays into the hands of morally unscrupulous actors and foreign adversaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nknYtlOvaQ0

"Everything is shit and everyone is guilty" is the exact thing an autocrat needs the majority of his citizens to believe to remain in power.

> A nihilist regarding truth

Nope. I believe in truth. My point is that the news industry isn't in the business of truth. They have never been. The news is in the propaganda business. They exist to form opinions. It's why pretty much every news company around the world was formed by a politician, banker, industrialist or government. If trump created "Real News Company", I'm sure you'd say only the naive would view such a company as a purveyor of truth right?

> You might want to watch this video to see why that's a dangerous attitude, and one that plays into the hands of morally unscrupulous actors

You might also look up the history of the news industry, manufacturing consent, etc. And the morally unscrupulous actors are the major news companies.

The real danger is not from those who question the news, it's from those who blindly view it as the truth.

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.

Long live the freaks of the world. We need them more than ever.

A-men

Here's to the rebels...

Please show me a high-profile investigative piece from the mainstream media against Biden.

It was the New York Times that originally broke the Biden Ukraine story back in 2015. Recent iterations of it are mostly just rehashing the original article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/world/europe/corruption-u...

Come on. This was not what OP implied. Of Biden as a candidate, L6M. Impossible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukr...

May 1st, 2019

If journalists didn’t rock the boat, the current POTUS would be very happy. But they do, and he’s not, so this theory seems to have no merit.

The journalists are not on that boat with the POTUS, so they are more than happy to rock it.

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.

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.

Oof, took me a couple tries to figure out specifically which trump lawyer you were describing because your description roughly fits a few of them

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.

Fox News argued before Mary Kay Vyskocil, United States District Judge, well, to use the court's words: "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."

My question to you is: are you arriving with an appropriate amount of skepticism?

Tucker Carlson is not a credible source, and nothing aired on that program "showed" anything definitive except accusations that were made. The Wall Street Journal ran their own story on these allegations and found no link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-bidens-ex-business-partn...

Tucker Carlson isnt the source, Tony Babulinski is the source. Im not a regular Fox viewer but I think you should watch the interview, Tony comes off as very credible. An interesting feature of this story is that Tony Babulinski's claims are corroborated by Hunter Biden's own words. That seems pretty definitive to me.

I cant read passed the first paragraph of that article because of the paywall, Im curious how they can possibly say that there is no link when we have so much first hand evidence of a link. Can you please let me know? Imho the only room for judgement is whether or not you find the link unethical or significant but to deny it exists seems disingenuous to me.

You haven't given me any reason to believe these allegations, and I have seen the interview and I am not persuaded that Tony is a credible source.

Now what.

Now nothing, youre entitled to your opinion. Cheers!

But from your comment above, can you please let me know why the WSJ says there is no connection between Hunter's company and Joe Biden despite Hunter's texts discussing Joe's involvement?

The Wall Street Journal investigated corporate filings and paperwork that indicated the opposite of the alleged connection. So at least in terms of above-board money flowing around, they investigated and saw nothing untoward.

So, is it a he-said, she-said? No. The texts can't be verified as they came from a laptop that no one can prove actually belonged to Hunter Biden.

From an outside infosec perspective, without the whole picture, it looks like the laptops are a mix of what happened with Podesta's emails (hacked by a foreign intelligence agency in a disinformation campaign and laundered through WikiLeaks to make the lot seem credible) placed on a physical device and dropped off in a place with a tip-off to a susceptible target (Rudy Giuliani).

There's no evidence Hunter Biden (a Delaware resident) traveled traveled to a no-name retailer in a city he doesn't live in (!) to get laptops that were in-warranty (!) repaired there instead of the Apple Store (!), where they offered to do many, many hours of labor backing up those laptops for only $85 (in New York City?!), and then Hunter forgot the laptops and left them there (!) even though they contained allegedly damning images, allegedly child pornography, and allegedly damning business records detailing financial ties between his father and a foreign power, and that it just so happened that the retailer was active on social media as a Trump supporter (!) and somehow knew how to get in touch with Rudy Giuliani (!) to convey these laptops to Rudy, where they then sat for nearly 10 months unpublished (!). Even by the loosest standards for an evidentiary chain of custody, that's pretty bad.

Rudy Giuliani also tweeted out alleged "text messages" from this laptop that were pictures taken of a blackberry showing a screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation, and in the top left corner of the screenshot showed a Russian telecom network.

Example: https://twitter.com/mikeemanuelfox/status/131928209151992218...

So, no, I don't think these claims are in any way credible. I think it's very unlikely that Hunter Biden would do those things, and I think the entire story beggars belief. That's why the story was shopped around to multiple outlets, that's why the New York Post was the only to go forward with it, and it's why the Wall Street Journal's coverage of it was incredulous because the only records they could verify contradicted these wild accusations.

I really want to see the actual texts so we can do DKIM validation and not have to take anyone's word for it. It looks like Gmail has used the same key since 2016, so this should be possible.

  dig +short 20161025._domainkey.gmail.com txt
  "k=rsa; p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAviPGBk4
  ZB64UfSqWyAicdR7lodhytae+EYRQVtKDhM+1mXjEqRtP/
  pDT3sBhazkmA48n2k5NJUyMEoO8nc2r6sUA+/Dom5jRBZp6qDKJOwjJ5R/
  OpHamlRG+YRJQqR" "tqEgSiJWG7h7efGYWmh4URhFM9k9+rmG/CwCgwx7Et+c8OMlngaLl04 
  /bPmfpjdEyLWyNimk761CX6KymzYiRDNz1MOJOJ7OzFaS4PFbV
  Ln0m5mf0HVNtBpPwWuCNvaFVflUYxEyblbB6h/oWOPGbzoSgtRA47
  SHV53SwZjIsVpbq4LxUW9IxAEwYzGcSgZ4n5Q8X8TndowsDUzoccPFGhdwIDAQAB"

I heard claims that someone at ErrataSec has the emails and did this validation, but I want to do it myself.

I've put some whitespace in your comment because it was borking the page layout. Sorry - it's our bug.

Thank you for fixing it!

Watch the interviews on Tucker Carlson tonight. You will see the text messages, you will see the documents, you won’t hear the tapes that were recorded as he was speaking to these people.

Correction, you Will hear the tape!!!

Only one email so far, but here you go:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

Because the bumbling relatives of powerful people exaggerate their connection and involvement all the time. Without further evidence of Joe Biden's involvement, this amounts to hearsay.

That indicates the media should probably ask Biden about this and almost nothing more.

Here's a quote from the WSJ:

“Text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture,”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/is-wsj-editorial-boa...

> youre entitled to your opinion

you are entitled to say you believe something with no evidence, and he's entitled to say that's a ridiculous thing to do.

> can you please let me know why the WSJ says there is no connection between Hunter's company and Joe Biden despite Hunter's texts discussing Joe's involvement?

Are you serious? Read the article. Your text conspiracy involves believing that certain codewords are referring to Joe Biden. It's Pizzagate all over again. "It all makes perfect sense as long as some words mean something other than what they mean!"

I am so sick of this lunacy.

The face to face meetings Babulinski and Joe Biden had along with the recordings, hard drives, emails original phones and text messages. All were just authenticated by the FBI and Senate.

That’s ok. The Senate and the FBI have said the evidence is real.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the role and requirements of serious journalism. One is attempting to corroborate information, and weighing that information by the likelihood that it is, in fact, fact. Tony may have seemed very credible to you, but I think that there are many people who are good at seeming credible while lying. So unless the specific information you find damning is corroborated by some source independent of Bobulinski, serious journalists will not and should not present it as fact.

Tucker Carlson is not serious journalism - he's opinion at best and propaganda at worst. None of the above applies to him (as persuasively argued by Fox News itself).

Let me quote the WSJ linked above: >The venture—set up in 2017 after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.

Here's a detailed Q&A by NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/us/politics/bidens-china....

CEFC was supposed to send $5mill to Tony and Hunter's company and 5mil to Hunter Biden as a loan. They did indeed never send the money to the company but we know from the senate report that CEFC did indeed send 5 million directly to Hunter. And official documents showing no role for joe biden is expected as this looks really bad for him. We know from Hunter Biden's email that his share was being held by his family members. Again Hunter Biden wrote that not Tony.

We don't know that at all, you've begged the question by assuming the veracity of the disinformation and then used that to justify the authenticity of further disinformation.

This NBC News story should help you understand the origin of this conspiracy: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1245387

Why did NYT run the "senior administration official" story then?

It was an op-ed, not a story by the NYT.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/29/tony-bobulins... includes what the WSJ found:

The Wall Street Journal reviewed his documents and found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden — or that he was active in his family’s foreign business endeavors, as Bobulinski claimed.

Bobulinski’s overarching claim is that Joe Biden was involved in, and may have profited from, his son and brother’s business dealings in China. He called Joe Biden’s claim that he never played a role in Hunter Biden’s foreign business endeavors "a blatant lie."

But the Journal reported that the text messages and emails Bobulinski shared from 2017 "don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture."

The venture in China "never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter," the outlet reported. "Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden."

The Journal also quoted Gilliar, the British national involved in SinoHawk, as saying he was "unaware of any involvement at any time of the former vice president." Gilliar added that "the activity in question never delivered any project revenue."

> the statement he makes.

You're not parsing the legalese finely enough. It says the statement in that quote. Not every statement, but just one in paritcular. They defended one particular statement Tucker made on air in that lawsuit as "rhetorical hyberbole" which is a defense against defamation that has been used in, e.g. the Larry Flint case.

You can read more about what rhetorical hyperbole if you wish:

https://www.virginiadefamationlawyer.com/rhetorical-hyperbol...

https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1796/rhetorical-hyp...

This is not the sort of argument you should make if you want people to take your opinions on legal matters seriously.

Tucker Carlson is a professional entertainer. Why are you mentioning him in a discussion of journalism?

Tucker Carlson ... the man who lost the important document in the world ... who claimed in his defense that no one should take his TV show seriously ... that Tucker Carlson?

Why the fuck would you use that as a source?

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?

The same FBI claims Giuliani is being used by foreign nations to influence our elections. What's your source?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/giuliani-bi...

The source is the Director of National Intelligence: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fbi-hunter-...

I don't see anything in that article that indicates that "[t]he FBI and DNI have also both confirmed the validity of the laptop".

From the article:

> Appearing Monday on Fox Business Channel, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said “there is no intelligence that supports” the idea that the purported Hunter Biden laptop and the emails on it “are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

Absence of intelligence that the laptop is "part of a Russian disinformation campaign" doesn't mean that the contents of the laptop are genuine. That statement still leaves open a bunch of possibilities including that the contents of the laptop were faked by non-Russians, were faked by the Russians but the US doesn't have intelligence confirming it, etc.

As for the FBI, they say "we have nothing to add" to the DNI's statement and that "the FBI can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation". Nothing in the FBI's letter says anything about the laptop's contents being genuine.

What he meant to say was: "the FBI has confirmed there is a laptop". They have no commented at all about what's on it, only to say that these emails and salacious photos were being shopped around Ukraine last year and were most likely stolen at a different time.

https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/

Director of National Intelligence a.k.a. Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe. Do you see the problem here?

"John Ratcliffe, then a lawmaker from Texas, promised senators skeptical of his vocal support for President Trump that he would be “entirely apolitical as the director of national intelligence.”

A few months into his tenure, Mr. Ratcliffe has emerged as anything but. He has approved selective declassifications of intelligence that aim to score political points, left Democratic lawmakers out of briefings, accused congressional opponents of leaks, offered Republican operatives top spots in his headquarters and made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/us/politics/john-ratcliff...

Just last week he had the FBI director stand behind him while he ad-libbed about how Iran was attacking our elections to help Trump (an off the cuff assertion that he didn't clear with the FBI director when he was shown the prepared remarks). He is not credible.

> The same FBI claims

Checks article:

> four former officials familiar with the matter.

I don't think we can call four anonymous sources the 'same FBI'.

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.

Take a minute to step back. What do you think is more probable. That every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong, while the one publication is in the right. Or that maybe, just maybe, it's the other way around and NYP published something that has not been well vetted?

Every single journalist? What about Glenn Greenwald? How about Matt Taibi?

Err, sorry I meant publication. What other large real publication has been willing to back up NYP?

No mainstream publication has been willing to do so.

And IMO, that should be seen as an indictment of the state of the modern corporate press, as opposed to an indication that the story lacks veracity.

As we've seen repeatedly over the last four years, the mainstream media is happy to amplify absurd stories - the Trump "suckers and losers" story which was quickly debunked, the entire Russia Collusion narrative, etc - if it serves their own interests.

So to view what is reported in the mainstream media as the barometer of what is true is to commit an enormous error.

I'm sorry, I'll still rather take their word than those of a random internet stranger. And I'd like to see your proof of the "suckers and losers" story being "easily debunked, when it not only came from multiple sources, but it even matches very easily to actual public things Trump has said or implied, or the fact that he himself is a war dodger.

And again, as stated above, take a moment to consider what you're actually implying. That publications such as NPR, AP, BBC, Reuters, some of the least partisan and most trusted news source with the hardest working journalist dedicated their life to communicating the facts. You're claiming that they are hiding the truth in some big conspiracy and that your one flaky source is the one telling the truth? Cmon man, don't be an old facebook grampa...

For suckers and losers, there is an e-mail that has been verified that confirmed that due to weather Trump never made the visit. The story was also denied by Bolton who is very anti-trump.

> What do you think is more probable. That every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong, while the one publication is in the right. Or that maybe, just maybe, it's the other way around and NYP published something that has not been well vetted?

Great thought exercise. I'm happy to inform you that I have actually already considered both scenarios and am confident that it really is this:

> every single news organization out there, every single journalist, including NPR as you mention, are trying to hide this very real story and are wrong

If you look back at the media in the last four years that shouldn't be as surprising as you are implying.

Although I take issue with "every single journalist", since the point of Greenwald's piece, among others, is that even if one journalist wants to tell the truth, they will be suppressed.

---

To go more concrete here though, are you specifically claim that the materials are not real, or that the story of how they were acquired is false? The former is absolutely undeniable; the latter is up for debate but I personally don't even think the laptop repair shop story is fabricated.

I personally watched (part of) the video of Hunter Biden smoking crack while receiving a footjob, so unless you think it's a body double or a deepfake there is no doubt in my mind that these documents are real. Furthermore the big smoking gun is the financial documents which should be trivially easy for a journalist to debunk. So if you want to question how the materials are acquired, go ahead, but the documents themselves are real, and they show very questionable business dealings in China, Ukraine, and Russia.

BTW, the existence for years now of the Russia Collusion hoax - namely, the debunked notion that Trump is a vassal of Vladimir Putin and directly colluded with Russia to win the US election - should tell us everything we need to know about the intellectual integrity of the corporate press.

In a democracy majority should decide what to do. But it’s not the majority who decides what _is true_.

Marc Twain used to say: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

(Interestingly you’re demanding the same: taking time to step back ;)

Your analogy doesn't really apply. These publications are all top of their field reporters. That's like saying 99% of scientist agreeing that vaccines work doesn't mean the majority is right.

In a normal population you may be right, but in a field of experts, I'm happy sticking with the majority than with the one random scientist who believes in satanic rituals telling me hydroxychloroquine works.

So do you believe in second opinions? Have you ever heard of a patient having to go to several different doctors to get the right treatment?

Reporters 30 years ago might have had standards. I think those standards have slipped tremendously.

The North Koreans trust their journalists. They are the top of their field after all.

Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in uniformity and groupthink.

As so we got the replication crisis in multiple sciences.

Try this 30 second test on WaPo about the "Majority Illusion":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/ma...

Then, with this in mind, look at the fact that almost all media is controlled by less entities than you can count on your two hands (assuming you have ten fingers):

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

I'm inclined to agree that this story probably leads to nothing, either because it is absolutely nothing or because the corruption here is too vague to nail down (that's the smart kind to do).

But after living through the media's credulity toward the war on terror, credulity toward the war on drugs, credulity toward the satanic panic of the 90s, credulity toward the broken forensics that have gotten innocent people executed, dismissal of Juanita Broaddrick and vilification of Edward Snowden, I'm inclined to believe they are totally capable of a kind of mass group think without any need for a belief in a kind of conspiracy.

I may not have first hand experience with some of the older examples you give, but "vilification of Edward Snowden" makes no sense, considering 3 of the biggest news publications were the ones who were tasked with spreading Snowden's documents in the first place. How are they vilifying him if they're literally helping him spread the word?

I think you're using "The media" very liberally there. Were there pundits on some cable channel vilifying him? Sure. But that is in no way equivalent to every single major news publication refusing to back NYP on this report.

That's a fair argument and Snowden is the weakest of those examples. But I think the credibility media outlets lent the security apparatchiks in responding to the crisis colored the revelations in a negative way for many Americans.

What an idiotic statement. You could have said the exact same thing about the second Iraqi war. Also the conservative media is jumping all over this. Perhaps it’s only the media that you choose to believe.

The "conservat media" is reblogging it, not investigator it.

Tucker Carlson is telling absurd lies that he "lost the evidence in the mail" before making copies of it.

UPS says they found the missing package.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/29/fox-news-tucke...

And the liberal media isn’t investigating either. All politicized.

He did not say "before making copies". I watched that segment, and he did not say that. Now, he didn't make it clear that he had made copies in the segment, but in other venues he did assert that copies were made.

UPS also acknowledged that the package was indeed opened and the contents missing (though they did find them later).

The point, as he admitted in a text to journalist Roger Sollenberger, was that he was convinced that someone was monitoring his texts. That may be paranoid speculation, but it is not a lie.

Were you around for the early 2000's Iraq War? Because that's exactly what happened.

No, every left wing news organization buried it. Even though those same organizations were happy to publish accusations of a supreme court committing gang rapes with no basis.

Fox covered it. NYP covered it. Independent journalists covered it. Left wing corporates did not.

Given the events of the past few years, with the media spending 3 years of our precious existence on salacious and false Russia conspiracy theories...maybe just maybe the NY Post has it right.

Fox and NYP are both Murdoch-controlled and are located at the same address. They don't count as independent verification from one another.

NYP has had access to the hard drive for two weeks. Independent journalists do not. Left wing corporates do not have access to the hard drive and don't run stories when they can't vet it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch

Their editorial teams are independent. Yes they're right leaning, but you can't expect the left wing to report on its own these days. As for the laptop contents, they've been leaked on the internet already.

And yes they do run stories when they can't vet it. They lost a settlement with Nick Sandmann over it: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/media/washington-post-sandman...

They don't have to physically hold every piece of evidence and forensically investigate it in order to report a story. No one did that with the Snowden story that Glennwald broke. That's ridiculous. You simply frame it as "Documents Reportedly Show Biden Family Involved with Chinese Business Deals" or "Questions Surround Biden Family Foreign Business".

"They don't have to physically hold every piece of evidence and forensically investigate it in order to report a story."

Do you consider fact-checking a form of censorship?

Was the Steele dossier "fact-checked" before being reported?

I think many of these institutions are probably experiencing some internal tension about whether to publish this story, but that they dominant culture and voices are so panicked about the possibility of a Trump re-election that they are highly resistant to granting the story any credibility.

By the way, the emails found on the laptop have now been authenticated by a 3rd party security firm that has been relied upon before by "mainstream" publications like the Washington Post[1]. Not to mention that there is Tony Bobulinski, the CEO of Sinohawk that was founded in partnership with the Biden's, who has publicly stated that not only was Joe Biden aware of his son's foreign business activities, but that he believes Joe Biden was part of the bribery scheme.

[1] https://amp.dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-...

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.

> 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.

Extremely relevant reading: _Purity_, by Jonathan Franzen https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374239215

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.

I can't wait until the election is over.

In the general sense, it's not a new problem.

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.

Obviously it is not the same as it was decades ago. But how can you deny that the "5 pillars" framework presented in the book still holds true today?

I can believe it. There's been a heck of a lot of change, newsrooms have been decimated.

To me, like I said, mostly what I remember taking from it is how it got me thinking about how a journalists dependence on sources, and resource-constraints to be able to get out stories without exceeding available time to report em... leads to over-reliance on reporting what the powerful say as "the news" and by implication "what happened".

I'd suspect that is still relevant to the landscape of today, probably even MORE so because reporting resources have been so devastated, but do you think not?

One of the book's major premises, as the parent mentioned, is journalists' dependence on cultivating sources. Yes, the media landscape has changed drastically - with journalists now have far few resources. If anything, this would make them more dependent on cultivated sources as well as corporate press releases and similar things.

Which is to say your argument is nothing but a vacuous "things are different" claim but the overall situation has to be "things are worse", which reinforces the book.

> 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.

Then where are all the labor and communist newspapers? Seems like nothing much has changed to me.

It's not clear to me whether you've read it and are making this argument knowing the case it makes, or if you just saw that date and dismissed it a priori.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel-Ami

> 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).

This needs to be repeated more often, Chomsky's point is that ad-serving businesses are turning the reader into the product, hardly controversial today considering Google and Facebook are doing the same.

Good journalists and papers are honest about their ideologies, and most editors have written scathing pieces about Trump by now, and the papers reflect these views. It's the ones who aren't honest about their biases you need to worry about.

Yeah, honest journalism and capitalism are hard to combine. In capitalism, companies provide a service that their customers want to pay for. So a paid newspaper publishes news that their readers want to read. Ad-driven news writers what their advertisers want to be associated with. There's little room for reports that are controversial with the readers or advertisers, yet those reports might well be the most important ones.

Well, if they're true. But nobody pays for the truth anymore.

News readers can demand the truth either way (ad-funded, government-funded, corporation-funded, or reader-funded), and they're probably most likely to get it when they pay for it directly. It's the least worst way to get your news I'd say.

I need to take a shower after reading that, to wash off the cynicism

> "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?"

I think the way to report on this is fairly obvious: provide context. Any fact on its own is easily taken out of context and can be spun one way or the other. Context helps. And in the context of an election, dirt on one candidate provided by a close ally of the other candidate, comes with a ton of context. And even if the dirt is true, the context is still: how does that compare to the corruption of the other candidate.

It seems like there's a lot of attention for possible but uncertain corruption by Biden, exactly because it's uncertain; it's a question people want to know the answer to. Meanwhile, there's tons of evidence for corruption by Trump that nobody pays attention to because it's obvious, it's already known, there's no interesting question to speculate about.

But the end result is that the cleanest candidate gets associated with corruption while the dirty candidate doesn't.

Context would mean whenever there's a story on corruption by one candidate, you also report on the comparable cases of corruption by the other candidate. Then readers will always see what the balance of corruption between the two is.

> 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.

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.

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?

It's also possible he's a once great journalist who has gone off the rails. Which seems likely given the fact that the editors at a publication he founded refused to publish this piece.

The big problem for me is he does not set the context for the allegations, that the US is about to go to a critical and fiercely-contested election, last time there were all kinds of manipulations, and the role he s set on playing right in the last few days is analogous to that of Comey v2 and the laptop is "the emails".

Without the context, it's not being given to the reader to judge why this is a story, the real provonance of the maguffin-laptop, if it really has any impact in the Biden vs Trump question or is just noise...

In this context jumping on claims of Russian interference is similarly damaging.

Moreover I feel like this would be a bad precedent. Suppose Biden wins now and Trump runs again in 2024, I personally would not like a similar grace being offered to him (with no evidence of interference).

I think saying he brokenthe stort is a bit of a stretch. Didn’t Snowden himself contact journalists?

Snowden was tightly in contact with these journalists and showed them undoubtable proof that he did indeed work with the NSA. This story as I understand it is not even close to the level of verification that the Snowden story had.

Wait so what's the claim at this point?

The Hunter Biden emails are fake? or that they are real, but Giuliani got them from Russian agents?

Or that they are real, but "the big guy" doesn't refer to Joe Biden?

Or that they are real, but Hunter Biden was just saying shit, and Joe didn't actually do any of these things?

Any but the last claim seems likely false to me, pretty hilarious to see so many on the thread arguing otherwise.

The last one seems plausible. It's pretty clear that Hunter implied that he could influence the US government in an effort to make deals. It's less clear that his claim was true.

Agreed, which is why it’s the only one I labeled as not pretty clearly false.

I think it’s a dumb reason to not vote for Biden, but I find the cognitive dissonance with which this story is being treated sorta astonishing.

There is no claim. It’s all misdirection. All you have to do is cite some known figure supporting the mere possibility of some vague non-claim and it becomes the branch that ideologues desperately cling to. No one is overtly making any of the logical claims you posit above. Not Biden nor his family or campaign. They simply need to use buzzwords like Smear, Russia, and 50 high ranking officials, and that’s all the sheeple, especially those in the SV echo chamber, need to hear.

Why do they seem obviously fake? Why does it seem so reasonable that Hunter Biden would fly across the country to have an Apple laptop (or is it laptops?) repaired at a shop that doesn't specialize in them, that Mr. Biden forgot about the laptops and left them behind (and full of evidence), and that this shop just happened to be good friends with Rudy Giuliani? That this story just happened to break right before the election in the aftermath of a long series of conservative conspiracy theories about Mr. Biden (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-...) in an election where foreign influence has been frequent and obvious?

From what I've read about this story, it has indeed all the evidence of being a complete fabrication, and none of the evidence of being true. We only have Giuliani's honesty to trust that it's true.

The question (that Greenwald is asking) is why is Joe Biden not answering any questions about the whole matter?

At least some of them are definitely at least partially forged, and the DKIM headers for none of them have been released, AFAIK. At least some of the released screenshots of emails are obviously doctored (text that should be level with the text next to it is not).

At this point I would believe many outlets would not have published the Snowden docs because of editorial concerns. Probably because they have friends in Washington.

It's more likely that Greenwalds colleagues are a better judge

It's more likely that the Church is right about heliocentrism being wrong. They do after all, have more people on their side.

In my opinion this is weak reasoning and it only serves to allow people to cement their minority opinions more. Regardless of whether they're correct or not.

Logical fallacy, straw man argument.

Well, unless rat87 clarifies their argument about why it is they think the colleagues are more likely to be correct this is the best we can do.

There's no inherent reason the colleagues are more likely to be correct.

The authoritarian left today is not about facts or reality or science. it is about "My Personal Truth", majoritarianism, and tribal dogma

This is the culture / ideology that has taken over a large part of the "news" industry

It is very much regressive and has all the same kind of tribal dogma that fueled rhetoric that aligns nicely with those dark times where scientists where executed for daring to refute the dogma of the majority

While we are not physically executing people today, cancel culture is emotionally, socially, and virtually executing anyone that dares to disagree with their tribe

Oh yes, your character judged by your peers, a la Cultural Revolution. Wonderful.

Sure would be terrible if judging professionals by the opinions of their peers was how we determined the legitimacy of their claims.

Down with peer-reviewed journals! We should just take scientists on their word that they're operating professionally!

Thanks for teaching me that a paper rejected implies a rejection of your character as OP implied.The more you learn.

There's a big reproducibility crisis in science as a result of this "you pat my back, I'll pat your back" mentality. Peer review is not immune to groupthink.

Even worse than that, there's straight up research fraud from labs at big universities. Fraud that slips through peer review and then the journals and reviewers get out the pitchforks when it's pointed out.

https://forbetterscience.com/

Peer review is not about judging a person / scientists charter, political opinions, or anything about them as a person.

Well at least that is not what is SUPPOSE to do.

Peer review is about reviewing the science, not the charter of the scientists.

science has a real problem today because it is becoming less about the raw science and more about who is doing the science and if they have the "correct" political or other opinions

Experiments can be reproduced as opposed to sources. Mutual references to each other did cause a lot of problems in science.

Kinda like the editor(s), who are doing the job of an editor.

The namesake of the Pulitzer prize, Joseph Pulitzer, was one of the foremost proponents of yellow journalism. Rudy Giuliani, an American hero for a couple of years after 9/11, is now a foreign asset for all intents and purposes. Having prestige doesn't make you infallible, it just means you were in the right place at the right time.

The DNI has already stated that there is no evidence that Hunter Biden's laptop is "Russian disinformation".

partisanship makes people stupid.

Please show me the evidence of Russian influence. There has been plenty of evidence that the contents of the laptop are authentic.

Even if they're not authentic, it could just be a regular old lie. You know, lies? Like happen all the time in politics?

Why does everything have to be a Russian conspiracy. There was a front page article on HN the other day with people taking a Russian Death Ray seriously. Taking it seriously! Come on, people.

The timing if the this all coming out is super suspicious, but the "it's the Russians!" thing just made me groan. If Democrats had simply said it was a lie I would have found that much more believable.

But they can’t, because they know this is not a lie. It is actually quite possible that Russians have something to do with this — I say it as a Russian; they did nearly the same thing with DNC leaks in 2016. But the issue is not “who did it”, the question is whether the materials are authentic or not. DNC leaks were authentic, and that was enough for Americans to tip the election outcome in 2016. Hunter Biden materials look authentic, too.

I genuinely would like to understand the position of someone like you to whom this material looks authentic.

How do you rationalize this series of events piling on top of each other? https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/jkjeib/how_a_fake...

What about the material looks authentic to you?

When you are in a two party system you'd be surprised what your mind will do to either believe or deny as long as your team wins. You don't care if they cheat or lie as long as they win. You might know they are cheating or lying but you'll still deny it to the other team's fans because you see how much it gets under their skin, and afterall it's a sport because their are only two teams.

I always compare talking to a Trump supporter about his crimes to talking to a Pats fan about Bill Belichick or Brady getting caught cheating red-handed. Not only do they not care, they are confused as to why they should care. It's their team, nothing would convince a Pats fans to start rooting for the Giants.

I'm afraid that's where our politics are at.

You’re getting played by NBC. Their story is totally separate from the Hunter Biden laptop / Bobulinski testimony. They deliberately mention the other story in an attempt to discredit it by association.

To date, the only on the public record (in an interview, not testimony) statements are in favor of the allegations and evidence being true. The Biden’s have not public denied any of it. They, with the assistance of the media, simple delay and deflect.

> the Hunter Biden laptop / Bobulinski testimony.

The WSJ, while their own op-ed page was trying to make the story real, thoroughly broke down and discredited all aspects of this story. There is no tie to Joe Biden at all.

Why are you claiming otherwise with a straight face?

If this [1] is the WSJ report you are talking about, then your statement that it "thoroughly broke down and discredited all aspects of this story" is blatantly false.

All they claimed was that there was no clear evidence in Bobulinski's text messages that Joe Biden was involved (though the "big guy" phrasing refering to Joe was not proved one way or the other).

It does not discredit the emails, nor Bobulinski's own testimony. It's actually just a pretty reasonable and reporting of the information they had available.

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-bidens-ex-business-partn...

> no clear evidence

Just say "no evidence".

> (though the "big guy" phrasing refering to Joe was not proved one way or the other).

Pizzagate all over again. "As long as some words mean other words than we have a full blown, fully-proven scandal!"

Again, you aren't fooling anyone that isn't volunteering to be fooled so their worldview can be protected. The definition of a waste of time.

As reported by Greenwald, neither Hunter nor Biden's campaign ever claimed that the emails are fake.

It is quite likely that someone orchestrated this for maximum impact, but for now these emails looks as authentic as any other leak in the last decade.

Right, the DNC's emails weren't fake either. They were stolen by a state and leaked via a third party for political reasons.

That's the game.

Yes, that is journalism.

If the CIA managed to stop that hacking before it happened no journalist would have cried.

If the journalist had participated in the hacking they would be criminally responsible.

And if the journalist obtain proof of relevant stories (especially related to corruption in politics) they will publish them.

There has never been a poisonous tree standard in journalism.

> Yes, that is journalism.

No that's the active measures of a spy agency.

Just to agree on our respective positions, my understanding is that you are claiming that the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine should apply to journalism and news.

I would argue that this has very easily exploited consequences: if you want something to be ignore just hire some hacker to surgically hack parts of that information. Not enough to be criminal, and you are safe from the court of public opinion.

Wikileaks actively agreed to launder and selectively release Russian military hacked materials for specific political purposes.

Referring to that as journalism is an insult to actual journalists.

I think that it is quite likely that the laptop was planted, the whole acquisition story is fake, and this is an orchestrated campaign optimized for maximum impact. I am not an idiot.

However, the contents of the laptop (emails and pictures — at least some of them) were corroborated by multiple sources. Their timings agree with the events of Ukraine affair, which led to Trump’s impeachment proceedings. I can’t say anything about the laptop; perhaps it was planted by the Russian intelligence or Trump campaign spinners. However, its contents looks real to me.

You do realize that the mechanism you use to 'wash' disinformation is to mix it in with other legitimate (hacked) data, right? If the party you are attacking denies the validity you have a few real bits of data you can point to and use to call the other party a liar. If the party you are attacking tries to explain the nuance that there is some true and some false data in there then you use that against them to try to claim it is all true or that they are admitting that your specific bits of disinformation are true, by the time people hear the full statement it is already too late.

Seriously, it has been over four years since Clinton and the Podesta emails. How can anyone still be this naive?

Naive is buying into a jingoist narrative about how everything bad in our own country is because of the scary Russians and Chinese.

We've got billion-dollar Presidential campaigns and 100M-dollar senate campaigns, but an office floor full of internet trolls are the ones swinging the balance of power in our country? Who's naive? Take some responsibility -- if we suck, that's on us.

They are not swinging the balance of power, and at this point most of the trolls and disinformation artists are in the US working for conservative think-tanks and Republican campaigns. In case you hadn't noticed this big fat nothingburger is going nowhere. Like a lot of other new stories of late is mostly serves to separate the desperate and gullible from the rest of us.

I'm a reluctant Biden voter, but you're saying Hunter getting 600k for a bullshit job is totally above board?

If I think that's fishy, I'm desperate and gullible?

It's going nowhere, agreed, most blatant corruption goes nowhere. But I don't have to like it or defend it.

Yes, this is totally possible. And to counter the entire issue, Biden should have said something along the lines of “I don’t know this laptop; it contains some personal photos of mine, which were probably stolen by hackers, but these “emails” are fake, and neither me nor my family members have nothing to do with that”. Attempting to silence this on social media will backfire.

The stuff that has been corroborated by others (like Tony Bobulinksi) is already quite suspect, and includes implications that Biden knew about, and was even a part of, a bribery scheme with foreign governments.

It now sounds like the emails have been digitally authenticated by an outside firm: https://amp.dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-.... That is, they confirmed that contents of the emails match is contained in Gmail's servers.

And what evidence is there that the DNC emails were in anyway inauthentic?

No the stuff that has been corroborated did not suggest any sort of bribery scheme with foreign governments, but nice try. The only few that have been authenticated do not indicate that they have been read or even went anywhere but a spam folder. Those precious few are also the least incriminating of the bunch. For some reason you and your ilk cannot seem to provide these same DKIM headers for the entire batch of email. Why is that I wonder?

> How can anyone still be this naive?

Protecting their worldview depends on it.

It's undisputed that Hunter was getting 600k from a ukrainian national gas company and that Joe Biden demanded a prosecutor be fired. That's the real story, and it stinks.

The computer repair shop thing is laughable, but that doesn't mean the obvious conclusion is dastardly russians did it.. Hunter doesn't look like a model in operational security, any number of motivated people could have hacked him. Or maybe it was entirely made up to get the underlying scandal back in the news.

> It's undisputed that Hunter was getting 600k from a ukrainian national gas company

It's unsubstantiated, at best:

"However, the Daily Caller News Foundation could not confirm the accuracy of this figure, as there is no evidence the payments from Rosemont Seneca Bohai to Hunter Biden are necessarily for his work with Burisma."

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/10/17/fact-check-hunter-biden...

Why repeat something with full confidence when you have no idea if it's actually true or not (because no one does) ?

I'm sure he was only making minimum wage. /s

Glad you are having fun backing up other people that are wrong too.

They've been authenticated by a forensic analyst that has been used by "mainstream" media before: https://amp.dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-...

The 64 page article NBC is talking about here is unrelated.

To be clear, giuliani has refused to give the contents to anyone in the press. The Daily Caller (an extension of the Trump campaign) isn't to be trusted. No rational person would expect this to prove anything.

Also, Hunter's emails and photos were circulated in Ukraine last year to the highest bidder.

https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/

Someone finally paid for them and this is the way they are being laundered.

And no one is buying it.

> To be clear, giuliani has refused to give the contents to anyone in the press.

I can't speak for Giuliani, and I agree that his involvement in this is strange, but NYP, Daily Caller, and National Pulse have all offered to share the contents of the drive with other journalists. I don't know to what extent they have been taken up on it.

> The Daily Caller (an extension of the Trump campaign) isn't to be trusted. No rational person would expect this to prove anything.

To assume that the news agencies that ran with the Steele dossier or the "Fine People" hoax have some fundamentally higher standard of journalistic standards than smaller right-wing publications is a bit rich. But I fully realize you wouldn't trust them directly. The point is that it's not just the reputation of these outlets now, but people without a partisan axe to grind like Robert Graham[1] and Tony Bobulinski who are providing evidence for the authenticity of the emails recovered.

> Also, Hunter's emails and photos were circulated in Ukraine last year to the highest bidder.

Irrelevant. All evidence so far points to the laptop (which is genuinely Hunter Biden's) being the source of these emails. The DOJ has already acknowledged that it received (what I believe is the original) laptop drive, and they have been pursuing an active criminal investigation against Hunter since last year. The DOJ, State Department, and DNI all have said there is no evidence of foreign involvement, and even a Washington Post journalist has acknowledged that this likely isn't the result of foreign interference.

> And no one is buying it.

Wishful thinking.

[1]https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

> I can't speak for Giuliani, and I agree that his involvement in this is strange, but NYP, Daily Caller, and National Pulse have all offered to share the contents of the drive with other journalists. I don't know to what extent they have been taken up on it.

They are offering to share the cherry-picked communications meant to smear someone, are you actually surprised real journalists aren't taking the bait? If you actually care, ask yourself why Giuliani hasn't shared the entire drive with anyone besides far-right media dedicated to helping Trump get reelected.

> To assume that

1. Nothing from the dossier has been disproven. Many things have been corroborated.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/steele-dossier-retrospective

2. Buzzfeed isn't the NYT. You confuse the two, I dont know why.

> Irrelevant

Lol. The origins of the data was a hack of Hunter Biden's iCloud (photos) and a GRU hack of Burisma (emails), the laptop cover story is laughable, and the best you can muster is "Irrelevant".

What a joke.

> 1. Nothing from the dossier has been disproven. Many things have been corroborated.

Yes, Russia engaged in a hacking operation, and seemed to favor Trump over Hillary. That's hardly sensational. None of the sensational claims alleging conspiracy or blackmail have been supported despite years of investigation, and at least one claim was ruled innacurate/misleading in court[1]. One of the main sources was also identified as a potential national security risk [2]

> 2. Buzzfeed isn't the NYT. You confuse the two, I don't know why.

All mainstream news outlets, including the NYT, considered the dossier worth reporting even without verification. Let's not forget that this fundamentally started as a political opposition research document.

That the "lack of verification" with regard to Hunter's laptop would somehow be a justification for not reporting on it at all is a completely hypocritical stance, especially as additional news has come up (Hunter Biden former business partner Devin Archer agreeing to work with FBI, Tony Bobulinski working with the FBI, the verification of at least one email by a 3rd party security firm, etc.).

> Lol. The origins of the data was a hack of Hunter Biden's iCloud (photos) and a GRU hack of Burisma (emails), the laptop cover story is laughable, and the best you can muster is "Irrelevant".

I explained why it was irrelevant. If you have evidence that links that hack to the laptop hard drive contents, then I suggest you share them with the FBI. Otherwise, your reading comprehension needs some serious improvement.

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-08/billionai... [2]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-news-media-s-ste...

> and at least one claim was ruled innacurate/misleading in court

As said, not disproven.

> One of the main sources was also identified as a potential national security risk

The self-id'd source (Steele never confirmed) of mafia and spy secrets has a shady past. I'm shocked.

> considered the dossier worth reporting even without verification

The author was/is known as the single best source of Russian intelligence ops in the western world (the ex-head of MI6 in Russia). It was a raw intel doc never meant to be 100% accurate, but according to him "at least 90%".

> Let's not forget that this fundamentally started as a political opposition research document.

Yes, by Republicans terrified of a compromised criminal taking over their party.

> If you have evidence that links that hack to the laptop hard drive contents, then I suggest you share them with the FBI. Otherwise, your reading comprehension needs some serious improvement.

I can only assume you are trolling now. There is 0 evidence any of the leaked emails are from a laptop. It was reported a year ago that Burisma's emails were hacked and in circulation. The mental gymnastics you need to perform to not only think they aren't the same set of emails, but this paper-thin laughable cover story about a laptop in Delaware from a blind-shopkeep with 0 independent verification is just stunning to me.

The only answer is that you are smart enough to know this is all ridiculous, but are holding on to it anyways. Dissonance is a hell of a drug.

>> > and at least one claim was ruled innacurate/misleading in court

> As said, not disproven.

Those are some impressive gymnastics. Allow me to quote the NYT from this year:

"The Steele dossier was deeply flawed. For example, it included a claim that Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael D. Cohen had met with a Russian intelligence officer in Prague to discuss collusion with the campaign. The report by the special counsel who took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, found that Mr. Cohen never traveled to Prague."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenk...

You are making assertions about the dossier that are demonstrably false and defending a document which is now rightly treated cautiously at best by most mainstream media.

But the reason I bring up the dossier now is that, despite it's salacious, unverified claims and (initially) unkown source, mainstream media outlets all felt it was perfectly reasonable to report on it. Yet, when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop (which the FBI publicly stated they have in their possession) suddenly it would be improper to even acknowledge it's existence or the implications of its contents.

> Yes, by Republicans terrified of a compromised criminal taking over their party.

Have you always thought of Republicans as really honest and above board people, or are you only finding "a strange new respect" for them when they do something you approve of?

> There is 0 evidence any of the leaked emails are from a laptop.

Perhaps you are having trouble comprehending. Let me try one more time:

- The FBI admits they have Hunter Biden's laptop in their possession [1]

- Both the FBI and DOJ assert there is no reason to believe this is part of a Russian disinformation campaign [1]

- Hunter's lawyers asked for the laptop back from the repair shop [2]

- Recipients of some of the emails have already confirmed they came from Hunter (see interview with Tony Bobulinski)

- This is not the first time that Hunter has left a laptop somewhere [3]

- No one associated with the Bidens has ever claimed that the laptop/emails did not belong to Hunter [3]

- The Washington Post has acknowledged that this likely isn't a foreign intelligence operation [4]

Certainly there are reasons to be skeptical, and no crime by Joe Biden has been proven yet (though his son will probably go to jail for FARA violations at least). But your position is frankly untenable and strikes me as willful ignorance.

[1] https://twitter.com/SeanLangille/status/1318673941624426497 [2] https://twitter.com/adamhousley/status/1317319606126604288 [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/here-s-what-h... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/24/hunter-bid...

That's because you think a raw intelligence dossier complied by a top professional is the same thing as an ABSURD laptop story created to launder Russian military-hacked emails for political purposes in order to be 2020's equivalent of Wikileaks.

In your mind, it's all politics and you're just standing up for your side's dirty tricks against the other side's dirty tricks.

Except you are wrong. The laptop story is an obvious cover, and the dossier was never meant to be public. It was given to the FBI as a matter of national security (Steele was genuinely worried the US was about to elect a dangerously-compromised criminal) then leaked post-election because the FBI sat on it.

> Let me try one more time:

Not a single point you listed is anything beyond circumstantial evidence. There is "a" laptop. The contents have been been confirmed by anyone at the FBI or by Biden himself. You are relying on wikileaks-esk "drops" from political operatives seeking a Trump re-election. You are being fooled, but you are asking to be fooled.

The story literally originated in pro-Russian Ukrainian circles to fight against anti-corruption efforts there while Biden was VP: https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/

If your kid is getting 600k/yr for a no-show job, you don't get to call your interventions "anti-corruption". Literally being involved at all is a conflict of interest.

Yes accuse Biden of corruption so Trump's corruption just doesn't bite as hard, and be maybe sneaks a few more votes.

This is a cynical game and I'm sick of so many people playing it willingly.

That's not very charitable at all.

Can't one be upset at all corruption? Trump's gets coverage plenty of places, wall-to-wall. Yet any mention of Biden gets dogpiled by comments like yours.

For the record, I'm a Bernie voter and reluctant Biden voter.

Because getting a sweetheart deal b/c your dad was VP and money laundering / theft / bribery are not two sides of the same coin. One sucks but occurs everywhere, the other is illegal.

So who's gonna hold Biden accountable once he's President?

You? The NYT and WaPo? Sure doesn't sound like it.

"Trump commits crimes".

"Yeah but what happens if Biden commits theoretical crimes in the future? What then?"

Great point.

The world isn't zero sum, Trump wasn't a topic here until you brought him up. You're basically doing a "but her emails" here.

Biden's gonna win, most likely, will any pushback against our government be met with "what about Trump" for 4 years?

> Trump wasn't a topic here until you brought him up.

Are you joking? Do you think any of us even know who Hunter Biden is if it's not for the dirty efforts of the Trump campaign to drag him through the mud?

The fact that some of this content may have been available in Ukraine does not me Ukraine was the actual source. All evidence points to a legimately Biden-owned laptop being the source:

- No one in the Biden campaign has denied the laptop belonged to Hunter or the authenticity of the emails

- Hunter's lawyers asked for the laptop back

- The FBI confirmed that it has possession of Hunter Biden's laptop

- FBI and DOJ agree that the laptop and emails were not a part of a Russian disinformation campaign.[1]

[1]https://twitter.com/SeanLangille/status/1318673941624426497

The emails came from a Russian GRU hack last year

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/russian-hacke...

The photos most likely from an iCloud hack. The FBI has not made ANY claims on the content of the laptop they have, nor has the Biden campaign. I don't know where you are getting your (mis)infomation from, but I dont really care either.

There is no evidence to tie that hack to this leak. The Washington Post admits as much[1]. And respectable journalist Adam Housley reported on Hunter Biden's lawyers asking for the laptops back[2].

EDIT: also, I linked to a Fox News reporter talking about the FBI and DOJ admitting they have no reason to think this is a Russian disinformation campaign.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/24/hunter-bid... [2]https://twitter.com/adamhousley/status/1317319606126604288

> There is no evidence to tie that hack to this leak.

Russian Intel hacked Burisma's emails, those same emails are now part of a public smear campaign. THEY ARE THE SAME EMAILS. What you meant to say is "there is no evidence that any of these hacked materials (emails, photos) came from a laptop in Delaware. Because there isn't.

> And respectable journalist Adam Housley

Never heard of him.

> also, I linked to a Fox News reporter

Just stop. This is you cheering on your team like it's Sunday football. And no one that isn't already on your team is buying it.

> Russian Intel hacked Burisma's emails, those same emails are now part of a public smear campaign. THEY ARE THE SAME EMAILS. What you meant to say is "there is no evidence that any of these hacked materials (emails, photos) came from a laptop in Delaware. Because there isn't.

I've already provided you with plenty evidence. Here on a discussion forum you are free to pretend that evidence doesn't exist, but if that's going to be your choice then I see no further point in engaging with you. Needless to say, the Bidens will not be so free to ignore evidence should this ever get to court.

> Just stop. This is you cheering on your team like it's Sunday football. And no one that isn't already on your team is buying it.

Please provide me with evidence that claim regarding FBI and DOJ statements about the laptop were false.

You are the one under the delusion that any source you don't like must be lying. I don't give my full trust to any media source. I've cited from a number of difference sources, not just "right-wing" media. You have provided all of two links, neither of which make the point you were attempting to argue.

> And no one that isn't already on your team is buying it.

Again with the dumb rhetoric. Unless your definition of my "team" is "those who think there is credible evidence of Biden corruption" (which would be a useless tautology) this statement is obviously false. The only reason you could come to that conclusion is if you are in such an information bubble you have no idea what people actually think.

So Russian intelligence hacks Burisma the exact same way they hacked the DNC, leaking emails to smear the democratic candidate in the exact same way, and your response is "there's no direct evidence to tie them together!"

You've provided a theory and evidence that supports a theory ("The FBI has a laptop!"), but proves nothing. This theory helps people continue their delusion that Trump isn't a criminal, or that Hillary or Biden or whomever is somehow worse. You seem to be confused that outside your Fox News cult people don't buy it.

Thank god for that.

I'm sorry that you are stuck in this conspiracy theory. I wish you well. I expect you will not like the election outcome.

Nice projection. You are and for the foreseeable future will be the minority, and after your embrace of an amoral criminal, it's well deserved.

No, there is evidence that there are corroboratable bits scattered throughout. That doesn't in any way corroborate the whole.

Bobulinski has stated that Joe Biden was well aware of his son's business dealings (contrary to Biden's prior public statements) and affirms that "the big guy" refers to Joe Biden when talking about payment from foreign governments. He's handed over to the FBI hundreds of emails, documents, texts, some audio recordings, etc.

Right, as said no evidence.

If personal testimony and access to private emails and documents from a non-partisan actor is not evidence, what is?

But this isn't what GP is saying. No one is claiming that Greenwald is infailable. What I believe GP is pointing out is that someone who has worked on stories of similar caliber, like Greenwald, is likely to be a better judge of whether or not there is a story.

I think that's a fair assessment to make.

GP makes an appeal to authority, so no it's not fair.

Appeals to authority are sometimes legitimate. For example, "well, the judge in the last case like this thought..." is a very reasonable appeal to authority for example.

In this case, appealing to a Pulitzer-winning journalist's ability to judge the credibility and possible scope of a story is reasonable.

I mean, we just had a Nobel Peace Prize winner who perpetrated genocide.

The Pulitzer-winning journalist has quit his publication because he could not provide a fact check on his assertions, a rather basic journalistic standard.

The Pulitzer-winning journalist supported the 2nd Iraq War.

The Pulitzer-winning journalist burned Reality Winner.

>The Pulitzer-winning journalist burned Reality Winner.

Completely and totally factually false. He had nothing to do with that story, it's editing and saw it for the first time when it was published.

>The Pulitzer-winning journalist supported the 2nd Iraq War.

Huh? I don't believe he was a journalist or a writer at all at the time of the Iraq war. You can't commit a failure of journalism when you're not publishing anything, surely. Maybe he supported it silently? Maybe he had a private opinion before following such stories closely as his calling? I dunno, I give up. It's still an utterly garbage claim however you look at it.

>The Pulitzer-winning journalist has quit his publication because he could not provide a fact check on his assertions, a rather basic journalistic standard.

The Pulitzer-winning journalist invited the editors to point out any factual error after they claimed factual errors existed without identifying them and the editors could not do so in any single way. They didn't even attempt it. [1]

Maybe Glenn hadn't yet published the correspondence with the editors so you didn't know your characterisation of who failed in fact checking was garbage. Reality Winner? yeah, The Intercept really didn't speak up about Glenn not being involved in that story in any way at all but if you followed it even a little bit you'd have known that. Maybe you didn't, which is fine, so being this forthright when you didn't, maybe not?

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

Glenn's point is this is just a bit of the usual Democrat sleaze. It's not "Worse than ..." $whatever, it may be a bit weak as a corruption story but it is definitely corruption involving Joe's family, and that isn't nothing and should be reported and Joe questioned. Forthrightly.

The difference comes from whether you think Trump is evil incarnate and all lines must be crossed to defeat him (the common liberal view) or whether you think he's a symptom of the ongoing unending corruption that must be stood up to, reported and condemned whenever it arises. Glenn takes the latter view. He's been explicit that the failure to report the story is a much bigger scandal than Hunter Biden being as bent as a banana, which he obviously is (You get paid that much a month while being a drug addict, for doing nothing ever in your life?) And he was obviously Joe's single biggest liability as a candidate. Yeah there's others, and all of those liablilites appear to be dwarfed by Trumps but Trump didn't lose with all those last time. It's hard to imagine Joe is more corrupt than Trump. Or even in the same ballpark.

So do you report it because it's a story or bury it and pretend it's a russian conspiracy because Trump is worse? Why are the likes of Brennan and Clapper getting involved on one side of that? Once you tell the lies it never stops. Glenn has amazing credibility for being principled including with people who have very different politics to himself. There's quite a few journalists who hate that he never compromised and due to his unusual path to it, never had to, was always his own master at times exactly like this.

I wish he wasn't a socialist but I'll stick up for Glenn anytime, he makes it really easy to do.

Giuliani is a moron but there's no evidence that he's a foreign asset, besides saying things (and lies) that democrats don't like. It's possible, but there's no evidence, and occam's razor says he's just a regular moron.

Think about it: if everything you don't like is the product of the dastardly Russians, what does that make you? A McCarthyist? What kind of liberal is that?

He's such a moron that he's a Useful Idiot.

Sorry but this goes way behind saying things people don't like. For example the numerous, well documented trips to eastern european ex-soviet states to dig up dirt on his political opponents.

Here’s what his own (ex-) colleagues say:

> We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years. It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

Who constitute those being criticized remaining with The Intercept... no bias whatsoever likely coloring those statements. /s

It would have been much better if they responded to the factual claims Greenwald laid out in the article they refused to publish. I read that article, and his argument for why the Biden emails pass at least the plausibility bar sound reasonable.

BTW, the DKIM signature on at least one of the emails has been verified:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

EDIT: OK, rather than downvoting, which isn't going to change my mind, why don't you help address his points? If you change my mind, I'll go try to change other people's minds.

"The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives [the Panama Papers, Wikileaks war logs, Podesta / DNC emails from 2016] that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake."

Add to that that at least one email has had its DKIM signature verified (see the link above).

I hate Trump and think a second term would be an unmitigated disaster for our democracy. Even if the worst of the allegations or insinuations were true I think Biden would be better for our country than Trump. If I were an editor of a newspaper, I'd certainly think twice before publishing something like this, even if I thought they were accurate.

But I would never throw shade on a fellow journalist for writing something like this. And as a voter, if I'm going to choose the lesser of two evils, I want to know just how evil the lesser one is.

Greenwald published the e-mail correspondence with his editors on his Substack. I would argue that the feedback doesn't question the authenticity of the e-mail, but instead, the narrative being pushed that isn't fully supported by the e-mails.

The closest they came to suggesting that the e-mails were not authentic were these two points, addressing Greenwald: "You spend quite a bit of the piece explaining why authentication efforts have been more than sufficient to satisfy any reasonable requirement of verification, but a key reason news organizations have cited for their lack of full confidence in the documents is their inability to access the hard drive; your draft does not mention that. It is hard to report on and authenticate an archive you do not possess."

"And I do think you should treat the origin story of the hard drive – that it came from the Delaware repair store – with a bit more skepticism. It’s true that nothing has emerged yet to significantly undermine it, but it remains a very strange story surrounded by many unanswered questions."

Reading the editor feedback as a whole, I think they were totally fine with Greenwald claiming that the released e-mails are authentic.

The Pulitzer focus on the individual journalist has a lot to answer for sometimes. The amazing stories Greenwald wrote were all edited by an editor that helped refine, focus and potentially correct mistakes.

Would he win a Pulitzer for a piece he wrote entirely by himself? We don’t know. But the emails he released today show him objecting to exactly this process. The editor gave him a number of suggested improvements and clarifications, and he balked.

No. The story is what the evidence supports. He had Snowden and plenty of credible evidence when he broke that story. He claims he had to leave because of intolerable political bias and censorship, The Intercept says it was because he wanted to publish claims that were not supported by the current evidence. If I understand correctly, Greenwald himself doesn't dispute that he doesn't have access to the files in question and therefore can't have substantiated anything in his article beyond what is already publicly known, which is very little.

Greenwald may be a great journalist but that doesn't mean his word is now taken on faith alone.

This to me is the more interesting story. What happened here? I understand that russiagate made many people crazy, both those who believed it and those who vehemently fought against it. I don't however understand how some people became turned into complete contrarians over it like Greenwald seems to have.

Greenwald has always been incredibly critical of the media, and that is his main point both here and with Russiagate.

Greenwald is a lifelong sensationalist. His blog in the old days was extremely colorful and featured a lot of leaps of logic. It won him a fan base that included Ed Snowden. He's really a terrible journalist who just happened to get his hands on a treasure trove. The Guardian was part of the Snowden story as well and they don't publish garbage like the Biden laptop story with any undue credence.

What is your reference for a good journalist? Your criticism sounds baseless to be honest.

Sensationalism because he uncovered evidence of mass surveillance. Who is a better journalist?

I remember reading an article by him about the Mali conflict a few years ago where it was so obvious he didn't know shit about what was happening there and was just using it to say West is Bad. It was rather supportive of the pre-ISIS that had taken over northern Mali and led me to believe his MO as a journalist is to start with his contrarian agenda and then look for ways to turn any event into supporting evidence (with rhetoric more than facts), more so than other journalists

Many on the left operate with "The US is to blame for all the world's problems" as their main worldview. Everything they report on is filtered through this prism.

Greenwald is the de facto leader of this movement.

The NY Times exposed far more than Greenwald did. James Risen went to court to protect his sources in multiple occasions. And Risen works with a team and has the full support of his editors and employer. Greenwald is a journalistic berserker. He swings wildly and occasionally hits a target others can't get to. Really though it is my opinion based on observation.

Lots of people that are good with editors decline in quality when they become stars that are too big to listen to editors.

That's not restricted to journalism, either.

Was he trying to pitch an actual story with new evidence and sources or just an op-ed? I agree with the general idea that having Greenwald resign sucks but I don't really know if there is any real evidence behind the Hunter Biden story beyond what is sort of already obvious.

The Biden story sounds like bs? I was under the impression that their alleged behaviour was the de facto standard in a capitalist system. I’d be surprised if anyone with that kind of power wasn’t leveraging it to secure generational wealth. It’s like athletes and doping. You’d be stupid not to try given the potential rewards.

From what I gather, the circumstances for the “laptop” to be obtained by a legally blind store an improbably large distance away from anywhere hunter Biden would be, is among the first of many red flags that this is a disinformation attempt.

Part of it getting past scrutiny, is playing on the assumption that people will cheat.

I mean sure, but this stupidly? After Trump used taxpayer money to stay at his hotels publicly?

Add in they paid $85 for data recovery on 3 water logged Apple laptops... I’ve paid for data recovery services on drives, it’s a lot more than 85 bucks...

What? $85 for data recovery? That's nuts.

Side note: NBC broke a story broke a few hours ago showing that this was a case of false news.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-...

The NBC story is about a completely separate incident. It has nothing to do with the laptop.

The contents of the laptop are not "fake news." At least one email has had its DKIM signature verified. Multiple people who were copied on the emails have verified their authenticity. The pictures and videos of Hunter Biden on the laptop speak for themselves.

It is entirely possible that the story of how the laptop was acquired is at least partially fake, but there's no actual evidence of that, and some evidence pointing the other way - why would Biden's lawyer ask the computer shop owner for the laptop if he didn't have it, and Biden if Biden thought he didn't have it?

This story is truly shocking to me, not so much for the allegations of corruption, which are neither surprising nor interesting, but for the willful blindness of so many very smart people who are using a lot of brainpower to rationalize it away.

And yet none of the actually damaging or morally questionable emails have available DKIM signatures that can be verified. How funny that is. Almost as if the liars who wish to continue pushing this bit of political disinformation are unable to actually provide the info and are just hoping that people accept their unfounded claims. It worked before with Hillary and the Podesta emails, so I guess these agents thought it would be easy to repeat the same playbook but are so lazy that they could not even do the basic opsec legwork to make the claim hold together.

It is not shocking that there are so many useful idiots around the world (and here) that are willing to keep talking up this obvious disinformation. What is shocking is how lazy they are and how stupid they seem to think the rest of us are.

The “opportunity to meet” email originally cited by the Post has had its DKIm signature verified. You can find the links throughout this thread and through google.

The goalposts keep moving on this story, which has already been verified far beyond most of the scandals reported by the press in recent years.

None of the counternarrative even makes any sense. It’s all fake! Well, here’s a zillion extremely private photos of Hunter Biden. Where did they came from if it’s not his laptop? The emails are fake! Well, here’s some of the correspondents verifying the authenticity of the emails - which is all the verification usually required. Where’s the DKIM signatures! Well, here’s one that was verified. Some of them are fake! Okay. Has anyone ever applied this level of skepticism to any other story that has ever come out?

Why is it even surprising to anyone that this story would be true? Nobody disputes that Hunter Biden was paid enormous sums of money over the years despite his character and qualifications, and it’s all been widely reported. What did anyone think was going on there? How do people think high-level politicians and their families are leaving office so much richer than they came into it? The denials are almost shockingly naive - “we looked at Joe Biden’s financial disclosures and this isn’t there.” Well, gee, what a shocker he didn’t lay out grey area business dealings for the world to see - nobody does. Anyone who knows a drug addict can hear the ring of truth in Hunter’s self-martrying texts about how Joe makes him give him half his income.

How is it rational to conclude that everything contrary to the favored narrative must be disinformation propagated by highly competent operatives of a has-been midrate regional mafia state power with absolutely no evidence? How does that not reek of the disinformation long favored by the US “intelligence community”?

The complaints about the provenance are one thing, but it’s hard to explain why the FBI subpoenaed the laptop from the store owner, or why Biden’s lawyer tried to get it back. And what does it matter if the information is true, anyway?

It is truly amazing the lengths to which people like you will continue to lie and dissemble for the sake of this false narrative. Not surprising really, but just sad.

The emails that have been verified are bush league vague messages that lack even verification that they went anywhere but straight to the spam folder. Where are the responses indicating the messages were read? Where is the DKIM on any of the emails that suggest impropriety? Oh yeah, you don't have any. No one is moving goalposts, we are clearly stating that you haven't made any forward progress at all and are nowhere near scoring any points.

The best part of all of this is that you and all of the other little Trumpkins have wasted so much social capital pimping these dumb conspiracy theories that the rest of us can easily ignore you going forward. As unpleasant as the past four years have been, one minor upside to the experience is that it revealed many of the truly deplorable among us.

I am sorry you feel that way. I am struggling to see how I can bridge this gap.

This is the link verifying the “opportunities” email. It also explains DKIM issues with other emails.

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

I am truly having trouble understanding how this is a conspiracy theory. The alternative seems to require a massive conspiracy involving foreign intelligence agencies planting false information with true information - I mean, you don’t doubt the pictures, right? Moreover, the “false” information is not anything groundbreaking, it’s almost all the same information already reported by mainstream outlets with a few new bits added. And they somehow convinced other correspondents on the emails to come forward and speak lies? publicly. How is this not conspiratorial thinking?

Do you approach Trump stories with the same level of skepticism? For example, how do we know the tax returns are real? Absolutely nobody has confirmed them except anonymous sources speaking to the NYT.

The 'opportunities' email itself means nothing, which is why this whole exercise is laughable. What is being questioned is the rest of the so-called email dump. Emails that actually suggest damaging claims and which would be worth looking into. How strange it is that people like you cannot seem to come up with answers on those. It is so easy do to, just provide the full emails so that we can all continue to see the content and context of the entire conversation.

I could easily send you an email from my gmail account asking if you have managed to get burn all of the films Epstein made of you and those little kids on his island. It too would have a valid DKIM signature. Now show me the follow up from Hunter, or even proof the message was actually seen by him. If an actual hard drive was possessed as claimed then this would be trivial. The fact that it is not available is damning in this case. As has been noted repeatedly in this case an equally likely source of this data is an iCloud hack for some pics and the known hack of Burisma a while back. Mix in some fake messages and then add useful idiots who are willing to believe anything if it supports their cause.

Thankfully this story will return to obscurity along with the partisan hacks trying to push it. It was a lame attempt at an 'October surprise', it was executed poorly, and thankfully this time the means of viral distribution of same was limited while everyone looked into the story and then had a good laugh.

A Pulitzer-winning journalist who grew more and more detached from reality as his worldview was overtaken by hatred for Hillary Clinton.

Greenwald's emphasis here is completely unplaced. It is once again an attempt to make things seem equal. Unsubstantiated stories like this get no news time - and yet the fact that the opposite is undeniably true - Trump's children have not only been actively involved in the administration but have been coordinating deals for Trump's businesses, making millions of dollars, and even receiving international quid pro quo such as Chinese patent approvals - is ignored and treated as nothing. If Trump is anything less than an utter disaster, it's seen as a success. If the democratic nominee (Biden or Clinton before him) does anything less than perfect, it dominates the news cycle for weeks.

Greenwald didn't have to do any work for the Snowden stories, Snowden approached Greenwald. And from my understanding, Snowden didn't approach Greenwald because he was the "best" journalist to break the story. Snowden had an existing relationship with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post who Snowden also leaked to. But Greenwald was willing to put an encrypted key in the leaks to help Snowden prove he was the leaker to foreign governments while seeking asylum, which Gellman wasn't willing to do.

Then Greenwald parlayed having Snowden approach him into becoming a celebrity journalist. So Greenwald is a guy who takes a lot of credit for being in the right place at the right time and someone else handing him a scoop. Exactly the kind of person I wouldn't trust.

no support for those assertions provided. Never heard /anything/ like that before. Color me suspicious, sure. But if you've got the supporting evidence I'll change my tune...

Listen to Barton Gellman on the Longform podcast or read his book.

Not to be crass but I think just throwing a book out doesn't help to give evidence-- I think they are looking for specific examples.

He/she said there isn’t evidence for what I was claiming, I told them where I got the info & where they can find it themselves. Couldn’t be a more straightforward interaction.

False.

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-nsa-le...

Whether you've misremembered it or you are accurately reporting Barton Gellman's claim it appears to be totally and utterly false. That's not super-surprising, it would be everywhere and in every story about Snowden's leak and exile if it were true.

"The Post just barely beat The Guardian in publishing the PRISM story on Thursday by about 20 minutes — "

"Gellman told The Huffington Post last week that he “started to hear some footsteps, so I had to move” on the PRISM story. There’s no question it was a race to publish, and although Gellman said he “would have been happier to have had a day or two” longer on the story, the Post had to move to get that scoop online before The Guardian."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/snowden-an...

Snowden, who was one of Greenwald’s longtime readers, tells me in an e-mail. “Glenn tells the truth no matter the cost, and that matters.”

I'm not here to litigate this, Gellman has one take on it, Greenwald has his own. It's up to you who to listen to.

Yeah, I'll go with Snowden. It's false.

Greenwald released a story that got Lula Da Silva released from prison and seriously damaged the Bolsenaro regime in Brazil.

He has an outstanding reputation all around the world and is trusted by left leaning allies all over the world doing interviews with countless heads of states or opposition leaders.

He also was a reputable journalist even before the Snowden stuff do to work that investigated many of the evils of the Bush administration.

Greenwald’s story did damage Bolsonaro’s reputation, but I don’t think it had much to do with Lula’s release.

I have seen too many journalists gain a reputation for one story, and then ride that reputation into the ground, and while I still have a lot of respect for Greenwald, I feel like that's what I'm watching happen with him right now.

There absolutely is a "there" there.

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-...

Sinclair is a self-admitted Republican media enterprise. The supposed witness is a Trump campaign member who has provided no evident except oral interviews on right-wing media.

Bobulinski is a member of the campaign? I've seen no evidence of that. Btw, he handed over phones with emails and documents to the FBI.

Is this not the guy who went to the presidential debate as a guest of Trump's?

That does not make him a "member of the campaign". The dude is a centrist Democrat. He's pissed because the he was being smeared by association when Adam Schiff and others claimed the laptops contents was part of "Russian disinformation".

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.

UPS confirms that the package was lost: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ups-confirms-mystery-tucker-ca...

UPS has found it again, per the Beast.

This story still sounds bizarre and like a load of BS. I wouldn't put it past a low level employee to confirm something has been found just to keep the suspense for the gullible alive, especially when the documents could have been scanned and encrypted.

Don't be confused. Packages are lost, and found, every day. The real question is about what they claim to be the contents of the package. Which as of today, is still unknown.

At this point, 4 days from the election, you should be especially skeptical of extraordinary claims without proof.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...

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.

There was no concrete evidence of the Russia collusion bullshit and yet that dominated the airwaves for 3 years. The major news networks spent 3 years on a poorly conceived conspiracy theory.

Precisely. The press was willing to run with a story that had little to no supporting evidence and in the end turned out to be false.

Yet the tables are turned here and suddenly they have concerns about disinformation? To the point they won't even allow it to be discussed?

That's what impresses me about Greenwald and Taibbi. They both hate Trump. But they aren't willing to put their journalistic ethics aside because of it.

> That's what impresses me about Greenwald and Taibbi. They both hate Trump. But they aren't willing to put their journalistic ethics aside because of it.

This is exactly why I decided to sub for Greenwald for $5/month on Substack.

This especially applies so soon after Trump tax return story, which where objectively result of hacking (unless Trump himself leaked them) and had zero verification.

They wouldn't break the story. They're news division is covering the fact that a story exists, not the underlying story.

Their talking heads on the other hand...

> Fox news has been covering the hard drive since it was released.

This isn't quite accurate. Rudy Giuliani went to Fox news before it was released, and they declined to take it. After it was released, they of course had no choice but to report it.

Carlson never claimed that the evidence is now lost, just that it was stolen. IIRC he also did not claim that it was definitive evidence.

Plausible motive for the thief could have been risk assessment for the documents.

Sounds like the UPS confirms there was a package and it got lost. https://www.businessinsider.com/ups-says-it-lost-tucker-carl...

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.

and today the package has been found and Tucker is on air saying, "you know what? maybe we should lay off Hunter. After all, he's a troubled man."

What's more likely: that Tucker is full of shit and never had the kind of story he claims he did, or that a network of win-at-any-cost leftists have infiltrated the UPS and were lying in wait to kill this story and any others like in before the election?

The lengths people will go to find a conspiracy when there's a simpler explanation will always baffle me

Like, he was obviously referring to the underage nudes and PornHub account, which don't directly reflect on his father's conduct.

So yeah, there's stuff they're not going to air.

> that a network of win-at-any-cost leftists have infiltrated the UPS

You mean the Teamsters?

What simple explanation exists for the documents being ripped open and an extensive search not managing to find them? Is this a common problem for UPS, do packages randomly get opened during transit with no explanation?

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.

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.

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.

Aformentioned podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rcLsoIKgA

Sounds like they are taking the path that academia took.

By this logic most of NYT senior staff should be close friends with Trump.

> Journalists have essentially become socialites.

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.

> 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.

   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.

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...

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)

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.

[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...

How many corrections did Emma Alberici end up publishing on that one piece?

Nine ackowledged errors of _fact_ in one news artcile containing badly supported opinion. An article of the same quality written about the other major party when in power would have got a very similar response.

https://finance.nine.com.au/business-news/abc-senate-estimat...

"News story: government policies are garbage here's _nine_ errors of fact to support an non-opinion piece."

My opinion is that the government policies are garbage but I'm not pretending that's news, I'm not being paid by the national broadcaster to report news and I probably don't have nine errors of fact here.

There's plenty to look at in unfair media influence this story just wasn't it.

> There's plenty to look at in unfair media influence this story just wasn't it.

I disagree. However, with the rest of what you've said I'd say the truth lies somewhere in between. When pressure is brought to bear, one will find things whether they're there or not, for reasons of appeasement. This is pure opinion of mine, though, and I respect anyone's right to disagree.

from the linked article neither abc nor news ltd:

>An internal ABC review found significant problems with the article, which had been reviewed by ABC business editor Ian Verrender, including describing Etihad, Emirates and Qatar as Australian airlines, describing MYOB as a corporate advisor instead of a software company and not realising CSR had sold its sugar business.

I'm probably more accurate than that having a rant against the government while drunk in the pub. You might feel the same about your reliability yourself... ;-) She done messed up big. Really.

It's not just journalists, it's the entire class of "thoughtleaders" and such in the tri-state area.

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.

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.

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).

I thought Peter Maas email (that Greenwald posted) asking him for edits was very good.

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.

>> Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat

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."

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.

"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.

Sure, but that isn't the central issue here that Greenwald is claiming.

Also Glen talked about why he's so upset with journalists at the moment with Joe Rogan this week - https://youtu.be/vk1rSvnvXoY?t=262

The point of op-ed's is that they differ from the publication's opinion. That's why they're opposite the editorial page, to provide a contrasting viewpoint. They've got their own columnists and the board for that.

The point of op-eds is they reflect a range of views the editors think is interesting, varied or whatever. Op-eds are still a matter of editorial decisions - obviously, papers don't just publish anything by anyone.

Maybe this is breaching the agree Greenwald had with the editor(s). But independent op-eds able to say whatever they want isn't a principle of journalistic integrity. Questions of that sort revolve around whether you lie or misdirect or run paid articles and so-forth. That you refuse to run an op-ed right when your writer really want it published is a wholly different question, one clearly about the paper having indeed evolved to a left-liberal position while Greenwald maintains his conservative/Libertarian principles - ie, the argument is political.

Glenn said he also tried to publish it somewhere else and they forbid him from doing so, even though his contract says he has the right to publish stuff elsewhere if The Intercept doesn't want it.

They said "Our intention in sending the memo was for you to revise the story for publication. [...] It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere."

That's not forbidding him from publishing it, it's expressing regret that he appears to be unwilling to address the editor's comments on his draft.

This is the type of censorship/suppression that led to Donald Trump being POTUS...

Interesting, I didn't know that. But "detrimental to The Intercept" seems a little foreboding. It could be interpreted as them saying he's doing his job wrong if it's published elsewhere, and if he does his job wrong, he might assume there would be consequences.

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.

Am I reading that wrong or was it a DIFFERENT document, not the "evidence" on the laptop, that is attributed to an AI-generated persona?

Both the Aspen/Typhoon document and the laptop hoax documents involve Hunter and China, but are they connected in any other way?

There's literally a hunter biden crack sex tape on something called gtv and Tony bobulinski supposedly a Democrat who was hunters business partner in some of his high dollar china assignments. So sure, the Q bullshit is fake but there's actual stories that are basically ignored by everyone but Fox news and Glenn Greenwald that actually have meat.

I'm curious, which parts of the story can be easily refuted?

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.

> 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.

That's an incredibly low bar for praise.

Only if you choose to be blind to the relationship between most "journalism" outlets, their owners, and the types of stories they publish.

If you don't think Bezos influences what WaPo writes, or that Murdoch influences what Fox writes, indirectly or directly, you're not looking hard enough.

> If you don't think Bezos influences what WaPo writes

For example, "Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours": https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

Unfortunately for investigative journalism the bar is low.

It's like being the trash-man or cleaning the sewers of the information pipes. No one wants to do it. And of the few that do it have most interests and publish lies or predigested material spoon fed to them by their boss.

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?

No, my argument is that he had the choice to override his editors, and that his choice to instead resign instead of corrupting the editorial process is noble.

Ironically, he co-founded TheIntercept by fear of being censored by editors in big media. TheIntercept sells Greenwald’s reputation to fund the editors who are politely censoring him. His resignation speaks volume of his integrity.

> 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.

> He ought to (and I imagine, he does) have seniority on any editor.

> His submissions aren't treated specially. It's not his mouthpiece.

These two statements are contradictory.

No, they are not.

I am saying that while he is in a superior position at an organizational level, and thus has the authority to seize any responsibility he would like, he is noble for respecting the responsibilities he has delegated to his editors and not doing so.

> he is noble for respecting the responsibilities he has delegated to his editors and not doing so.

He quit rather than allow them to perform those responsibilities. That's not respect.

He quit rather then override them. That is respect.

It could be respect, or it could just be the realization that he could not take such actions without them coming to light, and that would likely be the death of his reputation as a serious journalists.

I think they got it right when they set up the intercept. A journalist without an editor is hard to distinguish from a blogger. Part of the editors job is to say no. Sometimes, "not yet, this isn't ready". Sometimes "no, this isn't good enough". I suppose sometimes also "no, we aren't that publication" which is more problematic.

You can never really be your own editor.

Or it could be respect. Are you going through life assuming the worst of everybody? Or this is only for a subset of Americans?

If someone quits their job in a huff because they don’t like what their boss told them, it’s not because they respect their boss. I don’t know why you think that’s a thing, but it isn’t.

Believe me, this happens all the time. You dont want to know what the non-respectful options are.

The respectful option is just doing your job, not posting internet diatribes.

You are confusing respectful with servile

You're confusing servile with having an ounce of professionalism.

It could be, as I said.

This is definitely true, but why is this post removed from the front page? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934192

Edit: I'm a moron and it just dropped a bunch suddenly. Was not removed.

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.

So two thoughts here.

Are they artificially inflated and then deflated to counter act “bot” behavior?

are they organically inflated and then censored?

I just wish I could be a fly on the wall and know. I just can’t believe this would be a damning enough piece to artificially inflate unless there’s a serious game of reverse psychology going on behind the scenes

I'd bet on bot-busting or possibly something that de-ranks stuff with political keywords close to the election to avoid spam and noise. Human moderation and content curation is a lot rarer than people think online. Primarily because it takes a lot of labor and and response times tend to be slow compared to how fast things go viral.

Betsy Reed's statement:

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

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.

Greenwald's version is basically attacking all his co-workers as democratic partisans and contains no actual evidence, so I'm not sure what line you're drawing here

My impression was the opposite. Greenwald went around slinging wild accusations of censorship and bias, and the Intercept's response was fairly measured in comparison. They even included an acknowledgement of respect for his work.

How is it not censorship if I can't read Glenn's article right now because The Intercept refused to let him publish it?

Because they never said that and you can read it on his blog right now...

Aha, it was just "will be published" when I read this. Thank goodness for the WWW, since when this happens to TV reporters they can't turn around and host their own TV station.

Their statement on Greenwald publishing elsewhere was:

"It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere."

To me this is clearly saying: "that would suck but we can't stop you". Otherwise they would have told him not to publish it instead of just describing the ramifications of him doing it.

To me it's clearly saying "that would make us look bad because it's a reasonable story". And here we are.

Or perhaps “That would make us look bad because our founder is credulously slinging bullshit Russian disinformation without making any journalistic effort to validate the story, calling into question the credibility of past work we have published”

A reasonable story would not make them look bad. An unreasonable one would.

Make them look bad for censoring a reasonable story.

Glenn Greenwald was able to post his article to substack in its unedited form and link it to his 1.5 million Twitter followers earlier today. From what I can tell, there was a disagreement about what The Intercept thought was appropriate for their platform and what he felt should be published under that banner.

I'm not really interested in litigating who has the "correct" opinion or version of events, but I'm skeptical that the editors' stance of "If you'd like to publish this as is, we'd prefer that you use your other enormous and wide-reaching platform(s) rather than the one tied to our professional reputations" counts as true censorship. Millions of people read his story today.

After he resigned!

Glenn Greenwald was able to post his article to substack in its unedited form and link it to his 1.5 million Twitter followers earlier today.

Way to weasel out of that question.

"Glenn was censored from publishing in his own publication!"

"No he wasn't he tweeted it later."

That's a non-answer.

What question?

Edit: >"Glenn was censored from publishing in his own publication!"

This is neither a question or a quote from what I said.

Comment asked "how is it not censorship?" and you replied "he could post it to Twitter".

why would any sane publication publish an unverified story that just before an election attacks the only candidate that isn't trying to dismantle democracy?

A lot of the commentators don't WANT sane publications. For this exact reason. They like that candidate and would rather burn sane journalism down then see him lose.

Please don't try to speak for what I or other commenters "want". That's incredibly rude of you.

People that support political propaganda don't get a right to be offended by fact-checking in credible journalism. People that support fascist leaders don't get to complain about "censorship." Not now, not ever.

Huh. I saw Glenn's response as pretty measured, except for the follow up after his first email where he gets a bit heated.

I thought his point by point rebuttal was pretty effective - he basically said "if you think my allegations aren't tempered enough, then suggest how to temper them further, don't just remove them entirely".

Again, it's the two-faced approach the media is taking. Rumor about Trump gets front page coverage, then someone asks about sources and you realize there are none. Try the same with Biden and you get "there is no story here. all disinformation".

Why two standards for two different leaders?

I'd suggest reading the e-mail thread regarding the article:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

The editor in no way seems compromised to me. There's a lot of very clear, straightforward and polite feedback. I suspect what we're seeing in the statement is a great deal of frustration, which is perhaps not surprising.

Just because it's clear, straightforward, and polite doesn't mean that it is right or we should uncritically accept it.

As an example, I've read many "clear, straightforward, and polite" illegal eviction letters sent by landlords in the past few months.

Rather than deal with hypotheticals, why don't we talk about the actual e-mails in question?

If anything, Greenwald comes off as compromised by his own political biases. The editor says fairly gently that there are concerns with poorly-supported claims and omitting key information -- such as the media reporting on corruption claims and the fact that media outlets have not been given access to the supposed hard drive of emails. This results in a meandering and potentially misleading article that leads readers to conclusions it does not actually support.

They suggest a way to focus it more on core points which are well-substantiated and get a solid article out of it. They're not censoring his political views, if anything they're encouraging him to express them in an article indicting liberal media for going soft on Biden. They're trying to get a shorter, more tightly-focused article for publication. Which is to say, a more solid article.

That sounds like an editor doing their job -- editing is supposed to be the art of removing words, after all!

Greenwald sends first a polite reply, then a much less polite one that jumps to this vitriolic claim:

> I want to note clearly, because I think it's so important for obvious reasons, that this is the first time in fifteen years of my writing about politics that I've been censored -- i.e., told by others that I can't publish what I believe or think

Followed by insinuations that they're suppressing the story due to their political biases. It sounds like Greenwald can't accept that there may be legitimate explanations for why the content isn't focused or solid enough.

That's downright nasty and unprofessional.

> editing is supposed to be the art of removing words, after all!

By whose definition? I always viewed the reporter–editor relationship as a continuous bi-directional thing, e.g. suggesting different angles or stylistic changes. A person who takes an author's words in a one-way direction and decides which ones I'm not allowed to see is more accurately called a "censor".

You clearly know how easy it is to take someone's words out of context and twist them into something they aren't. A good editor brings clarity and brevity.

The editor was telling Greenwald to focus on the story he could prove and tell effectively. That's not "censorship", that's good writing advice. He wanted to propagate flimsy partisan conspiracies instead.

If he wants to do that in his own name, that's fine. But he is not entitled to put the Intercept's reputation behind it.

The editor was trying to stop Greenwald to publish a story that puts in bad light the candidate preferred by mainstream media. All the rest, in those emails and here is mental masturbation, which serves to prove that even smart people decide first and find the justification later. There is nothing noble or ethical about it. This is a campaign play.

Honestly looks like he was looking for a reason to leave and created his own excuse.

From his explanation:

> these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

From the emails:

> It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere.

Where's the demand? It sounds like the EIC can't even express her own opinion to Glenn

In his response, he implies that “detrimental” is a term that would carry some legal weight if they were to sue him for publishing it himself, so it’s essentially a veiled threat. If she were to actually write “I demand that you not publish this”, knowing that he might publish their email convo, it would guarantee that her words prove his point about the censorship.

This is by far the most interesting piece of info to me. Greenwald seems off his rocker and I'm shocked that he is the one publishing this thinking it backs up his case. What censorship? Not once did they say this couldn't be published elsewhere.

> I have to add that your comments about The Intercept and your colleagues are offensive and unacceptable.

That's putting it gently.

A friend of mine works at the Intercept and has said that Glenn has been going off the rails for the past half a year and has alienated the entire staff at the Intercept, not just this specific editor. Apparently he's been planning to leave for a while, and from my friend's POV, this is Glenn's way of making himself the martyr and getting good publicity for himself and his patreon.

It seems evident that the relationship has been incredibly tense in their emails over the story. It goes from "here's some suggested edits" to "you clearly don't want to work here"/"I'm quitting" in what feels like seconds.

Well. If so, they made it easy for him. TheIntercept is over. People seem to forget who Greenwald is and why he co-founded TheIntercept. He has more credibility than all these editors combined. Good luck for them.

I might start reading the intercept again now that greenwald has departed.

greenwald had a lot of credibility for sure, and I have given him the benefit of the doubt several times, but he just eroding that credibility. I would say that there isn't much of it left now...

Yeah because he was left with no other choice, the total fuck up of the Reality Winner story massively hurt his reputation with intellegence community whistleblowers.

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.

> There we go.

Why did you not believe the first side you heard but you believed the second? Or is your conclusion making sense of both?

My conclusion is making sense of both of these.

Why didn't I believe Greenwald initially? Well, I have had the dubious pleasure of seeing many people behave badly and then play the morally-outraged victim to try to legitimize it. There's a particular way they write and talk, and Greenwald's description of events reeked of it.

The Intercept's response made a few jabs but it didn't level any particular wild accusations, unlike Greenwald. It seemed much more credible, although clearly frustrated. I assume (reading between the lines) there he developed a prior history of conflicts and bad blood at the Intercept, and political differences. This kind of blow-up does not just come from nowhere.

Greenwald has since released the emails, and they sound much closer to what the Intercept said than what he did: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

The editors clearly had substantive journalistic concerns about the extent Greenwald was drawing conclusions from dubious evidence, and the lack of context around it. They're comfortable publishing the parts of the story he can substantiate, but not the parts that are weaker (or less on-topic). There have some political disagreements, but that's hardly censorship.

Betsy Reed making personal attacks and calling him a child making a tantrum doesn't really lend credit to her opinion.

If anything she's defending her staff from baseless attacks of a disgruntled former coworker.

I don’t believe you have read even Greenwald’s side. If you read, you will understand his opinion even if you disagree with it.

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.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-... This is why the Intercept didn't want to run Glenn's story.

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 is "the issue" he's referencing?

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, 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.

Yeah I see where you are going and I think Biden is a "clean" candidate corruptionwise, at least as much if not cleaner than Hillary was. That being said I have no doubt he is an accomplice for the US backing corrupt politicians in the Ukraine or other countries.

Also I think accusing Russia of running a disinformation campaign to try to cast doubt on the emails form Hunter is cheap and dangerous, it makes his base more angry for no reason.

Just posting a link to the story since I didnt see it elsewhere in this thread: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

> Did you read his story? It's good, it's serious

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.

This is exactly right. Greenwald has distanced himself from the Democratic establishment for years and basically given Trump a free pass to instead lead bizarre crusades against perceived Democrat hypocrisy.

This stuff from him today is just playing on hype. Having read the draft article he put on Substack, there is simply nothing in it. There is no evidence anywhere suggesting the Biden emails merit this reaction, let alone merit any sort of investigation.

At this point the emails/texts have been authenticated by many people who were actually on the email chains, and people who were direct recipients of the text messages.

We are about a week past the point where people were falsely claiming this was disinformation, and several days past the point of any credible claim that the emails are not authentic.

We are actually, as of tonight, at the point where anonymous Justice Department sources are alleging that the Biden’s have been and continue to be under investigation for money laundering since 2019.

> At this point the emails/texts have been authenticated by many people who were actually on the email chains, and people who were direct recipients of the text messages.

This is like saying that one spy has caught another spy red-handed because the first spy has a letter that says "I done it."

There is nothing that links the computer to Biden, beyond the fact that it contains some emails (which were known to have been stolen), and other emails which appear to have been doctored. The doctored emails are the ones alleging malfeasance. To accept that Biden owns the computer is to accept that he flew all the way across the country to hand deliver his laptop to a blind technician who miraculously recognized him.

> We are actually, as of tonight, at the point where anonymous Justice Department sources are alleging that the Biden’s have been and continues to be under investigation for money laundering since 2019.

Yes, anonymous sources. The funny thing about these anonymous sources is that, you see, they're anonymous. Which means they could be anyone and, let's face it, they probably are anyone, even an anyone unrelated to the Justice Department.

> We are about a week past the point where people were falsely claiming this was disinformation, and several days past the point of any credible claim that the emails are not authentic.

No one outside of the alt-right media is claiming any authenticity for this "scandal". Even Fox News is like "Nah-uh. Nope. This is fishy as hell, and I once ate a whole fish stinking and raw!"

10s of thousands of emails, text messages, photos, and videos. Tens of thousands. To claim “there is nothing that links the computer to Biden” is disinformation.

DKIM validated by the way:

https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

In fact there is a massive amount of data which substantiates that it is Hunter Biden’s laptop, including extremely personal pictures and videos. We could say that it is either Hunter Biden’s actual laptop, or perhaps it is merely a clone of his laptop, down to the stickers on it (a “conspiracy theory”).

People on the email chain confirming that they did in fact receive those emails is evidence that the emails are genuine.

There is no evidence that I know of indicating any of the emails being doctored. If you want to make that claim, please cite a source.

John Paul Mac Isaac is a 44-year old Wilmington owner of “The Mac Shop”, located near a Biden family home. He was an Apple Genius from 2004-2010. There is no one disputing he works at the shop he owns, and while I have read some people claiming he is “legally blind” — what he actually said in the interview was that he has an eye condition, not that he was legally blind, and in any case that doesn’t mean he can’t see with corrective lenses. And he said he could not conclusively recognize Hunter Biden but that the sticker on the laptop and then ultimately it’s contents (e.g. thousands of sync’d iMessages) identified Biden as it’s owner.

As to the FBI investigation, for years the anonymous claims of Justice Department officials have graced the front pages of every national newspaper with stories damaging to Trump. So I agree it’s important to qualify the statement with “anonymous” and “allegedly” while also certainly being newsworthy, and would otherwise obviously make the front page if it concerned Trump or Trump’s family.

I think your last paragraph gives up your position. The bigger story even than all the alleged corruption in the Biden family is how the media has circled the wagons on this and lied about it being somehow linked to Russia, a claim made entirely without a shred of evidence. This latest attack against Greenwald is just more of the same. The story has nothing to do with alt-right anything, it is widely reported on Fox News, has a surprising large amount of documentary evidence for this type of exposé and now has on the record sources directly substantiating the key findings with their own testimony as well as their own emails, text messages, and even recordings.

It’s time to pack up the disinformation campaign against this story and go home.

I don't care were the emails came from. If a Russian agent with a secret invisibility cloak powered off the freedom of the countries they invade sneaked into Hunter's room at night, killed his dog, and stole his laptop, I don't care.

Maybe the repairman story is parallel construction maybe it's not, but I think the emails are real and Biden's Campaign response is a pathetic attempt at pointing to a scarecrow. It's as bad as Chinavirus in my hierarchy of sins, it's fuel for America's systemic racism and exceptionalism which are the energy that fuels the reactor that will make this country blow up.

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.

If the best you can do is call him names, just don't weigh in.

The article may be a form of a rant, but it is meant as a opinion, and an articulate and specific opinion at that. Everything he says is either very believable, obvious, or verifiable. You may not like what he is preaching, but give examples of what is incorrect, and why, or just go home.

Generally, labeling ("screed from an unhinged man"), hyperbole ("as much as I could get through"), unjustified claims ("pushing the boundaries more and more") and projections ("it's not surprising") are all great in debate class, and do wonders in a courtroom (unfortunately), but they are not content, they are tools of persuasion.

>The article may be a form of a rant, but it is meant as a opinion

That's the whole problem. Greenwald doesn't call himself a columnist, he calls himself a journalist. The Intercept doesn't publish his articles as opinion pieces, they publish them as news. You can't publish that article as a news piece with any sort of credibility.

> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-... This is why the Intercept didn't want to run Glenn's story.

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...

The earlier poster meant that the laptop story is b.s. and the intercept didn’t want any part of it.

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...

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.

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.

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?

> * provably false dump*

Not a single line of the NBC article seems to be refuting a single fact from the 64-page document. They do try very hard though to smear the anonymous publisher for trying to be anonymous, and imply without any evidence that somehow this document is tied to Hunter’s email story.

> Emails are a remarkably verifiable thing, and ones these just aren't.

Rob Graham just verified the DKIM headers of the “smoking gun” email included in the original Post article:

https://twitter.com/erratarob/status/1322007153415200768?s=2...

Thanks for sharing, I’ve been eager to see what the raw headers revealed. That’s pretty ninja to dig up the 2015 Gmail DNS records. DKIM spoofing is a thing, but its not all that likely. Its hard to know what actually happened given the chain of custody of the laptop. https://noxxi.de/research/breaking-dkim-on-purpose-and-by-ch...

I think we should be more careful about deflecting criticism of official with foreign or now domestic influences. Even if the material is authentic, it doesn't mean it has to hurt Biden. But the conspiracies from official sources get out of hand. NBCNews was careful here, but it is transparent that they didn't want to neutrally inform people.

These are real bad journalists compared to Greenwald.

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.

Oh I agree 100%. My mind has been completely hijacked for the past week as the election comes to a crescendo. My priority when consuming information is to get some idea of the known and unknown truths. Unfortunately, the current climate makes this difficult to ascertain in real time. There is an absolute onslaught of new info every hour (not just from the Bannon/HB “drip” campaign, but also more general news), and nobody is objectively summarizing it.

The only choice is to immerse myself in this deluge of information and try to sort out the truth from propaganda myself. It’s infuriating that so few journalists are doing this for me.

I’ve never seen anything like this, on both sides. On the right, we have a carefully managed PR campaign that is, despite its agenda, appearing increasingly credible but also manipulating our attention. On the left, we have a unification of the media apparatus, the DNC and the FBI, actively suppressing information and misdirecting our attention.

I’m so glad Glenn Greenwald has staked out a position in this environment, because it really is an existential fight for truth. Now that Greenwald is on the case, I hope it forces the left and the Biden campaign to respond to this story. It’s not going away.

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.

Matt Taibbi: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-on-his-resigna...

Those two deserve each other.

And may that pair long continue fighting the good fight against hypocrites and charlatans

Hopefully somewhere we never have to hear from either of them ever again.

Similar words have been expressed by the most wretched tyrants of the history of humanity.

Yes. Also by people with angry cats fucking in their back yards.

So they show more strength of character than many self-appointed tech leaders. For sure I would prefer them as neighbors.

And for the low, low price of whatever Greenwald is going to charge for his lucrative substack, you can have him!

That is the problem with Taibibi, right? He "fights". He uses "jokes" to imply and push not exactly true statements. Mostly to insult opponents. Not really to engage or argue, just fight.

He has sometimes good arguments. But plenty of times he does not, so he goes for second best thing to fight whoever he sees as opponenent.

For all his sins Mark Taibbi (not Taibibi) has expressed his views in several books and lots of articles, I doubt all 6 books are nothing but insults.

Look, the truth is there a big gap opened between center-leftists, people who like Hilary, Biden,BWS and all the mainstream democrats, and more progressive inquisitive , hardcore leftist branch like Taibbi or Rania Khalek who wont give a pass to the democrats just because they are "on their team". Like the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of the Russian Revolution these 2 groups hate each other more vehemently than any right wing side, because they consider the other as traitors. A split is inevitable.

All the rest huff and puff is just a front for this fundamental issue.

I am not taking issue with his general ideological position. I am taking issue with his general style. Also, I am not taking issue with him not givig break to some people.

He is not equal opportunity hit everyone kind of writer. He has friends and ennemies, gives massive benefit of doubt to ones and "attack" others. That would not be unusual, but it ridiculous to then frame him as fair one.

I stopped reading him when I realized the jokes and insults based on made up things or insinuations that someone is ugly and general crap are more memorablable then his actual arguments. He is dismissive in funny way, but he is dismissing straw man all too often or just not actually having any argument beyond insult.

I would rather remember latter then former.

Please don’t do this here. The HN guidelines make clear the kind of community we’re going for is one that resists provocation toward the uninteresting. In particular:

“Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.”

“Please don't sneer.”

“Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry. Would you like to know more about why those two deserve each other? I'm happy to deploy more words.

Sure, I'm so eager to hear you regurgitate whatever the NYT consensus is.

Greenwald was on the right side of history regarding the Snowden revelations... but your own posts from that era, however, have not aged well.

I stand by basically everything I wrote back then, unlike Greenwald, who tried comically to weasel out of his PRISM writing, while later striking this "I've never been corrected or retracted" pose.

What's the gist?

That both Taibbi and Greenwald have confidently reported out technical stories they were self-evidently not qualified to report, made huge mistakes, and doubled down on them, because truthiness and advocacy is more important to them than accuracy. They're both in their way like that Bloomberg reporter who reported the "Chinese spy chip on motherboards" story.

I'm a recent fan of both of these gentlemen so your comment is very interesting to me. Both seem to position themselves as journalists who value accuracy over advocacy…

Could you point to an example of what you are describing?

I can't really get my head around people stanning Glenn Greenwald, who is both shrill and also a dull, tedious writer. I tend to think people are just giving him credit due property to Snowden (stipulate that Snowden deserves credit), and Greenwald's role in that whole thing was mostly to fuck it up.

But I totally get why people stan Taibbi, who is an obviously gifted writer with a talent for making his advocacy entertaining. I think he's a force for evil, a liberal Ann Coulter, but I get why people like him.

Greenwald's writing does tend to be long-winded and repetitious, but I see both Taibbi and Greenwald as a force for good. They don't turn a blind eye to information unfavorable to either presidential candidate, even as it might be politically advantageous to do so.

I've felt calmer and more centered since I started to read their writing. It's really therapeutic to be able to dissociate and laugh at both sides. I think Biden is a lesser evil, but I don't want to experience cognitive dissonance whenever I see likely evidence of his corruption.

I'm still interested to see some corroboration of this claim:

> both Taibbi and Greenwald have confidently reported out technical stories they were self-evidently not qualified to report, made huge mistakes, and doubled down on them, because truthiness and advocacy is more important to them than accuracy

Taibbi on the technical details of how the finance industry works, Greenwald on the technical issues of the Snowden disclosures. By comparison, good writers on technical finance issues: Matt Levine; the Snowden stuff: Barton Gellman.

No one is perfect, so it's about how you handle your mistakes. Was there anything specific that discredits Taibbi and Greenwald as trustworthy reporters?

EDIT: Greenwald not Gellman

The problem here is that both Greenwald and Taibbi are most notable --- by their fans! --- for those respective beats.

You keep restating your thesis without giving any evidence.

I offered (and was subsequently asked) to explain the basis for my comment upthread about those two deserving each other. I didn't offer and am not interested in being cross-examined. I've written in detail about both Taibbi and Greenwald on this site, so if you're interested in details, avail thyself of the search bar beloweth.

I was hoping you would support the argument you are making on this topic in this conversation. I have no interest in wading through your old comments, especially if they are as handwavy as the new ones.

"I'm a recent fan of both of these gentlemen so your comment is very interesting to me", you said. Perhaps "interesting" wasn't the word.

It was, but isn't anymore.

I didn't see the comment the way you did, apparently.

In my mind, his comment doesn't go against the guidelines, but yours seems to not presume good faith. He has offered to amplify what he said.

I don’t understand how his comment could be interpreted as having been made in bad faith — I’m sure he made it earnestly.

I made my comment earnestly as well. I want HN to be the kind of community described by those guidelines, and comments like his work against that, all the more when coming from one of this forum’s most prominent members.

Out of all the comments in this thread, you chose this one to comment with HN guidelines?

> He wasn't even menaced by authorities.

Dude... really?

https://mobile.twitter.com/KimStrassel/status/13219920675857...

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...

The report that NBC is referring to was compiled based on public data. It can all be checked.

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.

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.

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.

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.

what do you mean by hearsay? There are videos and pictures of him doing this stuff: sex with what looks like prostitutes and hard drugs (you can find them too on the internet). Those don't make the emails real, and it might still be a disinfo attempt, but the sex and drugs part is real for sure. This should warrant some reporting on it's own.

Good thing that Hunter Biden isn't on the ballot, right?

>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.

> Senate Homeland Security committee and DNI director [...]

Both of these are partisan, unreliable sources. The DNI used to be a nonpartisan that you could at least trust somewhat. Not anymore.

OK, but doesn't there have to be at least a shred of evidence from any source, partisan or not?

The burden of proof is on you to prove that it is Russian disinfo, not to prove that it is not. No one has any proof that it is. And Greenwald lays out plenty of reasons in his article why the documents are likely real.

If we knew that (let's say) the Mexican government was trying to (let's say) keep Taylor Swift from winning a Grammy, and then a video of (let's say) Taylor Swift's cousin kicking a kitten mysteriously materialized the week before the Grammys, the reasonable assumption to make would not be that it was a lucky coincidence.

To continue this ridiculous metaphor, Glenn Greenwald is the guy arguing strenuously that this is a huge story, and anyone not covering it must be in the bag for Beyonce, because the video is authentic, it's been triple-checked, and just look at how her cousin refuses to deny it! And the rest of us are over here like, "Right, but did Tay-Tay herself actually do anything? Kicking kittens is indeed bad, but her cousin isn't the one running for President. Er, excuse me, her cousin isn't the one who's up for Best Female Vocal Performance."

Exactly how long before the election would something like this have to surface for you to believe it's not fake? 6 months? A year? Two years? And anything after that time frame but before the election would automatically make it fake?

Who said it was fake? I assume that if it was fabricated, it would've been more substantial. But I'm not gullible enough to think Biden's kid's sex tape found its way to the media in October by some sort of wacky accident.

So you don't deny that it's real. You're just dismissing it because you don't like when it came out.

I'm dismissing it because it doesn't seem to contain any evidence of Joe Biden doing anything bad. It seems like someone hacked his kid's email, went through it for embarrassing stuff, didn't find much, and so released it very close to the election because there wasn't enough dirt there to sustain a longer scandal.

Anyone, assuming such a person actually exists, who ever "trusted" DNI is a credulous fool. Foisting disastrous falsehoods on the gaslit USA public is the job. The current questionable proposition might be slightly more believable only for the fact that it seems more likely to discourage than to encourage war, which is opposed to the traditional preference of the office.

The reason I said "at least trust somewhat" instead of just "trust" is because your comment is so predictable and played out that I thought I might be able to save everyone the time. Guess not!

The position has existed for 15 years. The longest tenure, seven years, was that of James Clapper. The first line in his obituary will reference his infamous perjury before Congress. Every other DNI is also a professional liar, and partisan as well. If simple facts are "predictable", do rational people therefore ignore them?

Goes onto a Fox News morning talk show lol.

Far too many provable examples of political appointees in this administration outright lying and gaslighting the Fox News MAGA-ites into some alternative reality.

I'm sure they would go on any news program to talk about it. The others just aren't talking about it and his statement would counter the narrative they are trying to spin about disinformation.

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).

Did you see them make that demand? Their wording that he published implied that it would be detrimental to The Intercept, which would be a fair claim.

I think you can suggest it was careful pressure or negotiation, but it didn't read as a demand to me.

Language like that is setting up the basis for a lawsuit. It’s absolutely a demand not to publish it elsewhere. In fact it’s a thinly veiled threat if he does.

You have to read this knowing there is an existing contractural agreement that Glenn is expressly allowed to publish elsewhere if they do not publish. So the only basis to stop him from doing that would be to allege it would be “damaging” if he did.

If he's confident in his reading of the contractual agreement, what's the issue?

My read of the comment was as a negotiating point - they want to encourage a result but not make a legal demand. i.e., he can just ignore it if he doesn't have any consideration for The Intercept brand that they share.

They have no legal basis for a demand. All they have is threats.

And we know he was confident in his reading, as he went ahead and published.

It was not that and he even published that draft. If this reads as threat to you, then it will be hard to communicate with you anything negative without making you feel threatened.

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.

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.

Does it have to be fabricated by russian intelligence? Why not just Trumps campaign hoping to do another "But Hilary's emails!"

Here is a link to the article (draft) that is discussed in the resignation post, and posted an hour or so later:

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...

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.

And what about reading the email exchange with the editors where they provide feedback?

Peter maas' arguments seemed quite reasonable, but then so did the counter arguments of Glenn. Hard to take sides.

But that response from another editor Betsy was garbage- she threw around words like "offensive" and "unacceptable" and didn't even bother to explain her position.

> Peter maas' arguments seemed quite reasonable

Reasonable, yes. But sufficient to warrant the sweeping changes for which he asks?

His best (and, to my reading, only very solid) point is that Greenwald's article didn't make plain that the full archive is apparently only possessed by two media outlets, who have (in an act of their own tendency to act against the public interest, to be sure) not yet provided it elsewhere.

His assertion that the other media who have juggled these questions have done so with dispassion and exhaustion ("doesn’t explore how major news organizations have done significant stories, and those stories, such as the Journal’s, have not found anything of significance. The Times has also reported on the China deal and found the claims wanting. There are other pieces I can point to...") is a view with glasses so rose-colored as to be a political fiction in 2020 America.

Moreover, Greenwald's response is substantially more sophisticated and convincing.

The facts all rely on a hard drive no one has seen and no one will offer forensic evidence of

Who saw the hard drive and forensic evidence for stuff like the Panama Paper or the DNC emails? I'm asking seriously because on Glenn's article he says that the Hunter emails have gone through scrutiny similar to the material from previous hacks or leaks, and he makes a really solid case with examples of how each dump was "verified".

Also does the Biden campaign has seen or have forensic evidence about this being forged? Because for the Typhoon Investigations fake dump they showed it but for this Hunter laptop thing they just said it was a Russian operation and didn't question the material, they just refuse to answer questions about some of the stuff that's there.

Greenwald writes:

> it is clear to me that the trove of documents from Hunter Biden’s emails has been verified in ways quite similar to those.

and then he doesn’t really explain how he came to this conclusion or the specific ways that it has been verified - he just asserts that others have verified it, and he trusts them.

There is corroboration of at least some of the laptop's from Tony Bobulinski, who worked with the Bidens and has turned over devices with copies of the emails to the authorities.

It's not corroboration to simply repeat the same information. Bobulinski sat on his supposed information for a year, not even posting a signature hash, until the NYPost story suddenly appeared as an October surprise.

1) He has his own copies of emails found on the laptop (for those that he was included on)

2) He didn't have the whole picture until details from the laptop (that didn't include him) were made public

3) question the timing all you will (I certainly do) but the contents of the laptop have never been repudiated other than as a vague smear of "Russian disinformation". Hunter's lawyers even asked for the laptop back

4) The DOJ just admitted that they've had an open investigation into Hunter since last year, and Bobulinski just turned over his phones as evidence in that investigation.

I really hope everyone here who is dismissing this was just as skeptical of the Steele dossier, because there is more actual hard evidence and witness testimony here than with the dossier.

Greenwald has really fascinated me the past decade. He was on track to being one of the most prolific reporters on the planet, and he has gone really down this weird victimhood "censorship" path.

Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.

Exerpt:

> refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden

This is the news site that broke the Tara Reade rape allegation against Biden this spring. To me, this makes me think there's more to this story. You have no problem dropping a rape allegation story days after Biden is the presumptive nominee (with numerous follow-up articles), but apparently are "censoring" critical comments about Biden from GG's articles?

I've been doom-scrolling through this cursed page of comments, and this is one of the few salient points I've read. Kudos.

Keep in mind that this is Greenwald's perception.

The story he's referring to has so many holes in it that it's more of a mesh than a woven cloth. Maybe a lace. There isn't much to it except criticism of Biden. Removing criticism of Biden just makes it threadbare and tawdry.

Please elaborate on what you perceive to be holes in this story.

This is the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The theory here is that Hunter Biden, for some reason, flew 3,000 miles away from his home to drop off some devices with unencrypted sensitive data for repair and data recovery at a place where the owner couldn't identify him positively because he's blind, and then just forgot them. The shop's surveillance camera footage for the time period in question got wiped clean even though there's footage from before and after.

And instead of just deleting the data and moving on with life, the owner held on to it for a year (no one does this) and then somehow (we still don't know how) it ended up in the hands of Rudi Giuliani. And we can't see it except for a couple of screenshots from imessage, but we're told it's damning. It got mailed to Tucker Carlson but somehow got lost in the mail.

Here's the interview with the shop owner: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...

This is classic KGB/FSB misinformation. It's right out of the playbook.

You just used a collection of logical fallacies to poke holes in the story while avoiding the question of Joe Biden being corrupt and indebted to foreign adversaries.

Why did Hunter Biden get +$50,000/mo. salary from a Ukranian energy company that Joe Biden had dealings with during his time as VPOTUS? Why did Hunter Biden get $1 billion windfall from China just days after visiting Beijing with his influential father?

Why do Donald Trump's children have top secret clearances that they're ineligible for and work in the White House with him? Why does Donald Trump owe foreign banks nearly a billion dollars? Why did two banks forgive millions of dollars of loans against Donald Trump and then have bankers directly responsible for forgiving the loans receive positions within his administration? Why hasn't Donald Trump divested himself of his holdings in his companies as required to by the Emoluments clause? Why has the federal government paid Trump properties over a billion dollars for secret service and other agents to stay there?

Until you can answer all of those questions with reasonable explanations that aren't "because he can" then I don't want to hear another word out of you about Hunter Biden -- who has had no role in the Obama/Biden administration and will have no role in the Biden/Harris administration.

Jared Kushner - one of those supposedly unqualified family members, and one that the media has enjoyed throwing rocks at for years now - brokered multiple peace deals in the middle east, something that decades of establishment political and foreign policy figures have been unable to accomplish with little critique from the media.

What Kushner did disassembled something like 30 years of UN effort in the region. He enabled an alliance between two bullies who could agree on a couple of things, and will now use that alliance to beat the shit out of people that disagree with them, to the detriment of, say Palestine.

This "accomplishment" is the equivalent to smuggling some dinosaur embryos to a south american island in a cryogenic cylinder disguised as shaving cream. It's not so much that career diplomats COULDN'T do it, it's that they understood why they SHOULDN'T do it.

The UN was doing such a great job with Middle East peace... such a shame that Kushner and the bad orange man ruined all the great work they had done.

I think we used to call this “whataboutism”?

The apparent backstory of the laptop is better explained here, by a lawyer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYzCwiURwwQ

Sure, there isn't an expectation of privacy. But that implies that the property is Hunter Biden's in the first place and that there's an intact chain of custody of evidence if there are misdeeds, which there isn't.

Again, this looks exactly like every other KGB/FSB misinformation operation.

Perhaps his story fills in some of those holes? We'll see when he publishes it on his own.

Without knowing what's in there, it's really hard to make a call on that information alone.

This could be anything from "Hey, the source for this information is notoriously unreliable and doesn't meet our standards" to "He can't publish this because then Trump might win and that's not worth the cost". One is a very valid reason to refuse to publish something, for the other, the ends don't justify the means and he's right to be upset.

Was that the specific mandate? Nothing critical of Joe?

Or was it that all the sections in the article critical of Joe were unsubstantiated.

This right here is a masterclass on how you can still technically be saying "facts", but by cherry picking and bending words make it seem very different from what it actually was. This kind of deception honestly makes everything this person says worthless to me.

Setting boundaries on what one will and wont do isn't victimhood. He doesn't owe the world his output under any terms but his own.

I’m not talking about this specific situation; I’m talking about his career the past 5 years.

Can you please provide examples?

"victimhood"?

I find it hard to believe this comment is anything but gaslighting.

Did you actually read his resignation? The editors are refusing to publish a story unless he removes all sections critical of Joe Biden. How in the world is this playing the victim card?

The conversation regarding censorship is getting disgusting at this point. Censorship should be the main focus of ANY and EVERY journalist, full stop. The profession cannot coexist in a world with censorship. It undermines every single thing about honest, transparent reporting.

The idea that the Intercept has a blanket prohibition on criticism of Joe Biden is transparently ridiculous.

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/02/biden-foreign-policy-war...

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/01/biden-economic-policy-us...

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/13/biden-latino-deportation...

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/07/joe-biden-climate-policy...

What Glenn’s whiny rant leaves out is that it wasn’t just the Intercept that refused to run the Hunter/Ukraine/China BS: reporters at the NY Post and Wall Street Journal both refused to put their names on the story. The NY Post had to use a producer on Tucker Carlson’s show, while the WSJ ran the story as an op-ed since the reporters again refused to tarnish their reputation (they also ran a story from the actual reporters rebutting the allegations)

Editorial judgment and criticism is part of free speech. It is not just about broadcasting the president’s re-election propaganda as loudly as you can. And the idea that Glenn Greenwald can be trusted rests entirely on his 2007-2015 work, and ignores how disgraceful, craven, and just plain pathetic he became in 2016. Anyone who appears on Tucker Carlson’s show simply should not be trusted.

This is wrong. The WSJ did report as The Editorial Board (means all of them).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-tony-bobulinski-...

You are wrong, the actual op-ed that “reported” the allegations was “written” by Strassel a week before the editorial you linked to:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-family-legacy-1160340...

Edit: to clarify, the editorial you linked seems to be a real editorial that said “these questions need to be investigated” - the op-Ed I linked to presented itself as divulging new information. In 99.9999999% of cases this would be an odd use of an op-ed, but it appears to have been the only option since the reporters refused.

It is also worth noting that WSJ has a unique and well-known dichotomy between “brilliant, hard-hitting reporting” and “unbelievably hackish Joe-Rogan-level opinions.”

Another Wall Street Journal article, this time from the news desk, found no link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-bidens-ex-business-partn...

What leads you to believe that he was trying to spread misinformation? The suppression of criticism leveled against Joe Biden or any other individual in public service is a grave danger to democracy. I commend Mr. Greenwald for standing up to censorship.

Please entertain the possibility for a moment, whether you agree with it or not, that this story was indeed planted by a foreign nation for the specific purpose of manipulating our election. Do you then believe that it is responsible to willfully help spread it and blast it all over every social media site? Aren't you doing the foreign nation's bidding then?

If you do agree there, then where would you draw the line for blocking such information being spread? Is the fact that the reporter at the singular publication in all the the US willing to report on it didn't want their name on it worry you? The fact that the only evidence comes from some random Trump supporting repairman in some random state not worry you? The fact that unreliable (self-exposing to 15yo) people such as Giuliani are attached to the story not worry you? What about our own intelligence services saying that foreign nations have been trying to use said person to manipulate our election?

This argument can be made for nearly every piece of political journalism... you're only supporting this suppression because it helps your preferred candidate.

Do you personally believe people should be able to decide for themselves things in their life, make opinions based on different information provided?

Wow: what a standard hace you just raised dor just ine of the sides of the equation!

What matters is whether the story is true or not, not who planted it. If China digs out more on Trump taxes or business dealings, I'd want to see that, as well.

Right, and it's still not clear whether it is true or not.

The authenticity of the underlying evidence matters at least as much as the source.

No one has denied the underlying documents' authenticity to my knowledge.

There was a time when journalists cared about the truth, and what the truth requires is the disclosure of facts and objectivity. The proper way to publish this is to describe the evidence, and the reasons as to why the evidence may be falsified, and do continual reporting as the story develops to keep the public informed how likely or not the information is false.

The alternative of suppressing it based upon supposition and a "gut check" says very, very clearly: we don't trust the public to make up their minds, or, worse, we think this might be true but it would run counter to our interests if people knew about it. Saying something like this is "misinformation by the Russians" when it is not denied nor has evidence been presented as such is what we used to call "believing in conspiracy theories." Sometimes conspiracy theories are true, and the facts prove them. But journalists shouldn't make publishing decisions based upon conspiracy theories without evidence supporting those theories.

In any case, both of those behaviors run counter to the principles of journalism, which is predicated on the idea that preferring to share imperfect information, accurately described, is ultimately what leads to an informed citizenry, even if some of that information turns out to be misleading or wrong in the end.

That is not generally how journalism operates. Remember "Rathergate"? Would it have made the slightest bit of difference if CBS had inserted the disclaimer that "Of course we can't be 100% sure these docs are legit but we'll keep investigating."?

I don't remember the story well but certainly more self-skepticism, disclosure of facts, and rigorous investigation will always reduce the chance of humiliation and harm.

To a degree. My point though is that major journalism outlets, while they certainly screw up from time to time, don't run with major stories and be "We think this is true but maybe it isn't. We'll keep you posted."

> My point though is that major journalism outlets, while they certainly screw up from time to time, don't run with major stories and be "We think this is true but maybe it isn't. We'll keep you posted."

Right; they will run with "Someone else is reporting/claiming this, but we have been unable to confirm it. We'll keep you posted." And while the difference in terms of the impression on the reader/viewer may be subtle, there is an important distinction between running the unconfirmed story directly as news (or the thing Greenwald apparently suggested of an outlet running dueling news stories on the same issue from different journalists as news.)

Fair enough. If another credible outlet is reporting it, they'll probably run it with the disclaimer that the NYT (or whoever) is reporting something but we haven't ourselves been able to verify A, B, and C claims. If it's a claim on a conspiracy site? Or someone has just come to them with an accusation they're unable to verify? Unlikely.

Not to mention the use of the term "confirmed" has completely changed in modern times. Now, the press puts out a story that an anonymous source said X, and then another press outlet "confirms" it - and in this sense, the use of the word "confirm" means "we also asked the anonymous source and they told us the same thing." This is a trick: "confirming" a story used to mean that actual journalism was practiced, where the liklihood of the claims were vetted and determined to be likely true, given multiple independent sources or other evidence. It used to take time and effort to "confirm" stories, that was the job of a journalist, now the term is just used to artificially bolster anonymous claims by having a second talking head talk to the same person as a way to "confirm" the other media source wasn't lying that they existed, or something.

> There was a time when journalists cared about the truth

There have always been journalists who cared about the truth, but there has never been a time when that was generally dominant over the business, political, etc., interests of publishers, who have always been, for the entire history of journalism (which has been entirely embedded within the capitalist age), very deeply intertwined with those of the capitalist ruling class, of whom publishers, especially of major, highly-visible media outlets, are generally a part.

> There was a time when journalists cared about the truth

Which is exactly why no other publication has yet backed up this claim, because they cannot verify the truthiness of it. If anything, it's NYP that did not care about the truth and only about the fact that it would be a "win" for their side.

Caring about the truth and not spreading misinformation from foreign nation is one and the same.

OK, so that would mean it was fair to delay reporting on it until it was investigated. Has any investigation happened? Are the media reporting on how they chased down leads to confirm or deny the report? What about the claims of "misinformation from a foreign nation", have journalists gotten to the bottom of that beyond just repeating what the "intelligence services" have said?

So far, the "investigation" by the media sources who suppressed the story literally seems to be to not even ask if the evidence is real from those who it's targeting, and to just run with the idea that there's plausible deniability so it must be false. As if there'd be anything other than plausible deniability in a real corruption scandal.

Your world makes sense, but only if "cannot verify" means "tried and failed" not "didn't try and suppressed based upon the assumption it was invalid", as is the publicly stated methodology taken by the Washington Post.

> Has any investigation happened?

Yes, the FBI has looked into it and have yet to find any credible source. I also assume every reporter from every publication is investigating it too.

> Are the media reporting on how they chased down leads to confirm or deny the report?

The media never reports on the process of chasing leads and inconclusive stories (which is exactly what NYP did). They only post once they have the actual facts.

> by the media sources who suppressed the story

First off, it's the social media site that suppressed the story, not other publications. Secondly, not reporting something until you have it confirmed is not "suppressing" a story, it's actual journalism.

> as is the publicly stated methodology taken by the Washington Post.

Source?

They don’t seem to apply this rigor to stories that are engineered to make the orange one look bad... the NYT “anonymous” piece, the hit job re: Trumps taxes, dishonest articles about border separations (who built the cages?), etc., etc. it’s become clear that the media is absolutely biased to the core. This coming from a 2x Obama voter.

The FBI admitted today Hunter Biden and his associates are under an active criminal investigation. The article you are replying to is literally about the media suppressing the story

As for the wapo: https://mobile.twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/132036642124791...

I don't agree with the premise of the discussion. Consider for a less controversial example the iPhone 12. It seems obvious that:

* Much of the discussion about the iPhone 12 is part of Apple's deliberate strategy to sell phones.

* The media is in some sense being exploited; Apple wouldn't sell so many iPhone 12s if not for media discussion of it.

* An outlet that refused as a blanket policy to discuss the iPhone 12 would present its readers with an inaccurate view of the world.

There is no easy answer here, and I think the best is to allow things to play out with all the information out there for people to make an informed decision on. We need the entire collective effort of the media industry and journalists to poke, prod, piece together and corroborate the details being presented. Leak the data dump to 4chan even, see what they find. Who knows what holes everyone might find, or what additional pieces of the puzzle they might unravel with such a collective effort. Right now it just kinda seems like they're trying to discredit rather than investigate, which is why it's a huge story and why it's being picked up on by the right so much.

Is there any evidence that it was planted by a foreign national? We don't censor based on gut feelings that something was planted by a foreign national.

who defines what is misinformation and by what standard? it seems any opinion that doesn't conform to mainstream ideologies are now labeled as misinformation.

the whole point of his article he published is you don't shut down opinions and works of other journalists just because you don't agree with it as an editor.

By way of example, his description of PRISM was factually incorrect to the point of making the people who read his articles more misinformed than people who hadn't. There is nothing ideological in what is a statement of fact and what is not, and Greenwald gets in trouble on that basic point.

OK so if journalists have to get 100% of what they say accurate then 99% of what we see reported today are "factually incorrect" and there won't be anyone left in the profession. Same goes with your point saying more opinion leads to more misinformation.

Greenwald's description wasn't 99% accurate. It was barely 5% accurate. The only thing accurate in it was that some program called PRISM exists. Every statement he made about what it does was wrong, which he could have avoided if he merely talked to someone computer literate or used his status as a journalist to call the people involved. The NY Times, CNET, and pretty much the rest of mainstream media got it correct and correctly identified PRISM as a non-story while focusing on phone metadata, which was questionably legal post-Carpenter.

> Same goes with your point saying more opinion leads to more misinformation.

I didn't say that more opinion leads to misinformation. I said nothing about opinion at all.

if that meant that we had to force the slate clean and start over with proper journalistic standards, i'd kind of be okay with that. if it also means that we could eliminate network talking heads opinion shows from being listed under a News banner, i'd be even more okay with it.

Misinformation is factually-incorrect information that is spread to push an agenda.

That's no so hard.

A news organization has a responsibility to find out if the news they are reporting is factually correct, and if it's important.

If they can't verify the facts, then they may just publish the people's claims, but again, the matter of importance comes in -- is the fact that someone is making the claim important? If someone in power says a lie about COVID, that may still be worth reporting, because the fact that a person in power misled is, itself, important. But if some rando political operatives push an unverifiable story, the fact that they are claiming it isn't itself a story, unless the facts are true.

I do think it _is_ hard as in: it is very hard to find out the truth. “Misinformation is factually-incorrect information that is spread to push an agenda. That's no so hard.”

Given enough power you can make look any “fact” as the truth. This has been accomplished a couple of times in the past. I.e. the war against Iraq started with the “fact” that there are mass destruction weapons. All mainstream media supported this “fact” when the war began. Turns out later there was no mass destruction weapon. Publicly admitted by the US government. So a “fact” for one person isn’t a “fact” for the other because both have a different perception of truth. But again, given enough power, you can manufacture consent and thus manufacture a “wrong truth”.

Do you have anything to support this accusation?

I've been watching him closely for several years and it seems the mortal sin he committed was his failure to join the Russiagate bandwagon. In the end that was clearly the correct choice, but the liberal media no longer tolerates anyone who has the audacity to undermine their chosen narrative.

Tucker Carlson just announced on Twitter that he has lost critical documents relating to the alleged wrongdoings of Hunter Biden.

This was moments before Glenn Greenwald's resignation.

I'm not familiar with this conspiracy theory, can you explain how they're connected?

It means evidence backing up Greenwald's controversial position was still not checked out. The fact that the centerpiece of a story could be "lost" before it was even studied would show that Greenwald was jumping the gun.

He has no access to the evidence but he is making very preliminary bets.

i think what greenwald is basing is story on is all in the public domain. i think tucker is prone to hyping stuff so these documents probably don't add much.

Greenwald doesn't work for Fox and there are multiple copies of the documents, I don't see your point?

News agencies outside of Fox / NY Post haven't been able to study the evidence on a developing story, and Tucker Carlson has yet to reveal critical evidence.

Glenn Greenwald's own editor is telling him not to make preliminary bets. What's so surprising here?

he also tweeted that he has access to copies of the documents and UPS now have come out and said they found the missing documents.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ups-said-found-lost-tucker-c...

probably, just a weird coincidence but tucker wasn't lying about the situation.

fyi, UPS found the missing mail. So we are waiting with bated breath for Tucker to blow our minds with the critical documents...

I have critical evidence that this whole story is a fraud, but I can’t show it to you

My conclusion is the opposite. The Mueller report was heavily redacted, and misrepresented by AG Barr - precisely because it is so damning. Trump got impeached by congress over the Ukraine scandal later on, again enlisting foreign help. Trump asked a foreign power to help him against a political opponent - the Ukraine facts are not in dispute. Trump's campaign took multiple meetings with Russians bearing emails, and multiple members of his campaign are now in jail. These two facts are also not in dispute.

> The Mueller report was heavily redacted

So your first argument is essentially "There's proof in the report, we just can't see it"?

> multiple members of his campaign are now in jail.

Don't you think you should mention the fact that they went to jail for reasons that have nothing to do with Russian collusion?

Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't." So Mueller has admitted that Trump obstructed his investigation, and several members in Trump's circle have gone to jail for _lying to the FBI_.

Not to mention the fact that Mueller's investigation clearly found that Trump's campaign was in contact with Russian agents, knew they favored Trump's campaign, and "welcomed" their help (i.e., foreign interference). This is what the public understands as "collusion". However, "collusion" is not a legal term, "conspiracy" is and has a higher bar of proof. So yes, Trump colluded with Russia, we just couldn't prove that they explicitly conspired since Trump's circle lied for him.

You may find this shocking, but the Mueller report supports none of the substantive claims about Trump's campaign conspiring with Russians and actually contradicts many of them: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

> Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”

"If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

From the Executive Summary: "Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

It is a lie to suggest that there was "no evidence"; Mueller himself in a public statement literally said there was merely "insufficient evidence" to rise to the bar of conspiracy, contradicting your quote.

> "If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

Expecting them to prove a negative in a conspiracy case is laughably absurd. Mueller said that there was not only insufficient evidence for all claims, there was zero evidence for many of the others.

They got Don Gotti, Nixon, and countless other criminals on obstruction. But when the Senate and AG are fully loyal to the president, it suddenly isn't an indictable offense.

> As Mueller himself concluded, a reasonable debate can be conducted on whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation with corrupt intent. But even on the case of obstruction, the central point looms large over all of it: there was no underlying crime established for Trump to cover-up.

> All criminal investigations require a determination of a person’s intent, what they are thinking and what their goal is. When the question is whether a President sought to kill an Executive Branch investigation – as Trump clearly wanted to do here – the determinative issue is whether he did so because he genuinely believed the investigation to be an unfair persecution and scam, or whether he did it to corruptly conceal evidence of criminality.

> That Mueller could not and did not establish any underlying crimes strongly suggests that Trump acted with the former rather than the latter motive, making it virtually impossible to find that he criminally obstructed the investigation.

If you were innocent of a crime would you really just sit back and watch the government waste $35 million investigating you?

Who are you quoting here?

The Intercept article by Glenn Greenwald linked a few posts up the chain.

> Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't." So Mueller has admitted that Trump obstructed his investigation

There's a pretty big excluded middle between "We can say with authority that X obstructed" and "We can exonerate X of obstructing".

(Which is not to say that details in Mueller's report don't tend to support the conclusion of obstruction, but Mueller saying that they could exonerate doesn't equate to saying that Trump did obstruct.)

Mueller also said that, if the President did hypothetically obstruct justice, _he would not be able to bring charges_. That is Congress's job, he said.

So, let's say Mueller found ironclad evidence of obstruction. What would he have done? He told us that he would have said exactly what he did. He does not believe it was in his power to bring charges, only present evidence. And then he said "if we could say that the President did not commit a crime, we would have said so." He's speaking like a career lawyer because he is one; he can't outright tell Congress to bring charges.

> There's a pretty big excluded middle between "We can say with authority that X obstructed" and "We can exonerate X of obstructing".

Mueller was following Justice Department policy - he can't even say he thought a crime was committed, despite mountains of evidence, because the department's policy is it will never prosecute the president, so they can't indict, and thus won't ever accuse.

The president could murder someone on live television and department policy would be to say "Doesn't look like anything to me."

> Er, Mueller straight up said "if we could exonerate the President for obstruction of justice, we would. But we can't."

I always found that statement to be bizarre and offensive. You don’t prove someone innocent. You prove someone guilty. Trump doesn’t need Mueller’s exoneration, and a statement like that speaks volumes, to me anyway, about the mindset of the person making it.

> The Mueller report was heavily redacted, and misrepresented by AG Barr

Why would Mueller not say anything to that effect then?

He did: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/29/robert-mueller-wil...

He did.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barr_letter#Reactions

I don't think it's fair to say it was the correct choice. It was a choice, and one he was allowed to make, but it was one of many options.

You say "the liberal media no longer tolerates anyone who has the audacity to undermine their chosen narrative". Isn't that what I'm talking about? He founded the org. Do you think "the liberal media" got together and decided to censor him? Or do you think people just weren't buying what he was selling? I don't get how you can accuse the liberal media of anything in this situation... it's not like he works for MSNBC or CNN.

> I don't think it's fair to say it was the correct choice.

It's absolutely fair and the Mueller Report proved Greenwald was right all along: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

> it's not like he works for MSNBC or CNN.

There doesn't need to be some grand conspiracy among liberal journalists in order for them to engage in the partisan censorship he describes. It's clear that most of them believe supporting the "correct" candidate is far more important than publishing the truth.

The Mueller report did no such thing.

> It's absolutely fair and the Mueller Report proved Greenwald was right all along

So says... Greenwald.

He's doing a classic strawman: claiming that the "Russian interference" claim was that the Trump campaign co-ordinated with Russia. Outside some fringe beliefs that isn't the claim: instead it was that Russia interfered in the election which was exactly what the report found.

It found Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC, stole the emails and disseminated them via DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks.

In regards to involvement of Trump campaign personnel, Greenwald conveniently leaves out the multiple mentions of Paul Manfort (pg 52-55) which the Republican-led intelligence committee confirms "One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer."

It's ironic that Greenwald would do what he claims other publications do: only publish material which confirms his views.

[1] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/trump-russia-senate-repo...

Linking to an article by Greenwald about how Greenwald was right all along is pretty spurious, to say the least. Even more so when there are plenty of non-Greenwald sources, like the ones involved in the Special Counsel investigation, which state exactly the opposite. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/04/complete-...

> clearly the correct choice

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but saying something with confidence doesn't actually make it true.

You're right, the Mueller report is what makes it true: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...

$35 million wasted on an investigation that started with a FISA warrant based on a phony report (Steele Dossier) commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

> In the end that was clearly the correct choice

You think (and to be honest, I agree with you) it was clearly the correct choice. If you ask anyone from the MSNBC/NYT/CNN/WaPo's audience (substantial amount of people), they will say it was clearly the wrong choice.

Two movies on one screen.

> Two movies on one screen.

It reminds me of Shiri's Scissors: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

"Misinformation" now seems to mean anything that threatens partisan objectives. Given Greewald's track record, I would give him a long leash.

or how about stuff that just can't be, you know, VERIFIED? Unless you take Tucker Carlson at his word and that this proof did exist, he just lost it. Oops.

Greenwald seems to have gone way off the deep end, what the heck happened???

The Biden campaign nor Hunter Biden have never discredit the material. The fact that I really do want Biden to win does not make Glenn’s piece factually incorrect. I prefer Biden despite this shady story. Still, I commend Glenn for taking a very hard decision for the sake of his integrity.

By "discrediting" it, the only thing you do is ensure that it'll make it another 24 hours in the media circus (and then there will be another claim that you have to refute or face claims that "but this time they didn't refute it!!!"). That game can be repeated ad nauseam, never leaving you off the hook and keeping the subject matter at the front of minds of everybody.

So maybe they never discredited it because they stopped jumping through every hoop that their opponents (Trump or otherwise) hold up for them?

Absolutely. In lock-step with Bari Weiss

We will never know how much of his "prolific" career was actively stunted by him being censored by both editors and an overall "feel-good"/left-wing bias in society and the news-industry.

With enough people being brave enough to stand up like this, we will finally start noticing truly how many people and their opinions have been silenced. Every additional brave person lets others see that they are not alone, that their opinions are reasonable and not hateful or fringe or unaccepted, and that they can once again speak freely in an open society.

Who determined it was misinformation? Nobody on the Biden campaign has said that the emails are false. The media has just decided that it's "Russian misinformation", which is increasingly looking more like a justification for not investigating valid news that may paint their preferred candidate in a badl ight.

I don't know ... The Intercept is practically dead without him regardless. It's not like they managed to rise above him

The actual article in question was published about 90 minutes after this one, here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

I think you'll be surprised by it. There's nothing about it that is fairly characterized as misinformation.

The dichotomy between Greenwald's complaints (censorship of his article despite contractual guarantees, Reality Winner cover-up, what editors forced Lee Fang to do, lack of reporting of Assange hearing, and "lack of editorial standards when it comes to viewpoints or reporting that flatter the beliefs of its liberal base") and the editor in chief response in the NYT [0] (he is a "grown person throwing a tantrum") is frightening.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/business/glenn-greenwald-...

what is frightening about it?

Did you read the e-mails Greenwald posted? He comes off as rather unhinged in his eagerness to claim censorship.

Honest question: is it just me or is it getting harder to determine what is factual and what is not? It seems like the US has begun to splinter such that there are two different sets of "facts" on many issues, but of course that is not how facts work. Nevertheless, when doing research and investigation is it often hard for me to pin down the truth behind any of the "facts" that are thrown at me, whether that's by the partisans, by the media, or just by random people on HN etc.

Does anyone else feel this way?

It's certainly getting harder and I have this sinking feeling that's by design.

If I was a foreign adversary of the US, I would be supporting this "balkanization" of the US

If I was part of the intelligence community, I would be supporting this "balkanization" of the US.

I find that many in the US are quick to blame and suspect foreign adversaries behind everything where the intelligence community makes just as much sense (to me).

Reminds me of Scott Adams recent Robot Reads News cartoon (couldn't find a link) where the gist of the joke was: "There is no evidence yet that Russia is behind the leaks. That is so Putin!"

It's not accidental, that is actually the result of a well-known propaganda technique known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

It's the echo chamber and unoriginal thought.

In a free society, people are free to speak about the world and how they see it. This is practically the job of a journalist: observe, record goings-on and ask insightful questions that generate understanding.

But now people that don't cleave to the consensus opinions of the crowd are essentially discarded based on the post-modern view of dubious "lived experience", suspect motivation, etc.

Back in the day, truth was what UPI, AP, CBS, NBC, and ABC agreed it was. All five outfits were in competition to break stories, but also all five were pretty centrist, and they had no effective competition. You either watched the evening news, or you read the paper, or both.

Now the various arbiters of truth diverse very strongly from each other. CNN is (picking a number) maybe 20 times as far from Fox as NBC was from CBS.

When the different sides are so far from each other, and both are constantly spewing how right they are, how do you tell what's true?

It's becoming harder to trust information at face value. Everyone has an angle and everyone is using their platform to push their angle. But personally I don't feel I have a hard time determining truth to a high degree of accuracy. A well-honed power of Inference to the Best Explanation is a superpower in today's disinformation economy. Truth has a way of fitting together cleanly without loose ends and without unexplainable coincidences. Fabricated stories have rough edges and requires leaps of faith. These leaps are easy for true believers to make, which is why the media environment seems so splintered.

Train your ability to model the world and judge whether new information fits with the current model or requires substantial revision. This is a powerful guide to whether the new information is true. Of course, this requires you have the ability to dispassionately analyze information and judge how well events fit together. If you're a partisan or an emotional thinker, IBE won't do you any good. The truth is available for those who are capable of dispassionate analysis. If you're not, then you're doomed to a steady diet of falsehoods and a worldview that diverges from the truth.

Your feed is not the same as your compatriot's feed. _The Social Dilemma_ explains how this leads to splintering.

There seems to be a premise in the USA that if Russia has a hand in true information coming to light, the bigger story is about Russia's hand in it, and not the information itself.

This narrative has been seen a lot, and often times it is invoked as the default narrative whenever things are being claimed in a particular political direction.

I would like to question this at a fundamental level. At what point does the information itself become pertinent? Shouldn't the information itself, if true, always be the focus of the story? If the information is unverified, shouldn't there be some attempt to verify it? If it cannot be verified - then it's probably best to dismiss it, but if people involved in the situation start coming forward to verify the context of the information, shouldn't it merit further investigation?

There is this guy - Tony Bobulinski. He's a navy veteran from a family of veterans and he's pretty much coming forward to say that the emails are all true. In his absence, it's ambiguous, but now that's come forward, why is there still hesitation to take this story seriously?

Frankly I find it difficult to believe that there is no coordinated media attempt to silence this story because at a personal level many of them want to cover up anything that makes one candidate look bad.

>There seems to be a premise in the USA that if Russia has a hand in true information coming to light, the bigger story is about Russia's hand in it, and not the information itself.

You're absolutely right, and it is frustrating to no end.

Imagine all politicians have at least a bit of dirt in secret, documented in some email, text, or photo, on a computer somewhere. Also suppose each politician has varying degrees of dirt, from minor mistakes, not in bad faith, to full on treason. Then suppose there's an adversary capable of hacking any of the politicians' aforementioned secret media. This adversary can now pick and choose which politician they release damaging evidence of. They don't need to release all of it, implicating the politician with the most severe grievances. Just the one the adversary decides they disfavor. In this case, your argument is saying "let's focus on this small mistake, because that's all the info we have."

I'm not advocating that in the real world, the bigger story is about who's releasing the info, rather than the info itself. However, there are issues when not taking both into account.

This requires your imagined scenario to be true. It also requires that the selective release of information is weighed in the opposite direction to what you are seeing.

In specific terms this is equivalent to saying "Russians showed us proof of Dem corruption" and the response by the media is "well imagine that there's worse GOP corruption that they haven't leaked"

The point is that there are plausible cases where you run into these kinds of issues where it’s not as easy as just saying “let’s evaluate the situation solely on the basis of what the info is.” This ignores the who, when, why, that are extremely relevant in this case, as they were this time 4 years ago.

Is your stated standard ever applied for other negative stories?

There are military generals who have served under multiple administrations. When they decide to go to the media and talk about some negative story about one administration, by your reasoning, it means they're telling a selective truth - unless you choose to believe that they only ever had differences with one administration.

There are whistleblowers from the State Department, DOJ, EPA and all kinds of bureaucracies. Are their stories ever met with this standard - i.e. "you're saying the W. Bush administration did this unethical thing, but you aren't telling us what the Clinton administration did". Was there ever a "I'm sorry Mr Deepthroat you may be right about Nixon but you have not told me what LBJ did, and for all we know, that may be worse"

The obvious point is that for a country to have a democracy that's free from manipulation by foreign entities it needs to strongly act against foreign influences attempting to interfere. If media publications credulously publish explosive accusations in the month before an election then you have a very easy way for foreign entities to influence elections.

Even if you buy Bobulinski as a credible witness it's difficult to discount the fact that his allegations have been deliberately timed to be as politically damaging for the election as possible, whilst giving the smallest amount of time to fact check his story. Specifically since the allegations could've been brought to light years ago. We don't have to be credulous - we all know that the unsubstantiated accusations can be damaging even if they turn out to be utterly baseless (which is what seems to be the case given the lack of coroborating evidence).

To put this in context - the 2016 relevation of Hilary Clinton's emails in the last weeks before the election coincided with a shift in the polls that pushed that election into a tossup, and when actually investigated, were found to be duplicates of emails that she had already been investigated for.

It seems natural given that we know about this dynamic, the reasonable thing is to raise your threshold for publishing accusations in the last weeks before an election.

If it is true that these accusations really are as damning as Bobulinski claims then they'll be coroborated and investigations will start, and frankly we've got 3 months before Biden even takes office. But those should be real criminal investigations, not baseless accusations made in the 2 weeks before the election - or more reasonably, made at the time that Bobulinski claims these conversations took place over a year ago.

The timing is definitely suspicious for the laptop contents to be released, but as for Bobulinski, I think his timing came down to two things:

1) He only had part of the picture to begin with. It was the release of some of the laptop's contents that made it clear (in his mind) that Joe Biden was in fact receiving bribes from foreign governments through his son.

2) Given his own involvement in Sinohawk, the leap to portraying the emails as part of "Russian disinformation" cast a shadow over his own reputation, and he asked the Biden campaign to issue a retraction of that characterization. I think many people naturally don't want to be involved in controversies like this because of the personal costs, but he felt it was necessary in part to protect his own reputation.

He's clarified the timing in his interview with Tucker. The only reason he's coming forward is because the campaign dismissed his presence as Russian disinformation, which hurts his reputation. He is under no obligation to wait till after the election to repair his reputation.

Can i put another dimension without trying to be judgmental: it seems to me that the younger generations of journalists (and audiences) are a lot more censorious by nature. I don't know the causes of it but it's certainly very prevalent, and it seems all the 'dissenters' are a few decades older. There was for a while a prevalent narrative of "safety" or "safe spaces", but that has passed, and it seems that it has been replaced by a general tendency to hide ucomfortable problems "under the rug".

Young people are usually more radical, especially when they are inexperienced and believe in some ideology. Maybe we're just witnessing a generational shift in power in media where it's not a 50 year old person taking over for somebody that retires, but a 35 year old person (because more digital skills?).

Greenwald posted some emails he says are from his editor at the Intercept. [0]

Reading the emails, his editor sounds pretty reasonable. And I think it's ironic that a journalist would cite ethics as his reason for being so hell-bent on publishing an article that does nothing but repeat and amplify unsubstantiated suspicions about a candidate a few days before the election. Greenwald's point-by-point attempt at rebutting his editor supports the editor's perspective, in my opinion. He describes the lack of evidence in a way that conspiratorially suggests that the evidence exists, and his takedown of the bigger media outlets consists of noting that they investigated and ran articles that failed to produce any damning evidence... which is exactly what his article would do, except his article would frame the lack of evidence as evidence of a bigger conspiracy.

I think his faith that there's a story there is exactly what you need in an investigative journalist, and I think stopping him from publishing anyway when he doesn't find it is exactly what he needs in an editor.

[0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

The first two of the three hours of him being a guest on Joe Rogan yesterday were brilliant. I've never heard someone so eloquently tear down the shiny facades of what passes as high-brow "journalism" these days.

Or just a bitter man being kicked out of the club?

Is it telling that you conceive of news outlets as clubs?

Are you sure the Intercept will survive without him?

I think the Rogen interview opened his eyes up to the possibilities in the world of podcasting (more so than maybe talking with Matt Taibbi who's just getting started).

I honestly think that interview gave him the courage to take the leap - and was not at all surprised to hear he resigned today.

Have you read manufacturing dissent? It’s a useful lens to read any mainstream news through.

It's romantic, but blind, to paint examples of one's own opinion like this.

Someone pretty familiar with Greenwald posted a pretty thorough, point-by-point takedown of the piece he wanted The Intercept to publish, and ended up publishing himself: https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1321923054499495938?s=...

Frankly, if you read his original piece, it's exhaustingly shoddy. To say he needs an editor is putting it lightly.

It's sad I had to scour Twitter and replies here to find this on the third page.

The irony of HN upvoting comments that do the same op-ed ranting on their own issues and haven't seem to have thought critically about the article in question or the emails Greenwald himself leaked (which paints the publishing story quite differently from his version of it) is wild but not unexpected.

I can’t believe that you genuinely would consider these tweets to be a “thorough point-by-point takedown” of the article.

If anything, her counter arguments were so weak that I’m even more strongly in support of Greenwald than before.

For example, at one point she implies that we should not trust the emails (and further, that it is incorrect to claim that emails have been leaked), because they are pictures of emails instead of text files. What?

The first point? Ask Greenwald, he’s helped get actual emails from whistleblowers into publication a few times.

I mean the blind computer repair shop owner on the opposite side of the country from where Hunter lives allegedly had 3 laptops in his possession that he offered to do data recovery on for the low total of $75, before digging into the data and handing it to Giuliani and friends. Why would these laptops only have PDF reproductions of some email rather than any originals with any headers intact? Surely they must have the real things in there. Tell him to open outlook.

This breaks my heart for the world, but it increases my respect of Glenn.

Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi are my only two journalists I really seek out and follow. Glenn especially.

I was of the belief that The Intercept was a valid source solely because of Glenn.

I believe Glenn. I will follow Glenn.

Somewhat Off Topic: Glen just did an interview on Joe Rogan [1]. I would suggest it may be worth watching for those interested in this. He discussed some of these issues.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rcLsoIKgA

Lots of people will listen to or see this one. Rogan is very popular.

https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-top-30-u-s-podcasts-accor...

"as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right"

That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is right". As he well knows, all that matters is that the story runs, not whether it's shown to be false months after the election is over. Strange that he thinks his readers are that gullible.

I want to be clear that I'm not claiming to know the truth as it relates to this story, only that this is the position of the editors, and that his argument is nonsense.

I'd like to see all of the critical statements and related content of Joe Biden that he wanted to include.

here's the article:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

I would withhold any opinion that it is a "garbage story" until actually reading it...

I read that "garbage story" was meant as the decision of the editors who would have just finished reading the story to decide if the story was worthy to run and not the poster's personal labeling of the story.

It is about emails which have no headers, that are impossible to verify, that were “known to fbi” for a long time but didn’t produce any action (because likely fake), and that are specifically being pushed to change outcome of election despite, again, no real evidence of their veracity.

Those issues could be addressed in the article. In open debate. That's the way the first amendment works.

There are reasons to not think its purely garbage storage, as many have pointed out. Not to mention a business partner, and someone who was sentenced to jail who has released their gmail account to the public.

The first amendment has nothing to do with activities outside Congress making laws.

huh? it's an inalienable right of us all. It either applies to all of us or it is meaningless.

So if the intercept refuses to publish my story, they are infringing upon my first amendment rights?

You might want to actually read the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law [emphasis added] respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(In various ways that aren't very relevant to the current discussion, this generally applies to states as well.)

You’ve gotten some downvotes so figure I’d paste the actual text of the first amendment here so people know exactly what you’re referring to:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

> Those issues could be addressed in the article. In open debate.

We learned this doesn't work all that well with the Comey letter eleven days before the 2016 election. "We've reopened the Hillary investigation" turned into "oops, nothing new" a few days after the election.

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

Biden could have addressed this story months ago. He knew about it. You'd think the democrats would have learned not to nominate a second clinton who refuses questions. They still think its easy to stomp on a story than address it.

What do you mean he knew about it months ago? The point is that this is all just a fabrication, there is no story to address.

> Biden could have addressed this story months ago.

If the story is true. If it's a fabrication - as they allege, and given that Fox News passed on it (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...) and the Post's reporter didn't want his byline on it (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...), seems reasonably likely - they didn't hear about it until last week.

He could/should have addressed this back in the primaries. They were running stories about it. He said nothing.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/02/joe-biden...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/09/james-biden-health-...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-bi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukr...

Comey's letter wasn't a lie. The timing was bad but it accurately represented what the FBI was doing at the time.

I'm not saying the Comey letter was a lie; I'm saying media organizations made mistakes in how they covered it. If you prefer:

"A fact that's missing critical context can travel half way around the world while the full context is putting on its shoes."

The same fundamental concept is at play here.

It was against FBI policy to declare that so close to an election

Supposedly Comey violated it because some FBI agents were already illegally leaking it to Guliani and he was sure Clinton would win anyway

And then he was fired. :D

> Those issues could be addressed in the article. In open debate.

It's a non-tabloid newspaper. What I want and expect from such a publication is to only see stories for which the basic underlying facts have already been verified. There might still be disagreements over the implications of those facts and how to act on them, which I want and expect to see covered.

One could simply ask the people in the email if they are real. "Impossible to verify" is just lazy excuse-making.

This is basic journalism.

So there is one shady person who says he is real but who can’t prove anything and other people in the emails deny them. Of course if the emails are fake then the forgers would include a confederate as one of the people in the chain.

Is the shady person you’re referring to Tony Bobulinski?

If so, he is the documented primary business partner in the suspected deals who has provided verified emails, he’s a US citizen with a history of military service who put his real name on the line.

It doesn’t get less shady than that. Unless you’re referring to someone else.

This is among the most naive comments in this thread. You clearly know very little about the about the history of military personnel, their credibility, and their political affiliations. You should look into Seal Team Six as an example. Some of them have turned out to be rabid crackpots.

Being associated with the military confers absolutely zero marginal credibility over any other citizen. If anything, it's the opposite since there's a known conservative bias in military and law enforcement - dovish liberalism threatens their values and their power.

Bobulinski has audio recording talking to one of Biden family partners saying "if you go public with this story, you will bury us all".

Here's an audio source[1] for the people downvoting this.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxE2nlDjYt8

"evidence" presented by Tucker Carlosn on Fox. you've already lost me there.

That's not how truth works. If something is not correct, state why it is not correct. You may not like Fox or The Guardian or the NYT or Daily Wire or Vox but that doesn't affect whether their content is true.

Ahh yes, Tucker Carlson "I have the evidence but it was lost in the mail" totally wouldn't allow another to present a one-sided account without challenge and would certainly present evidence in context.

FWIIW it appears that UPS located the mail.

Tucker Carlson has said they made copies anyway.

I'm not under any obligation to wait for the broken clock to be right twice a day when there are plenty of other, perfectly good clocks. Tucker Carlson's journalistic integrity and reputation absolutely play a role in my judgement of the information he reports.

You are wasting your time. People have arrived at the conclusion and are just trying to reverse engineer a "rational" reason for the conclusion. I mean it shouldn't be that hard to convince ppl what in Biden's long career and the millions resulting from it aren't tied up in some corrupt or at the very least shady activity.

True. But it still needs to be said.

> and other people in the emails deny them.

No they haven't. Neither Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, James Gilliar or Rob Walker, have denied that the emails and text messages sent to Tony Bobulinski are real.

That's not how basic fact checking works. You don't just single source a story on the basis of that sources "trust me."

That's literally been the last 4 years of journalism surrounding this administration. Not only that, but the sources almost never are actually named.

It hasn't but people like to pretend it has

Good journalists tend to not rely on on one anonymous source, they check with other sources and available evidence. The thing is this white house is extremely dishonest and corrupt and leaks like a seive hence a lot of anonymous sources

They should be treated with caution and skepticism, but you seem to be using motivated reasoning without an impartial look of the actual probabilities. There's no hard proof they're real and no hard proof they're doctored. This requires a rigorous analysis, not dismissal.

“Facts” conveniently dropped right before election whose veracity cannot be proven and which were clearly placed to affect the election outcome should be treated as fake and not promulgated in public discourse. Otherwise it encourages release of outrageous lies right before election and degrades the whole process.

Will you change your stance on this, in a general sense, if it's all later confirmed to be real? And isn't it true that someone wishing to affect an election, and in possession of real information, would take the exact same action? You can't judge truth solely based on motive. That motive and action is consistent with the carefully timed release of either fake or real information.

The same was probably true of the person who leaked Trump's tax returns before the election. Of course they were initially treated with caution, but the media worked to confirm their veracity. Here they won't even ask the question.

I don't think the emails contain anything very damaging to Biden, as far as I can tell. I think the cover-up, lack of care about truth, and blind zealotry is way worse than anything in the emails. I do happen to think the emails are > 50% likely real, but the absolute refusal to consider them impartially is the actual problem, not the emails. It just shows neither pro-Trump nor anti-Trump give a single shit about truth. They just care about winning. Ideology trumps epistemology.

I want to discourage anyone trying to “time dropping facts”, real or not. If you have real evidence then publish it when you get it. I disliked the NYT Trump taxes expose timing as well, although at least they put a bigger lead time to election.

The problem with these timed attacks is that they fundamentally encourage lying to affect elections.

I don't agree that they encourage lying. "October Surprises" have been a thing for a very long time. It's just politics; the whole point of politics is to try to get your person to win and the other person to lose.

I think the NYT with the tax returns and the NY Post with the emails both acted properly, personally. (Though I strongly distrust both of them in general. NY Post much more so, but NYT gets worse and worse by the month, in my eyes.)

It's also unclear if either of them hoarded anything; they both may have published their pieces as quickly as they could, given the circumstances and when they received the information. I might be missing some evidence of hoarding; apologies if so.

The FBI, according to reports, received this laptop at the same time Trump was being impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate the matter. It appears the FBI sat on this evidence for 9 months.

> Meanwhile, additional documents obtained by Fox News include FBI paperwork that details the bureau’s interactions with John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of “The Mac Shop” who reported the laptop’s contents to authorities, as first reported by the New York Post. > Isaac received a subpoena to testify before U.S. District Court in Delaware on Dec. 9, 2019, the documents show. One page shows what appears to be serial numbers for a laptop and hard drive taken into possession.

[0]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-purported-hunter-biden-...

Trump probably illegally cheated on his taxes what's wrong with Nytimes reporting that

Oh you meant the more recent taxes expose.

> I don't think the emails contain anything very damaging to Biden, as far as I can tell.

This is the weirdest part about Republican attacks on Biden's ethics or integrity. All that I have seen have been accusing Biden or his family of things that Trump and his family do much more often than the Biden's are alleged to have done them.

In a rational world, that kind of attack would totally backfire.

But it's pretty clear people aren't rational. I've had people tell me that Trump must be trustworthy because he's a billionaire, and had the same people tell me that Gates, Soros, Buffett, and Bezos cannot be trusted because they are billionaires. Huh!?

I fully agree with you. That's why I think the cover-up is way, way worse than the actual original thing. It was a nothingburger, and now the media's unintentionally turned it into one of the biggest controversies of the year, by refusing to treat it in a reasonable and balanced way. It's the epitome of the Streisand effect.

This is why I keep posting about this. It's all just unwittingly helping Trump, all because they somehow think being journalists is the thing that'd actually help him or will cause accusations of helping him if he wins.

There's a middleground here. Of course the media having a front page headline about the emails every day would be irresponsible. But refusing to talk about it or look at it inquisitively, at all, ever, is just as irresponsible. As is Twitter censoring links to it.

> the media's unintentionally turned it into one if the biggest controversies of the year

Maybe in the Republican bubble. Outside of it, no one really cares and sees it as a weird and poorly executed complot

I think you're very wrong. I'm the opposite of a Republican, and I think this scandal (the media's and Twitter's behavior, not the emails) is big. Matt Taibbi, a very definitely not-Republican journalist, agrees: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/with-the-hunter-biden-expose-s...

I think the main reason it's not a big controversy elsewhere is due to exactly what you mention - both bubbles absolutely reject anything negative about their side and absolutely accept anything negative about the opposing side. So of course one bubble won't care, or even be aware of what's going on.

Taibbi like Greenwald has gone gaga against the establishment/evidence of Trump's collusion with Russia.

I don't think many people care what he has to say

More relevant is https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/28/trump-conspiracy-th...

Basically a bunch of Republican operatives admitting that virtually no one is buying the BS and that's it's not a useful line of attack

There wasn't any evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, though, as explained in Mueller's report. Greenwald has in the past gone so far as to even doubt interference, but he seems to have changed his stance and on JRE the other day he did say they interfered. Also, as you can tell from my post history, I strongly dislike Trump and everything he stands for, to be absolutely clear. I just want to accuse him of the thousands of things he's actually guilty of and not the things he's not guilty of.

If you read Taibbi's article, he's not at all claiming that the emails are damaging to Biden. The headline is "With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Story".

Like in my posts, he's talking about the media's and Twitter's behavior in censoring the story - not the emails themselves. Everything he says is perfectly consistent with what's said in the Politico article you linked.

Taibbi is one of the most reputable, high-integrity, rational, and truth-seeking journalists working today, in my opinion. Reality often sits between a gray area of poles.

Russiagate has been investigated with insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign. You can easily verify this for yourself. Please stop promoting conspiracy theories.

> All that I have seen have been accusing Biden or his family of things that Trump and his family do much more often than the Biden's are alleged to have done them.

Attack your enemy (especially falsely!) for the things you are guilty of so the people who are outside of the bubble that uncritically listens to propaganda (yours or your opponents) have been primed to dismiss that line of attack as just the kind of thing that propagandists invent about their enemies isn't a novel technique.

Trump went into politics a rich man. Biden become rich while being in Politics.

The difference in the accusations is something like this: "Biden monetized the vice presidency, for personal gain. He set up a money laundering operation, that funnelled money from foreign entities back to his family, through deals his crack head son was making."

His son was making 50k/month from a power energy company in Ukraine, that he had no prior experience in.

This is a lot different than hiring your own kids to work for you in your own administration, as Trump did.

Lots of people here are still holding on to "emails" being fake. Maybe you have heard the term, "A lie is 3 questions deep". The problem with the emails are fake theory, is that that emails have these snippets of personal information, that have been collaborated, along with very incriminating selfie photos of Hunter doing crack and prostitutes in hotel rooms. Both would be incredibly difficult to fake because they are so mundane, and intimate, as no one would have the imagination to fake them.

> Trump went into politics a rich man. Biden become rich while being in Politics.

Biden wasn't very wealthy for most of his political career, which was as a Senator from 1973 to 2009, nor when he was VP. His net worth was under half a million when his VP term ended.

His current wealth of around $10-20 million or so came after he was no longer in office, mostly from a multi-book deal with Flatiron Books for both he and his wife ($8 million), speaking fees (basic fee $100k, but sometimes as low as $8k and as high as $190k), and $540k from his professorship with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

There's a chart of Biden and his wife's total earnings from 1998-2019 in this Forbes article [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/10/22/how-t...

Do you think Obama was told that Hilary was going to claim russia was helping trump?

Biden could have addressed this months ago. the fact that he hasn't is very telling. Before he got the nomination, major publications were running stories about it, like Politico and Bloomberg, etc.

Absolutely, and there're several other indicators as well. I think it's still unclear if all of it's real, and the acquisition story seems sketchy (and very unethical if true), but it seems more likely than not to be legit.

I think staying silent about it is absolutely the smartest move on Joe's part. Trying to defend the contents will only draw more attention to them. It's the media's refusal to be actual journalists that's the dumb thing.

The fact that he's not addressing this properly is the scandalous part. Don't we deserve answers. Even if he's elected, this is not going away and will only hobble his administration. He needs to clear it up and get it out of the way. There's a troubling trend among democrat nominees to suppress. Like him or hate him, you have to admit Trump holds press conferences and answers questions.

Eh, any politician would probably do the same.

I strongly disagree about Trump. That's basically been Trump's exact MO since forever; any real story concerning him just gets instantly dismissed. "It's locker room talk", "it's fake news", etc. Trump and his White House have held far fewer press conferences than past presidents. And at his press conferences, he refuses many questions and dismisses others with either non-answers or just his typical bullshit salesman-speak.

I do think this is probably the "Trumpiest" Biden has acted so far, but I think I'd probably do the same thing if I were in his position, honestly. At least until the election is over. It's politics. He doesn't want to throw too much gasoline on the fire. It's just the media's and Twitter's behavior that I just mind-boggling and gross, and the irrational way so much of the left is treating it.

My point is that we can survive a Biden or Trump. But once you start suppressing points of view, in the end, the election outcome won't matter. And if they think they are doing it "just this once" to save the country, they will do it again, as soon as its convenient for them. These are not the signs of a healthy free press.

What do you mean he knew about it months ago? The point is that this is all just a fabrication, there is no story to address. That’s why they are pushing it now and not months ago.

I'd be willing to take a bet with you that they're not a fabrication, if you want.

If they were a fabrication, the smartest thing to do would be a vehement pronouncement that it's all doctored, fake bullshit. It'd make sense to do that once and then never talk about it again and refuse questions, but the fact that there's not a single denial is telling. It's definitely not proof, but it's a sign.

Also, at least one email thread was corroborated by someone else on the thread as being real. That doesn't prove the rest of the emails are real, but it increases the likelihood.

Again, I don't even think there's anything damaging in there. But the absolute kneejerk insistence that they're fabricated, and that even trying to be impartial about it is giving into propaganda, by so many people, is pretty bizarre to me. There's a reasonable, rational, balanced middle ground here that very few people (besides some actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Ross Douthat, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald - pending exactly what he says in this forthcoming article) seem to be taking.

The drug use and pornography is not relevant and more of a distraction. But the indications he may have been paid off by the CCP is troubling, and would mean he's a compromised candidate. We've spent the last four years of dire warnings from the media about Russian information, only to see them ignore the vast influence of CCP money around the globe.

I don't think the emails show clear signs of any improper behavior with respect to China. It's not necessarily unethical for his family to have had businesses or business relationships in other countries, and it's not necessarily evidence of any relationship with the CCP. The CCP technically controls all business, so it could be said that any business dealing with any part of China is dealing with the CCP, but I think that'd be unfair if there's not an actual, concrete governmental relationship.

And so far, there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence that Joe was profiting from or involved with any of the deals himself (though there are some accusations of this).

The leaks are worthy of fair assessment and research, but people definitely shouldn't jump to conclusions of corruption.

I don't know. Watch Tucker Carlson's Bobulinski interview. He's got nothing to gain from this and comes off very credible. He accounts messages from the Biden family, even Biden himself that are very troubling. Not to mention the "plausible deniability" line chortled by his brother Jim. It deserves an accounting from the candidate. The company they got money, the CFEC was controlled by the CCP.

  > I don't think the emails show clear signs
  > of any improper behavior with respect to China.

Yeah, but there was this recent report (https://www.baldingsworld.com/2020/10/22/report-on-biden-act...) which does seem to show clear links to the Bidens having received CCP money.

Observing similar cases throughout history, the lack of immediate denial and dismissal is a very strong signal that there is some truth to it.

Take for instance the Podesta emails as a recent example. No one denied that they were real, just denounced the means by which they were made public.

Exactly. And the acquisition here also has a very sketchy story. It kind of sounds made up. If it's true, it's very unethical. If it's untrue, it very likely still was. But the method of acquisition doesn't say anything about the content itself.

If Biden came out and said it was false, he’d (a) be giving this garbage more air time than it deserved, and (b) embolden people who think it’s a cover-up. There’s no reason to believe that making such a statement would actually improve things; rather, it would probably make things much worse.

You say there’s nothing damaging in there. If that’s the case then the Biden campaign has even less reason to respond.

At this late stage, yeah, you'd probably be right. But when the story first broke - before a cover-up, before most of the air time - if someone completely forged some emails, it would be the reasonable thing to do.

There's probably nothing really damaging. But some things in it could still potentially be interpreted that way, to the point that if someone had completely fabricated the emails, I think it'd be worth coming out and saying "to be clear, these are blatantly made up, my son never sent this email/these emails" even just once. Even in just an off-hand comment in an interview.

For example, here's a screenshot of a few of the emails in question: https://i.imgur.com/XNQarwF.png

Is this a smoking gun of corruption of any sort? Obviously not. But could it raise some questions, before an important election? It could. If someone had completely fabricated this email, in my opinion almost any rational person would, at least once, somewhere, say or write that it was absolutely completely fabricated. Additionally, someone on this exact email thread corroborates that the email thread is all real, and claims that "H" is Hunter Biden and "the big guy" is Joe Biden, which seems plausible given the email context.

I think it definitely is a cover-up. Not because of some collusion between Biden and the media; I think it's all social forces and incentives.

Optically, the media doesn't want accusations of having helped Trump win if he wins.

At the object level, a large percentage of people in the media lean left and strongly dislike Trump and don't want to do anything that might help him win.

And, probably, some percentage may also be so biased that they really think there's no possible way the emails could be real.

In the last case it wouldn't be called a cover-up, but it's being awful at one's job. In all of the cases, it's not a cover-up in the sense of a nefarious conspiracy, but it's journalists not being journalists due to strong political bias.

I think if this were leaked emails about Trump, the right-leaning media would've done exactly the same thing and not reported on it, or only reported that "the left-wing media is spewing conspiracy theories again!", as the inverse of what's happening here. I think the lesson that's reinforced here for me is just that all media organizations of any kind once again can't be trusted when it comes to actually caring about truth and epistemology.

"before a cover-up" Its been talked about and has as many holes in it as the other dozen attempted smears.

It's not about the holes, it's about if it's newsworthy to even discuss, and in my opinion it is newsworthy to discuss. There's a difference between holes and bullshit. The emails are real; the extrapolations and Bobulinski's claims are what's unclear. Some of his claims are objectively true, and some may not be.

>If they were a fabrication, the smartest thing to do would be a vehement pronouncement that it's all doctored, fake bullshit

This is false, and rather laughable. If he addresses them directly, then that gives legitimate news organizations license to report on his denial, including reporting on the accusations. By not denying them he puts the onus on those pushing the story to demonstrate its legitimacy first.

I don't agree at all. Quoting another comment I made:

>For example, here's a screenshot of a few of the emails in question: https://i.imgur.com/XNQarwF.png

>Is this a smoking gun of corruption of any sort? Obviously not. But could it raise some questions, before an important election? It could. If someone had completely fabricated this email, in my opinion almost any rational person would, at least once, somewhere, say or write that it was absolutely completely fabricated.

>Additionally, someone on this exact email thread corroborates that the email thread is all real, and claims that "H" is Hunter Biden and "the big guy" is Joe Biden, which seems plausible given the email context.

The smartest move, if they're true, is to be silent. The smartest move, if even a single email is doctored, is to protest that it's fake.

There's already been tons of reporting in non-left-aligned media about the emails and the fact that his silence is suggestive of them being real. If he were to deny it, the very little bit of reporting that NYT etc. did about it, suggesting it's likely disinformation, likely from Russia, could be even more strong with its claims that it's total bullshit.

Combined with the corroboration of the person in that email thread, and the fact there isn't anything that interesting in the emails (why doctor something so boring? like with the DNC emails hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence), I'm happy to bet money with you that they'll be proven to be legitimate within a few months. I don't think it's proven at all, but I think it's more likely than not.

There was an article I saw recently quoting from a right-wing political operative about smears. The takeaway was that a smear has little value if it stays contained within right-wing echo chambers. The goal is to get the mainstream press to talk about it non-stop. That is the mark of a successful smear campaign (this is tangential to the information's accuracy).

The fact that the mainstream press hasn't talked about the controversy much outside of the context of twitter et al blocking its dissemination, or it being a suspected disinformation campaign is a win for Biden. Denying the content of the controversy suddenly allows the story to be reported as a he-said, she-said, giving the story a life of its own. This does a disservice to Biden because now the reporting can be neutral between the parties. The battle here is over swing voters, and a he-said/she-said controversy is exactly the kind of nebulous "concerns" the GOP hope to raise about Biden. It was the specter of something going on that defeated Hillary and they're hoping to repeat this with Biden. Not addressing the specifics of the controversy allows the story to stay where it belongs, as a right-wing media hail mary.

As a comparison, mainstream press didn't report on the Trump dossier until Buzzfeed's reporting of the dossier became the story. Once the story becomes reified, mainstream outlets can then report on the controversy. The winning move is to keep the story from becoming its own controversy. Not addressing it directly helps to accomplish this.

No. Responding to smears gives them more attention than they would otherwise get ruminating in the bowels of the internet. Those who are calling for Biden to deny them really want him to legitimize the content by addressing them.

> This requires a rigorous analysis, not dismissal.

a distraction so to speak. This is exactly why they're doing it.

> There's no hard proof they're real

Assertions made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

"Hard proof" is different from "evidence". In my opinion, there is some evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934971

Of course it's not proof, but there's currently some evidence indicating it's real, and currently no evidence indicating it's doctored. Given the circumstances, it'd be extremely irresponsible for any media outlet to assume they're definitely true, but it's almost as irresponsible to assume they can't possibly be true and to not even raise the possibility they could be real.

While I haven't seen Greenwald's piece, there is a lot more to the "Hunter Biden leaks" than some screenshots of emails allegedly recovered from a laptop.

You are nto following the story, cleary. Not only some texts have been verified, they have a former business partner going on record, verifying the messages along the way. What else do you want? People involved in the threads are claiming the messages to be true. What else do you want?

And, by the way, I could care less for the video and photographic content of that laptop, to me that content is irrelevant --actually, I feel sorry for Joe Biden and I can't imagine how hard it must be to have a son who is a drug addict and a man child. But shouldn't that also corroborate the validity of the laptop content? Why isn't the media all over it?

And, please, let's not pretend that several Trump stories came from anonymous sources with no audio or text evidence. And the mainstream media danced all over it. For instance, the (supposedly) anonymous senior administration who was part of the resistance. Not only did the NYT run stories on his unverified accounts (no audio/text/video to back it up), they also wrote a book with his accounts. And we just learned that this senior admin wasn't senior after all. How can you really read thsoe stories and not come way perplexed by the blatant bias? I understand why people hate Trump, but is it worth to abandon journalism standards? Where do we go from here?

We need to have faith in the general public that if this story comes out, along with the set of doubts that you just mentioned, that the public will be able to interpret it accurately.

Keep in mind that _you_ are a member of the public.

Your statement is counter to fundamental thesis of democracy. We must believe in the intelligence of the public to make an educated decision.

Your statement is also counter to the fundamental thesis of capitalism. We must believe in the intelligence of the consumer to make an educated decision.

If you don't believe in the sanctity of the public to make educated decisions, than what do you suggest we do to restore the fallen pillars of our society? You no longer believe in the capability of the public to perform capitalism and democracy. Rather, you believe that some subset of society should wield the power to influence the lower masses. Like rats in a maze.

Now, that I have characterized this harsh dichotomy for you, you must face the question are you a rat in a cage or are you one of the puppet masters?

The emails have literally been verified by people on the emails and further their authenticity has never been denied by the Biden campaign. To claim that they are fake or disinformation at this point is either an act of extreme ignorance or duplicitous intent.

No denial other than Joe Biden saying, "I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life," during the 3rd Presidential debate.

It's not Biden's to deny, it's Giuliani's to prove.

To be fair, the implication in the emails isn't that he took money directly, but that his son held it for him. So the answer given above doesn't actually answer the question on enrichment of office.

It's not only Biden's to deny, it's His brothers, His Sons, and the others named. Further, if the information wasn't true or not believe to be true, why is it being blacklisted / treated as it's true? Why was distribution banned?

That's the questions being asked that are being shut down.

Generally, unverifiable information is not given much airplay. Not even Fox News or the WSJ would touch this one.

Making an outrageous accusation and then demanding that the accused defend themselves against it is an old Glenn Beck technique. Sort of like the question, "Are you still beating your wife?"

>Not even Fox News or the WSJ would touch this one.

Fox New's most popular show, and as far as I know the most popular cable news show there is, dedicated their entire hour to an interview with one of the people involved in this story, and has been covering the story extensively for the last week. What you are saying here is absolutely wrong.

And I mean, just a quick google search also shows that WSJ was writing stories about this a couple of weeks ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunter-biden-business-11602...

To clarify the WSJ opinion section wrote articles including the one you linked that treat the allegations credibly. The newsroom wasn't as generous: https://variety.com/2020/politics/news/wall-street-journal-h...

I should have been clearer. The news departments of those two Murdoch entities would not touch the story. Anything goes in the oped department.

I think what they were talking about is that before Rudy Giuliani approached the NY Post he tried to get Fox News to publish the story but they refused it.

> Fox New's most popular show, and as far as I know the most popular cable news show there is

Carlson's show doesn't even pretend to be a news show, in the sense of something that communicates what is even purportedly actual facts about the subjects it discusses, it is a vehicle for presenting hyperbole and non-literal commentary which is recognized as such by any reasonable viewer.

That's not just me, that's Fox News's own successful argument defending the show against defamation claims.

Responding to sibling comment.

Fox News’s most popular show is Tucker Carlson’s.

Note that Fox lawyers recently argued in court that Carlson has no obligation to tell the truth.

Fox News Argues Viewers Don't Assume Tucker Carlson Reports Facts

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/fox-news-defends-t...

The New York Post is a 200 year old publication started by Alexander Hamilton, it's not some fringe media source.

A few elections back, there was a the “swift boat” controversy with John Kerry. Out of nowhere a bunch of people who worked with Kerry claimed his military experience was fraudulent in some way and the media ate it up, being one of the major factors that costed him the election.

Later on, and with more digging, people who were near him at the time confirmed that the controversy was all a sham. The people who previously claimed Kerry lied all suddenly claimed they misremembered, or gently admitted that they lied. There were just enough bits and pieces of facts to build a story, and BS was used to glue it all together.

I think people are seeing a repeat of that. Some things may be true, but a lot of overly convenient information is coming out to bind it together that’s hard to absolutely verify and will likely collapse under scrutiny.

I would say the most likely reason the FBI did nothing because there was no crime.

What Hunter/Joe Biden are accused of doing is a very popular scam among politicians in most countries and unless you are dumb enough to explicitly put in writing a bribery scheme then there is very little legal risk.

The scam comes about because it is fundamentally unfair to limit the employment opportunities of a politician’s family or the politician themselves after they leave office. So what happen is that companies will put a politician’s family members into positions of employment where there is a large gap between the value they produce in that position and what their reenumeration is. Alternatively, after the politician leaves office they will be parachuted into one of these scam jobs.

In return for organising these scam positions the company gets some alternative value from the politician. There can be a whole range of value from impressing (helping to scam) third parties to actually getting favourable government action or policy changes.

I feel like this is a very common arrangement for politicians and this is part of the reason there is a lot of pressure by the media to not cover this.

This argument is specifically, and repeatedly, addressed by Greenwald in his article. [1]

> The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as those other archives that were widely reported. There are sources in the email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate. The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all, neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake.

1 - https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

At this point I'm forced to conclude that there is more evidence pointing towards the authenticity of this information than pointing away from it.

Consider:

- The FBI came out and said there's no evidence of foreign disinformation.

- As has the DOJ.

- As has the director of national intelligence.

- Hunter's lawyer contacting the shop owner to ask for the return of the hardware

- The FBI's grand jury subpoena for the laptop

- The Biden campaign's weak (those meetings weren't in our schedule), later walked back to non (they might have happened anyways), repudiation of authenticity

- Travel mentioned in the emails matches up with Secret Service travel records

- The absurd volume of pictures of Hunter Biden in compromising positions

The argument against authenticity, at this point, falls deeper and deeper into conspiracy theorist territory. At the very least, it fails Occam's razor. The best argument I know of against authenticity is the lack of release of any raw messages with headers, but even that is pretty low-impact in the face of FBI/DOJ/DNI confirmation.

I've collected what I found so far here, both arguments for and against, with sources where possible: https://www.kialo.com/are-the-hunter-biden-emails-as-release...

If the raw messages are later released in whole, and the DKIM is validated, that's the smoking gun. A number of media organizations are then going to have some very uncomfortable questions to answer. The same later applies to some of our three-letter agencies if they turn out to be bogus. That would mean our investigative and intelligence agencies are both tainted.

As of this morning, a third party has verified the DKIM headers on at least one of the messages.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-auth...

You can't do that if its censored.

You also can't say for sure whether it's true or not if it's not censored. At best you can judge plausibility, but plausibility isn't truth.

Most evidence can be faked. The chain of custody for evidence is important, and that's not a property of the evidence, but of its history.

There's no substitute for trust in the person or organization reporting the news.

They can be cross referenced with the information that's in the emails. Many have already done this. A business partner, Bobulinski, and a gmail account of one of his partners serving in prison. This is a moving story. The non-interest in even trying to verify it, as pointed out by Greenwald, is very concerning.

It hasn't been, though. Private citizens of a private company opted not to publish it in their paper, and that's not the same thing.

And he says that they're threatening litigation if he publishes it anywhere else because it could make them look bad.

Where did he say that? Towards the top of the linked substack, he says: "The censored article will be published on this page shortly."

Edit: I dunno if I agree that this counts.

"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)."

> are using thinly disguised lawyer-crafted threats

I don't think there's any other way to interpret that than "threatening litigation". You don't receive a message from a company's lawyers because they're having a friendly conversation about not intending to do anything.

Greenwald published his email exchange with his editor. He brought up his contractual right to publish elsewhere if he likes, in his first response to his editor. He started accusing them of censorship in the second email (which he sent after the first before he got a reply back). WHen they did respond, they said it would be "harmful and detrimental to The Intercept" if he published it elsewhere. Glenn can call that a "lawyer crafted threat", I see it as a true and accurate statement from his editor.

Guess what I'm saying is, he didn't receive a message from the company's lawyers that I've seen yet.

Here's the Merriam-Webster definition of censored: "suppressed, altered, or deleted as objectionable : subjected to censorship".

Government censorship is a subset of censorship. Private citizens of a private company are perfectly capable of suppressing, altering, or deleting material they consider objectionable, which seems to have been what happened in this case.

If the entire editorial team and his peers rejected it, it seems pretty clear.

I will reserve judgement until reading the article. Greenwald has certainly had his share of garbage takes, but also can have a quite refreshingly honest perspective.

Vs someone with the history of journalistic integrity and clout as Greenwald, there's no doubt in my mind whom I'd trust more on their opinion (btw: it's not the New York editorial elite).

Yep. Just like the entire team of conference organizers decided that there was a code of conduct violation. No doubt about it. He's guilty. I don't need to evaluate any evidence to know that. It's obvious.

There was an almost mutiny from the NYT when they published Tom Cotton's article in their op-ed, which forced the editor to resign. They couldn't bear hearing from the other side, and this is just another example of the same mentality. This is exactly what Greenwald and Tabbiti have been reporting about, the fascist left censoring or wanting to censor the news to only those opinions that they want to hear.

EDIT: For the record, I'm "center-left". When I say fascist left, I mean the extreme left who believe that anyone who disagrees with them is the enemy. Unfortunately this belief is spreading more and more amongst the left, but I still believe there are a lot of moderate, even-headed left but the conversation is being dominated by the fascist left.

The use of terms like "the fascist left" makes it harder to appreciate the merits of statements like this. Also, the phrase is a bit oxymoronic as fascism is, specifically, a conservative ideology.

Nobody really knows what fascism is. It's more of an excuse to make up the rules as you go along to obtain a certain objective. Both left and right are susceptible to it. That's why we need transparency and a free and open press.

> Nobody really knows what fascism is. It's more of an excuse to make up the rules as you go along to obtain a certain objective. Both left and right are susceptible to it.

This really only serves to muddy the waters. There are a few clear and well-recognized definitions of fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#By_scho...

There may be some differences, but they very clearly describe the same set of core traits.

My point was that its not a "left" or "right" phenomenon. The political extremes tend to resemble one another as they are willing to forego principles such as free speech in order to suppress political opponents. Everyone should be very weary of this. We can survive Trump, what we can't survive is a press that feels the need to censor content. If they get away with it, they will use it again and again.

That's not true either though. Fascism is by definition a right-wing form of authoritarianism, because of how it uses class divides to build its political power.

The corresponding left-wing authoritarianism would be "leftist populism", "Stalinism", or some other term.

What you're describing is called Horseshoe Theory, and it's not well-supported by evidence. Right-wing and left-wing populism have a few things in common (authoritarianism primarily), but have much larger differences than similarities.

I will point out that attacks on a free press ARE a clear sign of authoritarian regimes. I would encourage you to take a look at the history of the German word "Lügenpresse" (literally "lying press"). Especially take note if you see similar things being said about the modern media -- and which groups are saying it.

You say "by definition a right-wing form [...] it uses class divides to build its political power", but how does that match the right? The very first thing I associate with obtaining power via class divides is Karl Marx. There's also Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot, and anybody in modern USA politics who complains about the "1%ers" or "income inequality". I'm really really not seeing how that matches up as you claim it does. I think you need to accept the uncomfortable and obvious conclusion here.

I phrased that poorly. Fascism uses economic and class features that largely do not exist in a far-left society, such as a sizeable middle class and corporate power.

From Umberto Eco's definition of fascism: "'Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class', fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups."

From Gentile's definition: "corporative organization of the economy that suppresses trade union liberty, broadens the sphere of state intervention, and seeks to achieve, by principles of technocracy and solidarity, the collaboration of the 'productive sectors' under control of the regime, to achieve its goals of power, yet preserving private property and class divisions;"

I understand that it is appealing to try to dilute the meaning of "fascism" by applying it overly broadly until it loses its meaing. Whataboutism is also convenient way for the Right to distance themselves from the evils committed by the right-wing Nazis and other far-right fascist groups.

The better way for the Right to distance itself is by supporting moderate democratic norms rather than giving in to violent populist impulses. Power is one heck of a drug though.

The world has gone 75 years without real fascism or Nazis, so the definitions shouldn't be changing, yet they have over the last 20 years. Older dictionaries and encyclopedias very clearly contradict the newer ones on the left-right measure of fascism and Nazis.

So, correcting for the projection:

"I understand that it is appealing to try to dilute the meaning of "fascism" by applying it overly broadly until it loses its meaing. Whataboutism is also convenient way for the Left to distance themselves from the evils committed by the left-wing Nazis and other far-left fascist groups."

The facts don't change just because some people want to fling a dehumanizing insult.

A better phrasing of the parent post is that very few people use the term fascism based on its actual definition; it's a highly-parroted word whose colloquial meaning has been entirely diluted, yet still carries gargantuan negative weight.

I will agree that people intentionally misuse the word "fascism."

For example, the people in this comment thread claiming that editors making editorial decisions are the "fascist left" are pretty clearly misusing the word.

I would tend to agree. It would be stronger to extract the individual behaviours in mind, and not use that word incorrectly.

That said, 'not fascistic' does not imply 'good'.

Sure, there's TONS of things that are 'not fascistic' but are bad.

“Fascism “ means basically “really bad” the same way “Hitler” means “really bad”. I really hate it that most groups have their favorite bad words, be it “racist”, “socialist”, “fascist” or “neocon” without having even a basic understanding of their meaning or history. They all just mean “so bad that it can’t be even discussed or questioned”.

Perhaps the term "the authoritarian left" or "the totalitarian left" would fit a bit better. I think in context their point is very clear though.

For those on the left who're against free speech and such, I've started using "antiliberal left". I'm not even sure they'd object to the term. (Consider this a try at finding out.)

One of Gentile's elements defining fascism is "a police apparatus that prevents, controls, and represses dissidence and opposition, including through the use of organized terror." Sending in the military against protesters would be literally a textbook example.

Cotton's OpEd was a prominent member of government advocating for fascist actions.

The irony here is palpable.

He specifically said rioters, not protesters. Read the actual op-ed.

I did, when it came out. Labeling them as rioters did not make the piece any less concerning.

Read up on the Reichstag fire and how it was used to justify suspension of civil rights. The parallels are striking.

You didn't read it properly, because he never said protesters. Changing "rioters" to "protesters" completely changes the meaning of what Cotton said. I don't agree with him, but I am vehemently against people twisting others' words to spread lies and misinformation. He said "rioters". Don't lie and say he said "protesters" because then you are implying he is trying to quash free speech with the military.

In this case, you are the one in the wrong. Spreading misinformation purposefully to trick people into agreeing with you is what is destroying this country right now and you are doing this.

In context, many had, and continue to, misconstrue protests as riots. As such, a call to send in the military against rioters cannot be differentiated from a call to send in the military against protestors, unless you can get cotton and the protestors to agree on what the differences between protest and riot are.

Yes, it was a calculated move to try to paint ALL the protests as riots and justify potentially deadly use of force.

> You didn't read it properly, because he never said protesters. Changing "rioters" to "protesters" completely changes the meaning of what Cotton said.

This was a calculated move to paint all the protesters as rioters and drum up support for treating them as such.

Even without reading into it, Cotton was advocating for bringing US military troops into US cities to put down the protests because some of them turned violent. That is NOT normal, and NOT something we should see in a healthy democracy.

I might add that once the police stopped attacking protesters violently, the protests calmed down pretty quickly.

> Spreading misinformation purposefully to trick people into agreeing with you is what is destroying this country right now and you are doing this.

Projection is such an ugly thing to see.

> This was a calculated move to paint all the protesters as rioters

I don't think this is true. Quoting from his piece:

"Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...

He clearly says in plain words that the majority are law-abiding protestors. I suppose you could argue that the piece actually means something other than the plain words that it uses, and you could certainly argue that he's drawing the line between protestors and rioters in the wrong place, but at no point does the op-ed make the claim that all protestors are rioters.

Every single action taken by the fascist left mimic traditional fascism. They have taken the tactics from Mussolini and adapted well for their own purposes. Suppression of different ideas, censorship, etc. The only difference is that it's flown under the banner of the left, but their tactics are very much the same.

> Every single action taken by the fascist left mimic traditional fascism. They have taken the tactics from Mussolini and adapted well for their own purposes.

There's no such as even fascist left, even in the kind of disputable way in which Leninist and non-Leninist Marxists will argue over whether Leninism is a genuinely Marxist, Communist, or leftist movement, or a form of right-wing state capitalism.

Fascism is an ideology, not a set of tactics. Yes, right and left wing groups (both moderate and extreme) often learn tactics from each other. No, that doesn't make the ideologies the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_fascism

That's a reference to National Bolsheviks, which haven't existed since the night of long knives.

"There should be a communist utopia...for aryans as they crush all other races under their boot" is not a movement with really any members anymore.

Try reading the links for once. It has nothing to do with National Bolsheviks. The links talk about more modern forms of left-wing fascism.

This is not a uniquely fascist thing. Every dictatorship suppresses different ideas, censors etc.

Otherwise you could argue that giving speeches or writing pamphlets and books is a fascist thing.

Here's an actual, in depth definition of fascism from Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism. The connections to the modern left are tangential at best.

    "The Cult of Tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

    "The Rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

    "The Cult of Action for Action's Sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

    "Disagreement Is Treason" – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

    "Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

    "Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

    "Obsession with a Plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite's 'fear' of the 1930s Jewish populace's businesses and well-doings; see also anti-Semitism). Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

    Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak." On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

    "Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy" because "Life is Permanent Warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

    "Contempt for the Weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

    "Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

    "Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."

    "Selective Populism" – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People."

    "Newspeak" – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

Not publishing an editorial calling for an authoritarian crackdown is facism now?

Greenwald was the founder of the outfit. I would think weight would be given to senior editors judgment.

The same editorial team and peers that tried to get Lee Fang fired for having the audacity to interview actual residents in areas where rioting was happening?

The poster makes no claims that the story is garbage, only that the editor though so.

Now that his actual article has been published it is super clear Greenwald’s story is pretty garbage. He has no evidence of anything and even states so plainly. It is purely conjecture that Hunter Biden’s big mouth statements might be connected to impropriety, with utterly no proof.

Then it turns into a comically bad diatribe about bias in the press.

Greenwald over the past 4 years has become an insufferable troll. This article adds nothing new in any way, and given the wildly unjustified harm it could do to an impending election, it is beyond doubt that the Intercept editorial decision not to run this was the right decision.

Exactly. This looks much more like Greenwald trying to capitalize on hype. The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked and there is tons of evidence to suggest it’s illegitimately sourced by agents directly directed by Trump, from sources with active incentives to try to damage Biden.

It is responsible to decline to run this story. It only serves to feed conspiracy theories and drive disinformation opportunities right at the time of an election.

I am really disappointed with Greenwald here.

> Exactly. This looks much more like Greenwald trying to capitalize on hype. The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked

Oh please. Let's try to keep the "post-truth" ethos on the Right, rather than adopting it ourselves, mmkay?

You are far too late on this one, sir. It's been thoroughly adopted by both sides of the aisle.

Most of those adopting it on the "Democrat" side of the aisle, I wouldn't call on the Left.

Is it your presumption that only people not "on the Right" are allowed on HN?

My presumption is that someone on the Right would not be making these specific misleading claims.

Don't worry, I am well aware that there are quite a few right-wingers here.

Absolutely not. Your comment is absolutely not describing the world.

This story has been completely debunked. I welcome real facts suggesting otherwise, but there truly aren’t any. This story is not being cut because of Evil Democrat Socialites. It’s cut because it truly, really, actually is debunked by well-regarded professional journalists at many other trusted outlets.

Greenwald has spent the last four years on a bizarre war path against the Democratic establishment. This is just more of the same.

> This story has been completely debunked.

The "story" (at least that I am referring to) is that Hunter Biden had these emails and they were released. Is your claim that the emails were forgeries? If not, the NYPost story had relevant, true, information of public interest.

If you're discussing the broader context of the Ukraine prosecutor firing, I agree that there is strong evidence that Biden was not pushing for his firing in response to circumstantial evidence of pressure from his son or anything. Not, to me, strong enough to consider the claim "completely debunked."

The pushed story is that those emails implicate Joe Biden or otherwise call into question his involvement with foreign interests.

It has been completely debunked - the emails do not contain any suggestion, evidence or information that in any way implicates Joe Biden in activity that even might have impropriety, let alone actual impropriety.

Nobody’s saying the emails don’t exist. They appear to have been up for sale in Ukraine for at least a year, suggesting that the Giuliani “found it in Delaware” story is possibly a lie, but the emails exist nonetheless.

Their content has no bearing or connection to Joe Biden. Drawing that line would be deliberate misinformation purely for election destabilization.

> Their content has no bearing or connection to Joe Biden. Drawing that line would be deliberate misinformation purely for election destabilization.

The emails mention his father, a meeting, etc. There's obviously some connection, but claiming that the emails are referencing a meeting with Joe is not "deliberate misinformation."

I'm sorry, but it's just pretty clear that your threshold for what constitutes a "debunking" is much lower than mine.

It's a stupid reason to not vote for Biden anyways, but I think it is better to be honest.

Emphatically no. A son possibly mentioning his dad and alluding to things you are wildly speculating about is not “some connection.”

Every credible journalist would laugh you out of the room if you try to frame that as if it’s legitimate in any way or counts as evidence of anything besides Hunter Biden having a big mouth.

Just as they are shutting down even Greenwald if he is going to try to pull that same disingenuous crap just to keep pushing his crusade against the Democratic party leaders.

> Every credible journalist

My parents are both retired journalists in DC, one a former editor-in-chief of a publication with millions of paid subscriptions. Both voted for Biden.

They have also expressed their concern with the response to the Hunter Biden story, but I won't name them for obvious reasons.

I understand that you have a vested interest in presenting this as open-and-shut, but in no way are you speaking for "every credible journalist" unless you mean in a tautological no-true-scotsman way.

It’s very scary that disinformation conspiracy theories affected them like that.

And I mean this absolutely sincerely, from the POV of open journalism, high priority for inquiry into our democratic process, freedom of the press.

The way the Hunter Biden email story has morphed into basically a manipulative, disinformation campaign to overwhelm citizens and undercut basic trust in journalistic integrity and election procedures is staggering and frightening - as this anecdote about your parents being swindled by it highlights.

It could be a no true scotsman issue on my part, or it could be that really, actually the story is completely debunked and belief in it indicates departure from credible journalism to instead embrace partisan conspiracy theories.

The evidence really, actually suggests the latter in this case.

> It’s very scary that disinformation conspiracy theories affected them like that.

The existence of the emails is not disinformation, nor has it been discredited. You're attaching all of these claims to what "the story" is and using it to make extremely condescending remarks about reputable journalists (and my parents).

Good day, can't wait for after Nov. 3rd for people to return to normal.

Nothing has been debunked. The politifact link you shared above says "not corroborated". Those are not the same thing.

You are incorrect.

The standing claim is that Hunter Biden’s emails do affirmatively show Joe Biden’s involvement in questionable or illegal activity.

The emails do not show that. This has been established by all major news outlets, even Fox News.

Therefore it is debunked.

Now, some totally separate other evidence may show something different. That is irrelevant. The claim is about what these emails affirmatively prove or corroborate. If someone were to say these emails suggest impropriety by Joe Biden, that claim is totally debunked.

The FBI just confirmed an active investigation started in 2019. They just interviewed Bobulinsky as a witness.

Uhh no, that is Sinclair Broadcast Group claptrap.

They are saying the DOJ confirms it. So they are about to be prosecuted or this is legitimate.

https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/tony-bobulinksi-i-have...

> The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked

Although I've been following this story, I am not familiar with this round debunking. I realize that the email headers are not available, but have the emails decisively been shown to be illegitimate? Or just difficult to verify?

If I produce a random TXT file saying jMyles is doing BIG BAD THING X, is it on you to show it is illegitimate? No, it is on whomever is producing this to show it is in fact a real email, from a real source, and not just something they made up on MS Word to win an election, especially if they make up things a mile a minute.

> If I produce a random TXT file saying jMyles is doing BIG BAD THING X, is it on you to show it is illegitimate?

It's on him to deny it, yes. He doesn't have to prove that it's illegitimate, but if he doesn't even say so, then that's reason enough to assume it's true.

Seems like there would be a bit of a risk for a personal DDOS attack by that logic?

This attitude doesn't seem reasonable. Anyone can make up random nonsense about someone else (no federal libel laws in the US...). Acknowledging the nonsense will only legitimize it. Why should the subject of the nonsense have to invest time and energy in debunking/denying it?

I'm simply looking for a more thorough explanation of the claim that "the entire spectrum of claims regarding Hunter Biden has been roundly debunked".

Bubolinski, a recipient on the emails recovered from the laptop, has confirmed that those sent to him are genuine. Has that claim been debunked?

If you are simply saying that the evidence isn't strong enough to say one way or another, fine. But "roundly debunked" means, at least to me, that there has been an investigation and that the factual claims have in some way been shown to be false. That, to my knowledge, hasn't actually happened.

And sure, "anyone can make up random nonsense", but these claims aren't being made by "anyone", but by people with closeness to the situation that not just anyone can claim. And they aren't random nonsense; they are part of a pattern of explaining how a family has become fabulously rich on a 176k salary.

I don't think it's too much to ask people to deny any claim made about them by, say, the four largest papers in the US, if that claim is in fact wrong.

If you are in a position to know such a thing, and you assert its veracity, then I don't think I can properly say that I have "debunked" it without actually investigating your role and showing that your assertion is false.

There is a difference between a claim being unproven - and properly erring on the side of caution and skepticism - and claiming that the story has been investigated and debunked (when, to my knowledge, it has not).

This summarizes it fairly well

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/29/tony-bobulins...

Right - there is no evidence yet showing that Joe Biden had direct awareness of his son's corrupt dealings.

That's leagues away from saying that Hunter's involvement in these things has been "debunked."

There’s also no evidence yet that Donald Trump wore a full body costume and pretended to be Hunter Biden while typing these emails.

Guess that can’t be called debunked either.

“No evidence yet disproving...” is not a standard of evidence for an extreme assertion. It’s ridiculous to act like it is.

The number of logical fallacies in your reply is alarming - and most regular citizens are susceptible to these same fallacies, especially when spammed out in high production infotainment.

I don't think your analogy fits. If someone who was known to be in Trump's presence produced a journal entry from a third party, also known to be in Trump's presence, saying, "Dear Diary, Trump wore a full body costume today...", and you then said that the sourcing of the journal had been "debunked", I'd expect something more than just the naked assertion that the journal was not legitimately sourced, with no serious investigation of the claims of the party producing it.

At least two recipients of emails from the laptop have confirmed their authenticity. Now, maybe there's still some forgery happening here, I don't know. But the idea that it's made up from whole cloth is no longer plausible.

Can you point me to a specific sentence in the Greenwald piece that you think is "debunked"?

Your extended analogy likewise doesn’t fit either. It would be more like if John Bolton sent an email that said, “we should get the big guy to wear a Hunter Biden costume ha ha” and then everyone starts demanding, based on nothing but extrapolating from this email, that Trump in fact has to deny it all and some investigation should be launched.

I think you’re wrong in your last sentence because there is nothing for Biden to deny or refute. The emails are real, probably sourced in a scammy way by Giuliani, but still real. They just do not contain any content that suggests or corroborates any wrongdoing or questionable behavior in any sense other than Hunter Biden has a big mouth and is a bit immature, that’s it.

What aspect of it would you expect needs to be denied or investigated? No part proves or suggests Joe Biden had anything to do with it or had any meetings or any business dealings related to it. No part suggests or proves Hunter Biden leveraged any political promises or power of his father for any profit.

I cannot see what aspect of it you believe is open to investigation. One person ran their mouth about their political figure father and .... nothing. That's all.

We cannot pretend like that requires journalists to devote attention to it - in any other situation they utterly would not. That’s a nothing story 8 days a week. It’s only being inflamed this time because it is politicized to subvert an election.

> The emails are real, probably sourced in a scammy way by Giuliani, but still real.

Agreed - and to be clear, I count Giuliani as the scum of the damn earth (and I say this as a New Yorker).

But do you think that you can say, on one hand, that the emails are real, but that "The entire spectrum of details around the Biden emails has been roundly debunked"?

> They just do not contain any content that suggests or corroborates any wrongdoing or questionable behavior in any sense other than Hunter Biden has a big mouth and is a bit immature, that’s it.

It shows that convincingly, yes. But, we also know that he received a $600k salary as a result. Isn't it worth investigating why? What did he do to be worth this salary?

> “Isn't it worth investigating why? What did he do to be worth this salary?”

No, it really, really isn’t. The FBI already did and found nothing worth prosecuting. There is no reason to even loosely speculate it has a connection to Joe Biden.

It is a 100% non-story, period. Unless some vast new source of information was obtained, there is nothing in it.

“This info contains no wrongdoing and no indication of Joe Biden being involved” is not at all valid pretext for “but shouldn’t it be investigated?”

If that were true, all possible facts that are ever gathered showing no wrongdoing would be justification for constant investigation. Every time someone with noteworthy parents spouted off some immature nonsense, it would be the pretext for never ending persecution by investigation.

This situation truly, truly is not noteworthy. Hunter Biden did some business deals and ran his mouth. In doing so, there is no evidence of anything questionable or illegal. Why would go around opening up big investigations into pieces of information that don’t prove, corroborate or even suggest wrongdoing?

I simply do not trust the FBI. I do not think that the FBI, throughout its history, has earned our trust, and it has done many awful things to betray it. I see no evidence that this entity is materially different than it was when it attempted to gaslight Dr. King into suicide.

I think that this does warrant an investigation. We have the son of a powerful career politician offering to sell access to his Dad's office. We have a foreign corporation cutting a generous check on that basis. We have emails outlining these details in an archive that has been verified in part by one of the people in the "To" field, who was indeed a business partner in an earlier venture. We have an official decision being made during this time, by Joe, which is favorable to the corporation in question.

None of these facts are in dispute.

It seems the only dispute is whether they warrant an investigation by someone with more integrity than the FBI (ideally, a lot more).

While I don’t agree with you, and I believe wide distrust of established justice offices like the FBI is conspiracy theory behavior inflamed by Trump, I at least grant you that if this is your position, I guess it makes sense to also believe all the disinformation around the Hunter Biden emails.

I just feel so sad for the US that it is such a deep epistemological divide.

Almost half the country appears to believe true knowledge no longer derives from fact or observation, but instead derives from speculative conspiracy theories that use lack of evidence to reinforce themselves to the point of being essentially unfalsifiable religious beliefs, like QAnon, Pizzagate, disbelief in basic institutions of justice, refusal to acknowledge or accept whole classes of humans, like trans people, through denial of rights and continued discrimination.

Anyone seeing this and not realizing it is a full on existential threat against basic human rights and decency just isn’t paying attention.

I certainly do not fit the picture you paint. I'm not a Trump supporter, nor do I adhere to any of the silly theories you suggest. I believe wholeheartedly in robust rights, recognition, and respect for marginalized groups. I believe no person is illegal. I have been out in the streets of Portland joining BIPOC leadership in calling for abolition of police and prisons many dozens of the past 150 nights.

Distrust of the FBI doesn't stem from Trump-support and is not related to "refusal to accept whole classes of humans"; it chiefly stems from the fact that it's a historically racist and xenophobic institution that threw itself headlong into trying to violently disrupt civil rights activism, and has never done any serious internal healing since.

The deep, lasting, institutional corruption of the two major political parties is based on fact and observation, including the fact pattern I have laid out in the comment to which you responded, which again, to my knowledge, is not in dispute. Whether or not it amounts to another in a long line of actual instances of self-enrichment at the public's expense is something that I do not trust (and I don't think any reasonable observer can trust) the FBI to investigate and conclude on its own.

Thanks for backing your opinion with a good summary like this. It provides a good framework for discussion. People should read it. That said, although it outlines the issues well, I disagree with many of their conclusions. I think in parallel, people should watch the 17 minute version of Carlson's interview with Bobulinksi and determine for themselves how well the details match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zLfBRgeFFo. Or if video averse, read the transcript here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/27/tucker_ca....

Just to pick one example, here's Politifact on the question of who "the chairman" referred to: "Bobulinski has also claimed that Joe Biden was the person described in another message days later as "the Chairman." Whereas the interview goes much further than just a "claim". Instead, it directly shows a text message sent to Bobulinski by Rob Walker (the "Biden family representative") clarifying that "the Chairman" does in fact refer to Joe Biden: https://youtu.be/2zLfBRgeFFo?t=906 (or search the transcript for "the chairman").

Now certainly, the text message might be faked, or Rob Walker might not actually know what was meant. Hopefully, if allowed to happen, future research will be able to determine this. But this is something that can and (probably) should be verified. To reduce this to "Bobulinksi has also claimed" doesn't give adequate weight to fact that Bobulinski did a surprisingly good job of providing verifiable evidence for his interpretation. So yes, read the Politifact article, but also listen to the interview before deciding to trust its conclusions!

>If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election

Nobody disputes why this story was dropped at the time it was dropped. It's a common tactic that has been practiced for decades by political campaigns and even media outlets. Heck, there is a reason why the Kavanaugh story broke when it did. There is a reason why the NY Times published Trump taxes when they did.

What's different is that all of center-left/left news establishment decided that they are going to get Biden elected and protect him from any negative news.

Except it wasn’t news.

It isn't news that the son of a presidential candidate is and has been using his name to enrich himself, raising AT BEST questions about conflict of interest?

Are you for real?

To me, it's the fact that Joe Biden didn't put a stop to this immediately. Regardless of the emails, Hunter Biden is/was a drug addict with no skills, being paid upwards of $50,000/month to be on a Board of Directors of a known corrupt company.

What skill does he possess that is worth $600,000? The only thing that makes sense is his connection to Joe Biden. It's obvious they were paying him money to be on the board because of his connection to Joe Biden, and Joe Biden should have put a stop to it. That's the crux of the issue to me. The fact that the media is forming a wall of silence around this issue really does show the vast biases they have.

This doesn't mean Trump isn't corrupt, by the way, which he is and I believe he is unfit to be president and nothing about the laptop or these emails stopped me from voting for Biden. But every tiny issue with Trump is magnified and overanalyzed by the media, but this rather big issue on Biden is swept under the rug. The media is just as corrupt and biased but the only losers are we the people.

We elected George W Bush to President, whose history isn't so far away from Hunter Biden's except that the Biden family isn't insanely wealthy.

This wasn't that long ago. Everybody should remember Bush's coke problems.

You are right that there's a double standard, but I don't think that double standard is where you assert it is.

I mean, has there been any investigation of the intelligence response to Russia having bounties on US soldiers' heads? And you think that "any small thing" by Trump gets investigated?

Four years ago we were obsessing over emails from the Clintons, which Trump would have us believe were worthy of jailing Clinton. Yet here we are four years later with absolutely no wrongdoing exposed, no grand jury indictments, etc.

The lack of awareness and short memories are astounding.

>has there been any investigation of the intelligence response to Russia having bounties on US soldiers' heads?

Yeah. It turned out to be speculative bullshit. There is no link between American solider deaths in Afghanistan to any bounty program from Russia (or even that such a bounty program has ever existed).

Why do you think the story just disappeared?

Might want to update Wikipedia if you can substantiate "bullshit" in some way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program

And we still don't have a President that can keep up with intelligence briefings, apparently.

You may want to actually read the article. Pretty much everybody, from the Taliban, to Russians, to DoD and American intelligence, dismisses the story.

The choice lines from YOUR source: - "On July 9, 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. and DOD intelligence agencies have not found a link between alleged Russian bounties and that specific attack."

- "On September 14, 2020, Gen. McKenzie stated, "It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," reflecting a growing consensus among the U.S. military leaders that the anonymous sources initially presented in the media were either exaggerated or false."

Give me a break. If there was even an inkling that this story was true, it would be front-page news from now until election day.

> Give me a break. If there was even an inkling that this story was true, it would be front-page news from now until election day.

Clearly not. Circular arguments aren't a good look.

This also seems relevant:

>According to the New York Times, on 1 July, the National Intelligence Council, which reports to the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, produced a two-and-a-half page document in which various intelligence agencies assessed the credibility of the existence of a bounty program based on the available evidence. Anonymous officials who had seen the memo said that the "C.I.A. and the National Counterterrorism Center had assessed with medium confidence—meaning credibly sourced and plausible, but falling short of near certainty"—that the GRU had offered bounties.

It takes evidence to get to a medium confidence assessment, it is not purely "speculative bullshit."

Very good cherry picking. Right in your paragraph it says the standard for 'medium confidence' is that it is 'plausible'. That's the best you could do? Notice, the claim put out by the NY Times was much much stronger. It actually linked a SPECIFIC American soldier death, to a GRU bounty. Where is the evidence for that?

This is whataboutism.

I'm someone who believes that Bush should be in jail for crimes against humanity. But nothing you said doesn't take away from the fact that the media is corrupt right now and avoiding a real story on Biden.

No it's not, at all, it's a response to the accusations of a double standard based on political party.

"The media is ignoring Joe Biden stories and nitpicking Trump stories."

"What about George W. Bush?"

Yes, it's whataboutism. Answer the question about Joe Biden vs Trump.

If hiding behind the election of George W Bush is your defense... you need a new lawyer.

Clinton did destroy tens of thousands of emails that were under subpoena by the FBI. If you or I did that, we'd be jail for eternity. And yet...

I think this is the spirit behind "lock her up" -- the fact that there are two sets of rules for the powerful and for the rest of us. This is true for them all: Trump, Clinton, Bush and Biden.

I have no idea about the veracity of the story, but Hunter Biden went to Georgetown and Yale Law and was EVP at a massive bank holding company and founded a lobbying firm.. That resume is every bit as impressive as most people in the 'business world'.

Describing him as a "drug addict with no skills" is very misleading.

First there has to be credible evidence for any story to be news. It isn't news that aliens are planning to invade earth. Not because that wouldn't be a huge deal, but because there is no evidence to support it.

Second, if there is evidence of a son using a name to enrich himself but there is no evidence that the father played a part, I don't think it is news. It may be a shitty thing ethically to do from the son, but I don't think it is particularly news worthy. I thought the same thing when they were talking about how the wife of Bush Jr killed someone in a driving accident. Newsworthy if a candidate did it, not newsworthy if his wife did.

I can't reply directly to macspoofing above, so to explain it clearly: the story wasn't Biden's son enriching himself with his name -- that story has been covered by every news organization for over a year, and didn't need a new article on the eve of the election. The new story specifically relates to Joe Biden being a part of it, and enriching himself, and that's the part that no news organization has been able to verify.

Why would they waste time verifying it when Joe was cleared by two administrations and the intelligence community?

Seems like you’re searching for proof of guilt rather assuming innocence.

>and didn't need a new article on the eve of the election.

What the heck does that mean??!??! What do you mean it "didn't need a new article on the even of the election". WHY NOT?! Because you're voting for Biden?

And by the way, Biden has denied all wrongdoing by Hunter. It is certainly relevant when you have concrete proof that his denial was wrong.

For the same reason that the NY Times suddenly publishing a front-page article on the 26 women who have accused Trump of rape [1] the week before the election would be a blatant partisan hack move.

It's well-trodden ground, it's been covered (some might say not enough, but regardless), there's no significant new news, and it would be a blatant attempt to influence the election.

In this case, the Times has written numerous stories on Hunter's use of his name to try and make money. That story isn't new. The new part of the story is the insinuation that he did this with Joe Biden's permission, and that Joe himself may have been making money. That part hasn't been verified by anyone.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-m...

>For the same reason that the NY Times suddenly publishing a front-page article on the 26 women who have accused Trump of rape [1] the week before the election would be a blatant partisan hack move.

What are you talking about??! That story was reported EVERYWHERE. If it was 'old news' why was it reported EVERYWHERE?

The fact that it didn't change the election outcome (which is what you're really complaining about) is not the same thing.

>the Times has written numerous stories on Hunter's use of his name to try and make money. That story isn't new.

Hold on a second here. There is plenty 'new' here:

- Joe Biden STILL denies any wrongdoing by himself or Hunter Biden. As it pertains to Hunter Biden's conduct, we now have direct evidence that's false. You don't think that's a story?

- How about the fact that we have direct evidence of Joe Biden being introduced (and taking photos with) with corrupt business partners of Hunter Biden?

- How about the fact that the emails show Hunter Biden trying to induce VP Biden to take actions that benefit Burisma and Chinese business deals?

- How about the fact that Hunter Biden's former business partner, Tony Bubolinski, has gone on record that Joe was planned to be involved in at least the Chinese business deal (and even if that turns out to not have happened, it isn't the salient point - his son is attempting to influence policy through his father)?

- How about the fact that Hunter Biden is being investigated by the FBI for money laundering?

- How about the fact that many outlets, including the Biden campaign and anonymous CIA officials make claims that this is Russian disinformation, when we have clear evidence it is not?

- How about the fact that a journalist that broke the Snowden story, says there is something worth reporting here but was told he couldn't by his editors and lays out his case quite cogently[1]. Greenwald is not the only one. Taibbi also noted the hypocrisy and the unprecedent nature of how this news is bing squelched. [2]

It is such a clear self-serving double-standard you're setting. You don't think it's a story, therefore it isn't a story. Meanwhile every two-bit conspiracy theory against Trump is given front-page treatment.

The irony of it all is that even if all the allegations are true, it isn't enough to sink Joe Biden. This low-level of corruption is par for course for political actors. The real story really is the abrogation of journalistic standards by mainstream news, the ad hoc censorship by social media, and the defense of these actions by Joe Biden supporters, present company included. We literally had the account of a major US newspaper banned for putting out a TRUE story, and journalists vilified or muzzled for waiting to report on it.... but it's all OK if it means Joe Biden is elected ..?

>That part hasn't been verified by anyone.

You're setting up a strawman, that the only way this story is relevant is if there is direct evidence that Joe Biden has been making money from Hunter Biden's adventures. There is certainly implications of that but that's not the most salient part of this story.

Besides if only news organizations were able to do things like ... you know .. VERIFY reports? You know, maybe by ASKING questions of the candidate?

And of course Greenwald puts your ridiculous and hypocritical standard to rest with this quote:

"First, the claim that the material is of suspect authenticity or cannot be verified ... is blatantly false for numerous reasons. As someone who has reported similar large archives in partnership with numerous media outlets around the world (including the Snowden archive in 2014 and the Intercept’s Brazil Archive over the last year showing corruption by high-level Bolsonaro officials), and who also covered the reporting of similar archives by other outlets (the Panama Papers, the WikiLeaks war logs of 2010 and DNC/Podesta emails of 2016), it is clear to me that the trove of documents from Hunter Biden’s emails has been verified in ways quite similar to those."

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b... [2] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/with-the-hunter-biden-expose-s...

> What's different is that all of center-left/left news establishment decided that they are going to get Biden elected and protect him from any negative news.

That’s what we all wanted right? That’s the point of all the tech folks talking about no bystanders and corporations being forced to take a political stance was about wasn’t it?

It worked. They’re taking a stance.

> That’s what we all wanted right

What are you talking about? I'm unsure if you're describing the tenor of comments here, but there was a clear amount of uneasiness with how these platforms are using their reach, whether with the Biden story or Uber on Prop 22.

>That’s what we all wanted right?

I never wanted that. But yes, this sentiment is out there. And yes, this is the logical end result.

There are two errors with this.

First of all, was it "censorship" when Fox News had not a single article on Trump's taxes for many days after the NY Times pice? No, tat's not censorship, it's an editorial decision.

Second, you're missing the "garbage" part of "garbage story" in the line you quoted. A news organization has a responsibility to vet stories, and avoid publishing stories that can't be vetted.

>when Fox News had not a single article on Trump's taxes for many days after the NY Times pice

Are you saying that all the news outlets that refuse to mention this story are acting like partisan hacks??!? I AGREE!

>Second, you're missing the "garbage" part of "garbage story" in the line you quoted.

What's the 'garbage' part of this 'garbage story'?

>and avoid publishing stories that can't be vetted.

Who vetted the NY Times story? Did NY Times release the documents or their sources? Or did everyone just report it? How about the Kavanaugh allegations? Did anyone have issues putting out prosperous, unverified, and clearly false accusations just to get him and by extension Trump? How about the Steele dossier, initially an unverified, and later found to be a fabricated document, put out by the Russians and paid for by the Hillary campaign ... it served as a basis for YEARS of reporting. The last 4 years, we've seen the mainstream media throw out all semblance of journalistic integrity just to get Trump.

Of course it was censorship. Censorship can be narrowly scoped - in this case, to Fox.

This isn’t any just negative news, it’s a PR campaign of epic proportions. I see plenty of legit coverage of Biden gaffes and corporate influence. Media outlets are wising up to publicists’ tactics about getting them to cover things and are making risky editorial decisions about what to run. We’ll see how it plays out.

Kavanaugh story broke when it did because it leaked

Yes. And the leak along with the timing of it, was no accident.

Are you of the opinion that all story publication should stop in the days before the election? If not, how do you reconcile that with this?

Your argument seems to be based on an assumption that the story was garbage, with the evidence being that the editor pulled it, which begs the question.

This story is specifically being released now to influence the election. Presumably the people who got the email had it for a year, they could have released it earlier. The fact that these emails have no headers and are impossible to verify strengthens the possibility that this is literal disinformation aimed to affect the election.

There are things that are legitimately news now (as in were discovered recently, are now published), this isn’t it.

I seriously doubt if it was Don Jr in question and not Hunter Biden the media would be so restrained.

So maybe MSM would act poorly in that case, and? That’s not justification for acting poorly now.

It would be an improvement if it'd at least be a level playing field with a consistent set of rules.

Being principled only when it suits your favored cause isn't being principled at all.

Neither is criticizing the media for a hypothetical scenario that didn't happen.

Donald Trump Jr, unlike Hunter Biden, participates regularly in his father's political campaigns. He spoke at the RNC in 2020. He is regularly on Fox news. This makes him part of the political news in a way that Mr Biden's son simply is not.

Maybe... But Hunter traveled with his father, then VP, on Air Force Two to China in 2013 and met with senior bankers to establish a Chinese private equity fund. So at least there was a bit of commingling between his father's political affairs and his son's business ambitions. Not to mention his questionable connections in Ukraine. Or his prior work as a lobbyist.

And while I don't think the sex videos on the laptop should have been published or covered in the news, the emails about Hunter's dealings with China probably should be. But the inconsistency of the media and the social networks on this issue should be pointed out. And if Don Jr had a laptop stolen with questionable emails about deals with Russia, I can guarantee that the media would have a field day with it (much like they did with the largely fraudulent Steele Dossier) -- not to mention the more lurid content.

> But Hunter traveled with his father, then VP, on Air Force Two to China in 2013 and met with senior bankers to establish a Chinese private equity fund.

This is exactly the kind of sentence which is technically true but worded in a way to make it sound like it says more than "Hunter took a plane trip with his dad in 2013."

- Biden was VP for 8 years. Is he not supposed to travel with his kids during that time?

- "Air Force Two" is the term used for any plane the VP is on. Anyone flying with the VP is on Air Force Two.

- Hunter Biden, and only Hunter Biden, met with the Chinese bankers. Joe Biden had no contact with the bankers, involvement in the meeting, or financial involvement with the fund before or after.

- The emails in question were from 2017, after Joe Biden was no longer VP.

- While the emails may be questionable, there is no evidence of Joe Biden's involvement in any part of the deal during or after his time as VP.

> Hunter took a plane trip with his dad in 2013

Flying with your dad, Vice President of the United State, to raise a billion dollars from senior party members from an adversarial country isn't a good look.

Taking a well-paid board seat on a Ukrainian gas company... despite knowing nothing about energy and while dad, the VP, is managing affairs with the Ukrainian government also isn't a good look.

"Just taking a trip with dad" indeed. This is clearly graft -- and condemning it should be bipartisan.

I don't expect everyone to be as pure as Obama -- but, "C'mon, Man."

Can we all agree that - sure - all those things look dodgy and most likely Hunter Biden benefited from his dad's position, but:

1) That doesn't prove Joe Biden himself benefited directly from it (that's implication all these last-minute 'stories' are trying to make)

2) So far nobody has presented a single shred of proof of anything other than hearsay and the testimony of people who seem to have a really big chip on their shoulders. In fact, the only 'recording' that has been presented is of a third party warning Bobulinski that him making a scandal out of that would affect them all (it's not Hunter Biden in the recording)

3) Tucker Carlson's dog conveniently ate his homework last night

4) The source of the story - Rudy Giuliani - seems to be severely detached from reality, to the point that he somehow fell for the simplest prank in the book and got himself into a Sacha Baron Cohen film

5) There's been so many contortions to this story - from accusations of child pornography, to all kinds of evidence that would be 'presented' but never materialized - that it's very hard to believe anything these messengers are saying anymore

This story stinks to high heaven. Did Hunter Biden benefit from his dad's position? Possibly, but the people trying to push the narrative have shat the bed so many times already I find it very hard to believe they are motivated by anything other than politics.

None of these are good looks... for Hunter Biden.

I'm 100% down with condemning failson grift! Let's start by instituting 100% tax rates for inheritance or gifts over idk, 100k, and making legacy university admissions illegal. For me it's a "nonpartisan" question not because it spans R vs. D but because the largest fundamental faults that cause it are so divorced from any one candidate or party it can only be seen as a partisan campaign tactic if someone tries to make it about a specific person.

So, to you and Greenwald - don't fucking do it.

> Maybe .. but (offtopic infodump)

That was not an opportunity to hawk this tired disinformation again (1). Nobody cares. Even this "report the controversy" (2) gambit is lame.

1) https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy

Don't many countries (such as France) actually have such a mandate? From my understanding it does work fairly well. That being said, even if you don't entirely stop, there should at the very least be a higher bar for fact checking, not a lower one. This story doesn't even pass the normal level of fact checking done by almost every single publication in the US.

> Are you of the opinion that all story publication should stop in the days before the election? If not, how do you reconcile that with this?

You could stop story publication unless you have a preponderance of very strong evidence for your claims.

> If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is right".

On the other hand, if Greenwald actually does have, or believe he has, a contract which guarantees him immunity to outside editing as he seems to claim ("The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week") -- which seems somewhat implausible as presented, but that's the story presented -- then the offer he presents also makes sense as what amounts to an attempt to essential settle the dispute over rights and obligations out of court with a compromise which arguably could be better for both his journalistic interests and the Intercept's financial interests than a public, after-the-fact breach of contract dispute in the courts.

all true, but in the end if you are an editor and you think the source is garbage, you can’t publish it. That’s your duty regardless of anything else.

A right is only useful if you assert that right. If you look at the email chain that Glenn himself published [1], the correspondence is essentially the editor giving a bunch of suggestions of how to improve the article, then Glenn asserting CENSORSHIP and then the EIC telling him to stop being so rude to his colleagues and then Glenn quitting in a huff.

Maybe it's possible that all of the implied messages were exactly as Glenn surmised them to be but ultimately, it doesn't matter what's implied. Glenn at no point even brings up what his supposed contractual rights are and lays out a paper trail forcing them to acknowledge a breach of contract.

It's entirely possible that if he had just pushed a little harder, they would have simply been like "Well, it's your grave but it does state it in the contract so we'll put it up without edits" but him not even trying makes it seem like he is engineering the situation to resolve to this particular outcome.

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

> the correspondence is essentially the editor giving a bunch of suggestions of how to improve the article

From the beginning of the first letter: "Overall I think this piece can work best if it is significantly narrowed down to what you first discussed with Betsy — media criticism about liberal journalists not asking Biden the questions he should be asked more forcefully, and why they are failing to do that."

In other words, the editor is asking Greenwald to keep only the part about criticism of liberal journalists, and not publish the allegations against the Bidens. That's not just a suggestion on how to improve the article - it's asking him to remove a substantial part of the article.

> Glenn at no point even brings up what his supposed contractual rights are

As for his contractual rights, he spells those out in his original article: "to publish articles without editorial interference except in very narrow circumstances that plainly do not apply here". And: "my separate contractual right with FLM regarding articles I have written but which FLM does not want to publish itself". Presumably, the editors would already be well aware that his contract allows him to be free of editorial interference - he's one of the founders of The Intercept, not some obscure random journalist that the editors don't know.

Absent any other evidence, the quotation:

> "Overall I think this piece can work best if..."

is a suggestion (and a perfectly fine way to start a discussion).

Greenwald might have good reason to believe there's more to it than that based on a perceived history of political bias. But, based solely on the text of the email I'm inclined to give the editor the benefit of the doubt.

As a matter of fact, I was firmly in Greenwalds' camp before reading the email exchange. It does read like a bit of tantrum IMHO. It certainly doesn't scream "censorship".

I concede, said "tantrum" may actually be justified based on history that we aren't privy to, but the raw text of the exchange alone does not paint Mr Greenwald in the best light.

>If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is right".

Occhams razor:

Glen Greenwald is one of the most respected journalists on the planet. the man is a modern day Cronkite. his character is beyond the pale when it comes to accurate journalism so it begs the question: What is Glen reporting that an editor finds so 'garbage' as to risk their entire future career on censoring this man?

After the past few years, I do not share that assessment of Greenwald in the least. Following him on Twitter for a while caused the scales to fall from my eyes. I think he's done some good things in the past, but currently he seems off his rocker, honesty. People can change as they age, and I think he clearly has.

Can you elaborate?

He has stuck by his claim -- despite the findings of numerous national and international intelligence community investigations and even a Republican senate investigations -- that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.

And despite his founding of the Intercept in part to investigate abuses by people in power (and his constant criticism that the press never publishes negative articles about people on their side) he has never written a single article critical of any of the abuses of power by the Trump administration. Not a single article critical of anything Trump has done in the past four years. [1]

1. All articles: https://muckrack.com/ggreenwald/articles

> He has stuck by his claim -- despite the findings of numerous national and international intelligence community investigations and even a Republican senate investigations -- that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.

I think you're grossly misrepresenting his opinion on the matter. No one denies that Russia made some half-assed attempts to influence the election. Every country tries to interfere in every election. Hell, we even bragged about it at times: http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

Even Biden himself brags about interfering in the affairs of other governments: https://youtu.be/FdHWU5jDQ2w?t=46

But did Russia conspire with the Trump campaign to rig the election or provide dirt on Hillary Clinton? No, and he's right for standing by that claim despite the immense pressure from partisan hacks who have effectively smeared him as some kind of Russian puppet. Your post is evidence of how effective that smear campaign has been.

It's just good foreign policy to meddle in the internal affairs of your biggest international rivals. Do you think the paranoid and allknowing American government doesn't do the exact same thing? Greenwald's position has ALWAYS been Russiagate was overblown nonsense. And I agree.

His unflagging support for Aaron Coleman doesn't phase you?

Not really. The adult behavior of Democrat politicians bother me far more than the behavior of a 12 year old. I was a bad kid when I was 12. What matters is who we become as adults and what ideals we champion then.

I followed him on Twitter due to my respect of his earlier journalism work, and I agree completely. I'm not sure he's changed though, and I think that's kind of the problem--all of his tweets stem from holding a grudge the old neoliberal guard of the 2000s onward, while getting some kind of high off of the chaos that the Trump administration introduced into the political establishment (not just to Democrats).

I think you may be right. People are always a mix, and can produce really great things even if they don't always have the best judgement. Just got to get it right some of the time to make a good contribution.

> his character is beyond the pale

I don't think this means what you think it means. You just insulted his character, not praised it.

Probably meant beyond reproach - but yep.

I think Glen Greenwald was one of the more respected journalists but isn't any longer. I think he either has crossed over or will soon cross over into Seymour Hersh territory (sadly). Mr. Hersh was an amazing investigative journalist that made a huge difference in how we can keep gov't accountable but has ended up (largely) a discredited hack, which is a shame.

What discredited Sy Hersh?

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...

> In recent years, however, Hersh has appeared increasingly to have gone off the rails. His stories, often alleging vast and shadowy conspiracies, have made startling — and often internally inconsistent — accusations, based on little or no proof beyond a handful of anonymous "officials."

From Wikipedia:

"Critics have described Hersh as a conspiracy theorist, in particular for his rejection of official claims regarding the killing of Osama Bin Laden and his rejection that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Criticism_and_co...

How come that people still take accusations of "conspiracy theorist" seriously, when so many have proven to be true (e.g. "NSA is spying on everybody" and "elite rich people pedophile ring")??

How come Marcy Wheeler and others have so many criticisms of the accuracy and sourcing of his journalism?

>Glen Greenwald is one of the most respected journalists on the planet. the man is a modern day Cronkite. his character is beyond [reproach]

This isn't my experience at all, at least not for many years (speaking both in terms of my own opinion of his writing and the apparent opinions of others).

> Glen Greenwald is one of the most respected journalists on the planet.

I don't think that's all that true. Glenn Greenwald is extremely popular with a particular political faction, which is itself particularly unpopular.

> his character is beyond the pale

Probably not what you intend:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beyond_the_pale

I don't know. I respected him highly after Snowden and I still think he handled it greatly. But then, I lost a lot of that respect mostly due to reading his tweet feed.

It mostly kind of ceased to be worth following and at times he seemed to be in perpetual rage combined with sort of "I wish this to be true so it must be".

You're right that it's not how this works. Media organizations are not interested truth or accuracy of their stories, but simply how many ads and subscriptions the stories can sell. And that's not the say they are motivated by greed - even worse, they are often motivated by missionary-like zeal to promote a cause. So of course it would follow that they have no interest in publishing anything disagreeable to their readership.

However, Greenwald's argument definitely should be how it works if a media organization cares about truth and open debate. In this case, it seems very hard to believe that a story -- written by a credible journalist, with a long track record, who literally founded the organization -- was garbage.

I think Glenn hoped to create a media entity that regarded truth as the measure of merit of a story vs. how well it promoted a cause and ads/subscriptions. Now that the experiment has failed so obviously, good for him for moving on.

> simply how many ads and subscriptions the stories can sell.

I don't think this is actually right. I think owners of news media companies want influence more than profit. I don't think Bezos is buying news media for the profits... The influence helps for their other goals.

>helps for their other goals

To profit?

Power. You can profit from power, but you could also genuinely believe that the world will be a better place if only everyone did what you said. In both cases you need power.

Techies, thanks to a bunch of dumb twitter talking heads, seem to think journalists are just rolling in bundles of cash from clicks. They're not. The vast majority of them, even the ones with upwards of 20k twitter followers, barely make any money. Influence is definitely more important to them than cash.

> seem to think journalists are just rolling in bundles of cash from clicks.

in this specific case: he is on a 400K salary living in his walled garden in Brazil.

This appears to be correct. Most media outlets now are activists pretending to be journalists, run by businesspeople who care about revenue more than truth.

Which one are they? Activists or business people? Saying that they are both doesn’t hold water.

They aren't the same people.

The journalists are the activists.

The managers and owners are the businesspeople.

Their motivations are very different but their incentives are aligned.

This has been true since the advent...I remember reading about the wars between Hamilton and Jefferson in the papers way back during the young years of the US.

None of this is new. It's way overamplified now, and everyone cries censorship and fascism when it suits them.

Remember the Maine!

Our expectations of objectivity (NPOV) is very recent and abnormal.

I'd like many many more Clay Shirky style analysis of print, broadcast, and social media, followed by a 100 crazy notions for novel NPOV organizations.

The Intercept has long been an activist paper. That's why Glenn joined. That doesn't mean they care about revenue over truth though

You mean helped found, not joined?

Seems like if they only cared about clicks and ads they would've ran the article.

From my position, they exercised the bare-minimum duties of any good editor to shut down stories they don't believe meet the standards they set for themselves.

And for exercising that duty, they are leaving clicks, ad impressions, and probably a good amount of money on the table.

They're free to make that choice if that's their true assessment of it. But when Greenwald publishes his piece, if it actually is not in fact a garbage piece, they're going to look extremely bad and biased.

You would think that if that were the case, he would publish it alongside this letter.

Edit; he did: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

He said he'll be publishing it on his blog very soon. He may have submitted an incomplete draft to The Intercept for review, and is still finishing it up.

That's a good point. I just wish he provided more detail to let people decide for themselves.

This proved correct, and he just posted the draft.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

[removed]

According to the response by the Intercept he's actually flipping out against basic edit suggestions as censorship. [0]. https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283/ph...

Seems like a temper tantrum to me, even if the journalism is legitimate. It could very well be these claims are clickbait for the journalist to strike out on his own without the publisher.

> According to the response by the Intercept he's actually flipping out against basic edit suggestions as censorship

Source? Your link doesn't say anything about basic edit suggestions.

Looking at the emails [0], this appears to be strong editorializing (much of it far from clearcut) for what (I believe) is an opinion piece.

[0]: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...?

I'm reading the emails and they seem to be perfectly reasonable edit suggestions (I'm a person that's familiar with the editing process)- it points out that the article is attempting to accomplish too much with evidence that is actually vague and suggests increased focus to critique that liberal media isn't holding Biden's feet to the fire. Asking for an article to be narrowed down in scope is a perfectly good suggestion as an editorial board, especially in news articles where too much stuff can make the article ineffective. Furthermore, the editor is nothing less than professional/polite, while the response is full of wild accusations like "What's happening here is obvious: you know that you can't explicitly say you don't want to publish the article because it raises questions about the candidate you and all other TI Editors want very much to win the election in 5 days."

It looks like a tantrum to me.

> I'm a person that's familiar with the editing process

I am also very familiar with the editing process. I'm not saying that the editing suggestions are beyond what you would ever see in an editorial context, but I would never characterize them as "basic edit suggestions."

Much of the quibbling in the edits to me suggests ulterior motive, like the rejection of the idea that there has been "suppression" of the story (there obviously has).

And if you're familiar with the editing process, you'd know that edits are not always completely apolitical, I know people who have been asked to make edits for political reasons in major national publications.

I think it is hard to claim this is just equal editorial scrutiny, given the publication of multiple false claims around the Hunter Biden story (ie. "very likely to be Russian disinformation", etc.).

> the editor is nothing less than professional/polite

To me, I don't necessarily always side with the actor who appears to be more professional, though I do agree that Greenwald comes off as rude in the email.

I think Greenwald is probably right regarding his accusations in the email, but I agree that they weren't necessary to include, at least so early in the discussion process. He did seem to react unnecessarily harshly, before his email even received a reply.

As you say, he was the one who first began displaying the unprofessional behavior. He probably should have just sent like half of his follow-up email (the citations of the email compared to the article) and given them a chance to reply. But I also understand why he felt he was being unduly pressured and why staying there wouldn't have been wise for him.

I read the entire draft and I’m going to disagree with you. Rather than write a lengthy diatribe, I’ll start with my main point. This is all very neat and tidy and while it may all be true, we live in a political climate where foreign governments interfere in elections by spreading disinformation. In that case, an editor is absolutely correct to push back, make suggestions and ensure their otherwise respectable publication is not used as a tool to spread more disinformation the week before an election.

> we live in a political climate where foreign governments interfere in elections by spreading disinformation. In that case, an editor is absolutely correct to push back

This is paternalistic to the extreme. Do we get to vote on whether we want such a society or is it just imposed by editorial fiat?

> spread more disinformation the week before an election.

You read the draft. Could you point out the explicit falsehoods to me?

Or are you saying we should stop the spread of inconvenient opinion pieces?

I vaguely understand the paternalistic side of your argument, but if you want to abandon editorial rigour, we have something already built for that. It’s called social media.

If social media doesn’t turn your crank, start your own publication and establish your own editorial fiat. HOWEVER, there’s a problem - if your editing sucks, you won’t attract enough readers to maintain high standards. That’s kind of the shit part of the free market - you can’t just go push a substandard product and scream about “my freedom”.

Ultimately, this draft needed some work and if you go through this thread, you can read some of the Intercept’s own comments. Personally, I found the section about possible disinformation to need more meat. The connection between the Vice President and the company is too tenuous. The article needs to cover WHY experts think it is disinformation, even just to strengthen the claim that it isn’t.

It doesn’t much matter what you want to read, but an editor still had to find balance and appropriate context. Otherwise, publications suck...

> I vaguely understand the paternalistic side of your argument, but if you want to abandon editorial rigour, we have something already built for that. It’s called social media.

Without getting into the irony of the fact that the article we're discussing was blocked on social media, I want to make clear: I don't want to abandon editorial rigor.

But I do think that electioneering concerns should be irrelevant to the context of whether you present information in the public interest. Just as reporting on Trump's tax returns or the Podesta emails were in the public interest, so too are the Hunter Biden emails.

There has not been a historical problem of major publications publishing Russian falsehoods. The "fake news" epidemic is mostly quickly stood up sites propagating on Facebook.

Nor did I see any evidence that Glenn was connected to a Russian disinformation effort. If that were to change (say, if he were found to be receiving payments from the Russian government), then I would support removing him as a writer outright.

> an editor still had to find balance and appropriate context.

Agreed. My claim here is that the editorial staff of The Intercept failed at this goal and their suggestions were not balanced.

I have experience in publishing and have edited some very complicated pieces in my time so I imagine that I look at this situation (and the draft of the Greenwald article) through a different lens.

On the subject of the Hunter Biden emails, there are a lot of problems with reporting on them. The first is that when you look at the full spectrum of Giuliani’s involvement, the laptop genesis story is a little weird. The second is that copies of the hard drive have not been widely disseminated to news rooms.

The laptop genesis story is relevant and the Greenwald article needed to devote more analysis just because of how weird it is. And as for the hard drives, journalists have their own sets of egos and biases.

Both of those points are relevant if you want to question why the media isn’t reporting on them. The laptop genesis story is weird enough to call for fact checking and verification but the hard drives aren’t available. Sadly that makes for weak articles and removes any exclusive coverage motivation to cover the emails.

Where isn’t that balanced?

This is voluntary ignorance and a cheap excuse. Which foreign intervention? The Russians again?

The draft is weak. It completely avoids explaining why several experts conclude it’s disinformation. Instead, it uses a very complicated set of coincidences with only one actual fact - Biden had something to do with getting one prosecutor replaced.

That’s flimsy journalism. Expecting better out of a journalist is far from voluntary ignorance.

Is there anywhere I can find a clear explanation of expert's reasoning to conclude it's disinformation?

It seems like the information is really up in the air, it will take time to determine what conclusions from it are legitimate and false. The information itself is quite clearly real, at least, I haven't seen any specific piece of information in regards to this claimed as false, just the whole subject referred to as "disinformation".

I heard sam seder break what he knew down pretty well a few days ago but I am having trouble finding the clip.

Here is a letter signed by 50 former high ranking intelligence officials - it's easy to absorb and if you're interested, it will give you plenty of threads to Google.

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...

So, Hunter was possibly selling access to Joe, for the possibility of influence? If so, did it work? Hunter is a troubled man (remember Billy Carter?). I only care about what Joe did, if any of this is true.

That’s where I think this article gets weak. It seems to hinge on “nobody else is reporting it so it must be true.” The connection between the Vice President and the company isn’t strong enough. And excluding the possibility this is disinformation just makes the connection that much worse.

I feel like I’m missing about 500 words. If Greenwald would tighten his prose and strengthen the persuasion, this article could rule.

>The connection between the Vice President and the company isn’t strong enough. And excluding the possibility this is disinformation just makes the connection that much worse.

>If Greenwald would tighten his prose and strengthen the persuasion, this article could rule.

Holy non sequitur Batman!

Come on friend, if you're going to pick and choose from my words, please be true to my original point. I feel that this article is missing about 500 words of facts, but that length could be trimmed down by removing some extraneous words. I'm more guilty of using extra words than anyone so I'm not qualified to judge, but I am qualified to recognize it when I see it. Crap, I used to publish a magazine - I have a little more experience in this area than the mean.

We've lived in a world where foreign governments have interfered in elections by spreading disinformation for literally as long as there's been elections. That doesn't give the media an excuse to ignore corruption across half of the aisle.

You’re correct but journalists need to do better. This article isn’t strong enough for publication, the editor made reasonable suggestions and frankly, it sounds like a tantrum.

[removed]

Thanks for engaging with me friend - I promise to reply but this will take a bit of time. Unfortunately, I have to step out.

I promise to write a proper reply and don’t want you to take my silence as a sign of disrespect. It’s been fun engaging with you and I appreciate your brain - I’ll edit this comment when I get back.

Seriously thanks, this has been a lot of fun!! :)

Edit - Hey friends, meowface genuinely doesn’t deserve those downvoted. They are smart - I don’t agree with them, but they’ve made some strong points in excellent ways.

Everyone on every side is being downvoted (and then upvoted, and then downvoted, and then upvoted, and then downvoted some more...), it seems. I don't mind at all; it comes with the territory. Anyone entering into a fray like this knows what to expect. If someone strongly disagrees with me, I actually think they probably should downvote me.

First off friend, I appreciate you - both for taking the time to engage and teach, and also for how well you articulate your arguments. I realize that this entire thread has become polarized, but if you would like to continue this conversation, my email address is in my profile. I can't promise to agree with you, but I will treat you with the respect you're due and try to better understand your point of view.

As for the comments about downvotes, call me naive, but I yearn for a world where we comment when we disagree but reserve up and downvotes for statements about the quality of a comment. I don't agree with you, but I upvoted you because you made me think. Ultimately, that's what I really look for from Hacker News. I don't know everything, but I have my own unique experience. If I'm wrong, please correct me....:)

Incidentally, if you want to continue this engagement off site, let me tell you a bit about my perspective. I used to publish an indie magazine that ended up winning some awards. At one point, I was tasked with editing a submission by a high ranking gang member who wanted to write about why he doesn't like the police and why his gang is a better choice for kids. I had to tell a story to make advertising dollars and it was a hell of a story. But our magazine ran contrary to a municipal bylaw so I had to somewhat tone it all down. It was complicated and to this day, I believe that I failed the story. Anyways, I think I bring a slightly different perspective (as do you) and I would appreciate the opportunity to learn from you.

The problem is that journalism as a gatekeeper is intended to buffer this by applying robust fact checking.

In the age of social media nobody waits for that and it becomes a race to publish, well, anything first. The filter is gone.

Greenwald has in his contract that he's not subject to editorial oversight. It's not a "tantrum" to expect TheIntercept to honor that.

> Greenwald has in his contract that he's not subject to editorial oversight

Really? Where can I inspect that contract? Clearly, the terms that allow him to publish elsewhere if TI doesn't want to publish his stuff that he claims exist seem at odds with the claim that there are terms that he is free to publish whatever he wants in TI without TI exercising editorial control.

I suspect that the story he is painting about the contract terms is misleading, as it makes no sense as presented.

> Really? Where can I inspect that contract?

What we have right now is Greenwald's word, which given that A) I can't think of a time he's published an outright falsehood, and B) the letter from the editor didn't deny any of the facts but instead just jumped to describing the process as Greenwald having a "tantrum", I'm inclined to believe at face value.

> Clearly, the terms that allow him to publish elsewhere if TI doesn't want to publish his stuff that he claims exist seem at odds with the claim that there are terms that he is free to publish whatever he wants in TI without TI exercising editorial control.

Or it's a clause that if they mutually agree that TI isn't the best forum for an article Greenwald has written, he's explicitly allowed to take it to another forum, in contrast to the normal staff writer contract provisions.

An editor is absolutely right to push back on a writer potentially publishing disinformation about a candidate before an election, but I disagree that this contains any disinformation or acceptance of disinformation. It covers a lot of ground, but the media censorship parts seem incontrovertible, and the parts specifically critical of Biden seem pretty balanced to me. He seems to hedge a lot of what he says and provides many perspectives and sources.

We should be very careful about disinformation, but another form of information warfare and "active measures" which I'm sure Russian intelligence is and has been deploying is the spread of skepticism of true information and belief that any or all information could be disinformation. Division, discord, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are the goals; not just falsehoods. All of these erode a sense of shared reality. Just as any claims about a political figure need support, so do claims of disinformation.

So, I think it's diatribe time. Could you quote the parts of the article (with full context) that seem like disinformation?

You know, we might not agree on this but I like you and think you’re very cool. :)

I’ll write you the reply you deserve but have to step out. Again though friend, you’re a good person and I respect your mind.

Edit - Seriously friend, I’m having a rough day in my personal life. I feel really lucky that I found you to engage with and get my mind off of things. You’re cool. Thanks for being cool. I’ll pay you back one day for this.

For the record, I read the email exchange Greenwald published and I am a little more sympathetic to the editors now. I don't totally agree with their criticisms, but I think Greenwald unnecessarily escalated into ad hominems before even giving them a chance to reply, and I think there was a valid discussion to be had there before there was no choice but to throw in the towel. He should've just kept the part of the email with the editor comments vs. article comparisons and left out the rest. I understand why he felt like he was being pressured, though.

I still don't think there's anything like blind acceptance of disinformation in the article, but he could've hedged certain parts a bit more.

Also, I kind of regret some of my earlier comments. I still think the way the media and Twitter handled this is absolutely ridiculous, and I really don't think there's a disinformation aspect to this article (bias and dis/misinformation are very different), but I kind of jumped to the conclusion about the rigor of the article after only reading about half of it (mostly the parts about the media). I think the truth about the article's rigor probably lies in the middle between your and my initial opinions of it, and similarly I think proper rigor kind of lies between Greenwald's and the editor's opinions. I prefer Taibbi's reporting on it (and Taibbi's reporting in general).

And to be clear, as I mentioned in my other comments, I've never seen very good evidence of corruption on Joe's part; my concern is pretty much just with the emails and the media's handling of them.

edit: Actually, I just went ahead and removed my very initial comment and another one. I was kind of shooting from the hip, though I definitely still stand by the parts about the media, and probably most of my other comments so far. But I might change my mind tomorrow about some of the other comments, and this definitely isn't the ideal platform for an extremely lengthy and careful debate.

This is tabloid level trash. No different than the email-gate nothingburger that dogged Hillary or made up the Birtherism claims against Obama. Greenwald should be ashamed.

The draft itself also has a not insignificant amount of leaps of faith that are not helpful in the current environment:

"Beyond that, the Journal's columnist Kimberly Strassel reviewed a stash of documents..."---this is an opinion article, why isn't the newsroom covering this explosive story?

"All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign"---absence of a denial is not proof of its validity.

"Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions."---an unnamed source told me that Facebook is really trying to push the election to Biden…

Even if Greenwald is sincere in his attempts to daylight the truth, he increasingly seems unaware or unwilling to accept that he might be or is being used as a useful idiot by foreign agents.

>"All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign"---absence of a denial is not proof of its validity.

He explicitly explains why he thinks it does serve as some additional evidence of such, and I agree with it. It's not proof, but it's evidence:

>Why is the failure of the Bidens to claim that these emails are forged so significant? Because when journalists report on a massive archive, they know that the most important event in the reporting's authentication process comes when the subjects of the reporting have an opportunity to deny that the materials are genuine. Of course that is what someone would do if major media outlets were preparing to publish, or in fact were publishing, fabricated or forged materials in their names; they would say so in order to sow doubt about the materials if not kill the credibility of the reporting.

>The silence of the Bidens may not be dispositive on the question of the material’s authenticity, but when added to the mountain of other authentication evidence, it is quite convincing: at least equal to the authentication evidence in other reporting on similarly large archives.

----

>Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,” one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions."---an unnamed source told me that Facebook is really trying to push the election to Biden…

He doesn't name him in this article for some reason, but he links another article he wrote, where he explains this: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/facebook-and-twitter-cro...

>Just two hours after the story was online, Facebook intervened. The company dispatched a life-long Democratic Party operative who now works for Facebook — Andy Stone, previously a communications operative for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, among other D.C. Democratic jobs — to announce that Facebook was “reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform”: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article. The long-time Democratic Party official did not try to hide his contempt for the article, beginning his censorship announcement by snidely noting: “I will intentionally not link to the New York Post.”

He's not wrong. But, it seems the American public is completely obsessed with the October Surprise. Everyone is waiting for that last minute piece of information that will flip the entire election on its head. And why not? Social and mass media have been training us to trawl for the "bug scoop" for decades now.

The truth is, news doesn't happen overnight. If anything sufficiently important is to be determined true, it needs to happen over a course of weeks or months, as people process the information, debate with each other, and come to a consensus on what it means for the country. Just because we can have this conversation with smaller and more rapid steps due to technology doesn't mean that we can get to the destination any faster.

So, in my opinion, burying this story is wrong. Amplifying it is also wrong. If Trump truly believes this is corruption, he should open an investigation, one that will be widely mocked as a political hit job and will still not finish until well into the next term. But, if you care about your country, you do it anyway. Not to win an election but because it's the right thing to do. I guess we'll see what happens.

> But, it seems the American public is completely obsessed with the October Surprise.

The news media is. The public (especially, given the pace of early voting, this year) doesn't seem to be, as much.

I'd posit that even if they already voted, people are still checking the news to see if there is late breaking news that will affect the broader opinion, even if they "know" that it won't affect theirs.

Anyway, my broader point is that Greenwald, and likely many others, feel immense pressure to get this out before the election, so that people have "all the relevant information", but the truth is, we never have all the relevant information because information exists in a continuum not a binary space.

It starts out reasonable enough. When it gets to Burisma, though, it falls off a cliff:

> But that claim [that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired so his replacement would better fight corruption] does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes. They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their markets to U.S. companies.

I don’t even know what to say other than that that’s an absurd caricature of US foreign policy. Yes, the US sometimes allies itself with corrupt regimes. That doesn’t mean it’s not interested in fighting corruption, especially in a potential future NATO member.

This doesn't really strike me as a cheap attempt to sway elections. Rather, it makes IMHO a pretty reasonable case for the idea that media - even independent publications - in the US are extremely polarized and biased when it comes to politics (albeit that's kinda beating a dead horse at this point).

With all this said, IMHO the style of the narrative also contributes to the ever increasing aggravation: why are people so focused on what can or cannot be construed as fodder for character assassination, when ideally an election is supposed to be about discussing the merits of different platforms. Investigative journalism certainly has its place, but in the context of the imminent elections and the political landscape, it would do a whole lot better to simply publish a down-to-earth for-dummies side-by-side comparison of candidate platforms, to dissuade pitchfork-induced action and encourage proper level-headed consideration by undecided voters.

Yes it's crazy how polarized popular U.S. media is. I'm from Germany but regularly check CNN and Foxnews since a year. I'm astounded how Foxnews is strictly positive about Trump and CNN is so positive about Democrats and Biden. (More in-depth magazines are more open though)

But being realistic, at least until the upcoming election is over they've reached a point of no return. 4 more years of Trump would exclude U.S. from international foreign politics.

"While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle a political campaign's — the Trump campaign's — dubious claims and launder them as journalism."

The Intercept said it had no doubt that Greenwald would "launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon."

"In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks," the Intercept statement reads.

"We get it. But facts are facts and The Intercept record of fearless, rigorous, independent journalism speaks for itself."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/10/29/glenn-greenw...

> The Intercept said it had no doubt that Greenwald would "launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon."

Any way you look at it, this is a terrible response. Jealous much? “People are willing to pay with actual money for Greenwald’s writing. Can you imagine?!? How shameful!” Even the post-blog-revolution news media companies don’t get it.

The Intercept did have a record. It was in large part due to Greenwald. He’s leaving, so with him goes a large part of their reputation.

They published the Steele dossier with ZERO evidence. It's now been completely discredited as a Russian plant the Obama administration knew was from a Russian asset.

The US government has officially said there's no Russian involvement in the recent Biden leak and it's been vouched for by Tony Bobulinski who definitely has close ties to the Biden family, yet it's not publishable?

That's as partisan as it gets and deserves to be called out.

EDIT: Do the downvoters have a reason other than ideology, tribalism, and conspiracy theories?

Horseshit. Last I checked, most things in that dossier turned out to be true.

Can you share the sources which convinced you of the report's veracity? Those sources which I have seen mostly or totally debunked it so it would be interesting to see what made your sources come to a different conclusion.

[edit] I must say it is both amazing as well as abhorring to see a post asking for sources to a statement which goes counter the current narrative to be downvoted (currently at -4) as if the question is somehow offensive. Wake up, folks, the truth shall set you free. Seeking for it is not a crime, at least not yet. [/edit]

Wikpedia has a whole section on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier#Veracity_and_co...

Wikipedia also had a section on the russiagate conspiracy which states:

> The Special Counsel's report, made public on April 18, 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that, though the Trump campaign welcomed the Russian activities and expected to benefit from them, there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.

The dossier is a mixed bag in terms of accuracy and rigor, but I find it interesting most people focus on "no collusion" but ignore all the rest of the claims. Like:

> The Mueller Report backed "Steele's central claim that the Russians ran a 'sweeping and systematic' operation ... to help Trump win".[7] James Comey said:

    The bureau began an effort after we got the Steele dossier to try and see how much of it we could replicate. That work was ongoing when I was fired. Some of it was consistent with our other intelligence, the most important part. The Steele dossier said the Russians are coming for the American election. It's a huge effort. It has multiple goals ... And that was true.

Mueller understood his mandate was to investigate before the fact conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. When people allege "collusion" between Trump and Russia, they are not talking about a before the fact conspiracy, but rather tacit and sometimes explicit coordination between the two groups to benefit one another.

Mueller kept his investigation very narrow in that sense, and failed to pursue various avenues of investigation, including not even looking at any financial ties between Trump and Russia (of which there are many, as confessed by Eric Trump). In fact the Mueller Report notes that the Trump, his campaign, and his associates obstructed the investigation by lying and destroying evidence. So a finding of insufficient evidence doesn't really put the issue to bed. Mueller didn't even interview Trump in person, and Trump lied to Mueller in his written responses to questions.

In fact, the Republican-chaired Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a later report which expands on the Mueller probe, and it more or less confirms what those who alleged "collusion" were saying all along. Remember, the original position Trump took was that there were zero contacts between his campaign and Russia. No contacts, no deals.

The Mueller Report and later the SSCI report lay out over 100 contacts between Trump and Russian intelligence and government officials. In particular:

- Trump's son, son in law, and campaign manager met with a convicted Russian Spy in Trump's house on behalf of the Russian government. The Trump Campaign was very eager to meet with her. The spy laid out specific terms: in exchange for dirt on Hillary Clinton, they expected the relaxation of sanctions levied by the Magnitsky act.

- Paul Manafort in fact turned over internal campaign data to a Russian intelligence officer. From the Senate Committee: "The Committee found that Manafort's presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign," ... "The Committee assesses that Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to exploit Manafort's access to gain insight in to the Campaign".

- In the trial of Roger Stone, we learned that Stone actually gave Trump advance notice to Trump of hacked DNC e-mails, as Stone was in direct communication with Julian Assange. Trump had previously been briefed by the FBI about foreign interference in the campaign, and he failed to alert the FBI of the incoming hacked information. In fact he kept quiet about this, and instead not only did he trumpet the hacked e-mails at every opportunity, he actively encouraged the hackers to try to obtain more information.

- From Michael Cohen we learned that Trump's claims of having no active deals in Russia was a lie, when in fact Trump was attempting to get a tower built in Moscow, complete with a penthouse gift for Vladimir Putin. It was reported by Buzzfeed that Trump instructed Cohen to lie about this, and while Mueller disputed this, we later learned that in fact when Cohen lied to Congress about the existence of this deal, he was doing so with the understanding that it was Trump's wish for him to do so. Whatever Cohen's motivation though, we do know Trump wanted to keep it a secret from the American people and he himself lied to all of us about the existence of a deal.

- Fast forward to Trump's actual presidency, and he has done everything he can to show deference to Russia, from pushing for Russia to rejoin the G8 (from which they were expelled for the invasion of Crimea), to making blundering strategic decisions in Turkey to Russia's benefit, to siding with Putin over the assessment that Russia was not responsible for hacking the DNC, to pushing the idea that in fact it was Ukraine that was responsible for hacking the DNC.

And after all of this, there still has not been a rigorous accounting of Trump's financial ties to Russia, of which there are many, and there has not been a counterintelligence investigation into the relationship. Not by Mueller, not by the House, the Senate, the FBI, or any other body. Given all of the above and everything we know about how Trump operates.

So was there a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia? No, probably not, and this was not alleged by most of us who had an issue with the relationship between Trump and Russia. Was there collusion? I think the Manafort incident alone proves yes. Trump's campaign manager hands over internal campaign data to what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence characterizes as a "Russian Intelligence Officer", while the GRU is hacking the DNC and targeting voters with a psyops campaign. Yeah, that's collusion.

It's not like those articles are locked down and written by partisans...

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/newly-de...

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/fisa-investigation

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/453384-fbis-spreadsh...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/16/fbi-declass...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/us/politics/carter-page-f...

Each new release like the FBI spreadsheet on the dossier gets more and more to the point that it was a knowing hit piece.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-declassifies-steele-dos...

Even the investigating agents themselves were buying liability insurance and saying it was a BS hit job:

> “[D]oing all this election research – I think some of these guys want a [C]linton presidency,”

> “[T]he new AG might have some questions….then yada yada yada…we all get screwed,”

> “I’m tellying [sic] man, if this thing ever gets FOIA’d, there are going to be some tough questions asked,” one agent wrote. “[A]nd a great deal of those will be related to Brian having a scope way outside the boundaries of logic[.]”

> “[J]esus,” an agent wrote back. “[T]rump was right. [S]till not put together….why do we do this to ourselves. [W]hat is wrong with these people[?]?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/24/trump-was-right-explosi...

As to the inevitable "partisan sources", I'd love to offer something from a "neutral" or left-leaning source, but they censor all the things instead.

I believe downvoters are likely responding to the factual inaccuracies in your post; not to mention the tone.

What are the factual inaccuracies in the parent comment? I am new to this topic and it would help me if you pointed to what specifically he said that was inaccurate and why you believe so.

>The US government has officially said there's no Russian involvement in the recent Biden leak

DNI John Ratcliffe, who is a Republican partisan, said that on Fox News. He was also just caught lying to the FBI director in making a partisan assessment (with zero to back it up) in a statement about election interference by Iran last week. He's not exactly a credible and dispassionate actor in all of this.

The FBI also concurred with the DNI’s claim that the IC has no intelligence to suggest the laptop is Russian disinformation, by saying “we have nothing to add.” Additionally, a senate committee has determined and announced that they believe the evidence Bobulinski presented is authentic.

"We have nothing to add" is not "concurring". You're making a leap of logic there. It's the same thing as saying "we can neither confirm nor deny".

The "Senate Committee" you speak of is chaired by Ron Johnson, who is a staunch Trump ally and again, a rank partisan.

In order for the general public to have any degree of trust about this, there is going to have to be some authority who is at least not a partisan who can speak with authority to actual facts. Not vague "assurances" with no evidence. This issue is way too political to trust Republicans, especially after Benghazi (went nowhere after dozens of investigations by partisans) and Hillary's e-mails (went nowhere after a whole year of hyping it up as the worst crime ever by a politician). This entire thing just smells like the next big Republican freakout over nothing.

Could you give an example of an authority you would trust to verify the authenticity of the evidence?

Edit: Update! Robert Graham (of Errata Security) has verified the DKIM headers of the “smoking gun” email — https://twitter.com/erratarob/status/1322007153415200768

Not if they expect that they would be effectively cut off from most major distribution channels for doing so.

> From my position

Your position is the same as everyone here: You haven't read the story and have no information whatsoever to claim that they are being good editors or not.

Until we have a story to look at, it's anyone's guess if he's being a good journalist or they are being a good editor.

Many media organizations care quite a lot about their reputation as well as their effect on society.They want to report honestly and give an accurate picture of the word. Including Glenns paper, that's why he joined it.

Glenn seems to have picked a grudge(against establishment Dems) over commitment to solid truthful reporting

The FBI just confirmed there is an actual investigation which was started in 2019. How is that not worth reporting?

>> Media organizations are not interested truth or accuracy of their stories

As someone who works in media (not on editorial side but on digital), I can assure you thats you are wrong.

Most media orgs have a log of rigor and fact-checking that goes into their stories. The editorial side is typically (not always in some places) shielded from the business pressures (for better and for worse).

Its someone else's problem to worry about clicks etc.

Greenwald stopped being a credible journalist awhile ago. Just look at what he was pushing these last few weeks.

I have a lot of respect for his early work but he went on a weird tangent.

He stopped being a credible journalist because he broke ranks and deviated from the liberal orthodoxy?

Ah, there it is.

He stopped being a credible journalist because he pushed to publish an article that is not supported by reality.

And this is proven by the countless won lawsuits against said media organisations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...

The mask came off this last year for me.

If you look, there is often a lot of video on the ground of these events, so that you can see beyond a single narrative.

In the same vein, there is a lot of video of what happened in Kenosha leading up to the shootings.

They didn't win the lawsuits...most of them were dismissed, and in the few that were not they settled for each side paying their own costs. (Most of their targets were publicly traded companies, so those legal settlements would have been disclosed in their SEC filings.)

"On July 24, 2020, The Washington Post settled the lawsuit with Nick Sandmann. The amount of the settlement has not been made public." "CNN settled the lawsuit with Nick Sandmann. The amount of the settlement has not been made public." "a judge rejected NBC's attempt to dismiss the lawsuit against it."

How are most of them dismissed if none were actually dismissed? Reaching a settlement is also considered 'winning' the suit in these kinds of cases.

> Reaching a settlement is also considered 'winning' the suit in these kinds of cases.

That's in interesting conclusion. If CNN settled for a few thousand dollars to make Sandmann go away, did he really win? Either way CNN looses, they either have to pay for lawyers on appeals or settle out of court and end up where we are.

Pretty much every lawyer whose chimed in on the subject says that Sandmann is unlikely to have won a significant amount. So he "won" in the sense of some PR points with people who already thought he was in the right. That's probably about it.

"If CNN settled for a few thousand dollars to make Sandmann go away"

No one would sue and settle with three different news agencies over 'a few thousand' if That was the only money on the table their lawyers would have pushed for a court ruling.

No, reaching a settlement is not considered "winning" a suit. Companies generally settle when their legal fees for going to court would exceed the amount of the settlement. Since we know the rates that WaPo's lawyers charge, we can put a theoretical cap on the amount of the settlement. Less his own legal fees, Sandmann might have walked away with $25,000.

As for "most of them dismissed," 30 of 33 claims against WaPo were dismissed. In other words, Sandmann lost on 30 claims, and settled on 3 of them. Two of his other lawsuits were dismissed by the court, and the only lawsuit still alive is the NBC suit. That's not a legal victory; a motion to dismiss at this stage of a lawsuit assumes that everything the plaintiff said is true without taking into consideration any competing facts.

"No, reaching a settlement is not considered "winning" a suit. Companies generally settle when their legal fees for going to court would exceed the amount of the settlement."

I was going to write exactly this but didn't because it seemed too obvious to do so. The plaintiff ALSO has legal costs if they go for a ruling. This is why I said a settlement is usually considered a victory. If both parties already agree on the outcome then going trough the legal procedure is a waste of time and money. Only if sandmann's lawyers didn't agree on the settlement money then it would be advantageous to push for a ruling. Hence this could be considered 'winning' the suit even though there is no such thing on courts. only rulings(Ex, in favor of) and paying the legal fees of the other party.

The fact that this incident was newsworthy is a useful indicator that this kind of case is rare. That's a reason to trust media organizations, not to distrust them.

Similar: sometimes I see people saying "this publication had to retract or correct a story, which is proof that you cannot trust them!". The fact that they posted a correction is a reason TO trust them. You should be suspicious of publications that never post corrections, not publications that do.

>>Greenwald stopped being a credible

hmmm, was that about the same time he came to understand that the Authoritarian left that was taking over the Democrat party was illiberal, regressive, and not at all out to advance individual freedom like the "liberals" used to be?

Did he "stop being credible" when is politics separated from your own?

Greenwald has always been left-libertarian, it seems today the "left" only has room for left-authoritarians

Then care to explain the wildly unfounded allegation that Trump called fallen troops suckers for dying for their country pushed by unfounded anonymous sources, when critics of the president like Bolton went on record saying the claim was bogus?

> Media organizations are not interested truth or accuracy of their stories, but simply how many ads and subscriptions the stories can sell. And that's not the say they are motivated by greed - even worse, they are often motivated by missionary-like zeal to promote a cause.

Why do you believe Glenn is immune to this interest? The entire point of this is to promote his newsletter.

> I think Glenn hoped to create a media entity that regarded truth as the measure of merit of a story vs. how well it promoted a cause and ads/subscriptions. Now that the experiment has failed so obviously, good for him for moving on.

How do you know that "truth" is not the measure of merit for this story? You haven't read it; you're simply taking Glenn at his word.

Greenwald has never operated in a way that concerns itself with the consequences of actions. The philosophy is "we report, freely, what we believe to be true and fair, and whats comes of it does not matter".

I am personally torn on this kind of philosophy. Would that everyone was like this, but since they are not, surely there are times when too much is on the line to behave this way?

He explicitly talks about this attitude in this interview: https://www.vox.com/2016/9/15/12853236/glenn-greenwald-trump...

But it is a bit weird that here we are again, on the cusp of another trump presidency, and Greenwald swoops in to Trump's aid, again. Not sure how I feel about it.

This is where the distinction between "act" and "rule" consequentialism becomes important.

Perhaps there is "too much" on the line, but I think that we live in a complex world, it is difficult to estimate the downstream impacts of your action, and that every time you choose to suppress a story due to potential political consequences, you are undermining broader "trust."

Better to default to reporting freely since, as a rule, suppressing stories generally erodes trust, whereas the direct downstream impact of airing a specific story can be difficult to estimate in a complex world.

Both both blocking and running a story are conscious actions with political consequences and which have the potential to undermine trust. Plenty of people lost trust in the media following their focus on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which amounted to nothing but likely swayed the election.

There seems to be some sort of paradox of tolerance to trust and the news media.

In principle, we should allow all information. However, bad faith actors can easily take advantage of this principle, and flood the airwaves with dubious and ultimately-overblown stories (see Clinton's emails). If bad-faith actors are afoot (which seems the case here), then at some point an editor needs to step in and refuse to print the story—the question though, is when? And is there anyway to step in, and have it not look like censorship?

I agree that both actions have consequences. I wasn't trying to defend taking action in general, I was trying to claim that I think a consequential rule of: "Do not block new information due to perceived impact on election" might be a good one.

> Plenty of people lost trust in the media following their focus on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, which amounted to nothing but likely swayed the election.

Hm, let's do a comparison. Do you think trust in the media would have been better or worse if media outlets had received leaked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign during the summer (some indicating, for instance, that some members of Hillary Clinton's campaign had conspired to acquire questions ahead of the Democratic debates), embargoed them until after the election, and then released them?

"bad-faith actors are afoot (which seems the case here)" -> I don't see why the 'faith' of the actors really has any relevance as to whether the information is in the public interest to know.

> Hm, let's do a comparison. Do you think trust in the media would have been better or worse if media outlets had received leaked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign during the summer (some indicating, for instance, that some members of Hillary Clinton's campaign had conspired to acquire questions ahead of the Democratic debates), embargoed them until after the election, and then released them?

It depends! What is the source of the information? Does the source have incentive to fabricate or exaggerate their claims? Can other trustworthy sources confirm the information? Does the information hold up to critical scrutiny? Does the information matter?

If the answer to these questions are all yes, then I think the media acted in a trustworthy way. If not, then I don't think so.

My argument is not that embarrassing information should be withheld because of an an election. Instead, my argument is that news media should not publish any and all information without the due process of journalism. If the claims hold up to scrutiny, then sure, publish it! If the claims don't hold up, then don't publish it.

> "bad-faith actors are afoot (which seems the case here)" -> I don't see why the 'faith' of the actors really has any relevance as to whether the information is in the public interest to know.

No, but bad faith actors have an incentive to inject noise into the news cycle, and in turn, have incentive to fabricate or exaggerate claims. Journalists and their editors, when they believe information is given in bad faith, should hold it to a higher level of scrutiny so that they avoid mischaracterizing a story.

edit: typo

> Instead, my argument is that news media should not publish any and all information without the due process of journalism. If the claims hold up to scrutiny, then sure, publish it! If the claims don't hold up, then don't publish it.

The emails exist and I think have gone through the same amount of due process as other leaked documents. Here's NYTs David Barstow (who broke the Trump tax returns) discussing why the faith of the leaker/hacker does not matter:

https://soundcloud.com/user-593288826/the-investigative-jour...

> The emails exist and I think have gone through the same amount of due process as other leaked documents.

I'm not convinced. The story was initially rejected from several outlets and even struggled to get a byline in the NYPost. This is on top of the questionable provenance of the laptop and the lack of metadata on the files. All of this for a story that, at least in my view, isn't even very remarkable.

> Here's NYTs David Barstow (who broke the Trump tax returns) discussing why the faith of the leaker/hacker does not matter:

I think my point isn't clear—a bad faith actor doesn't intrinsically make their information less truthful. The veracity of the information is a completely independent factor. My argument is that, when someone brings new information, and you expect this person to be acting in bad faith, you should evaluate that information with extra scrutiny, because they have incentive to fabricate and to stretch the truth. The information may, ultimately, be truthful, in which case good! check it, double-check it, and publish it! But their word shouldn't be taken for granted just because the story is exciting.

He is more concerned with upholding the principle of the first amendment than supporting the ideology of the moment. Supressing information because its not convenient at the moment is the very definition of hack journalism. Something he wants no part of.

You'd think the democratic party would have learned after 2016 by nominating another clinton. The seem to feel that supressing negative stories is just easier than answering them. Nominating someone like Sanders would have at least allowed the issues to be discussed.

How does the First Amendment come into play in a situation wherein a private corporation making an internal decision regarding a corporate asset?

Fair point. But this is not just the Intercept. This is multiple outlets all letting their partisan affiliation interfere with their reporting. Greenwald has been bothered by this for a long while now, along with a growing list: Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, just to name a few.

Not upholding the first amendment; upholding the principle of the first amendment, that is, the first amendment doesn't create a right, it protects one that we all already have. The Bill of Rights are based on natural rights, ones we have by benefit of being alive, one of which is free speech. The First Amendment concerns itself with a very small corner of that universe, but the rest of it is ours, and should remain free.

The founders never imagined a situation where a very few private citizens would have the power to censor the speech of millions of others. Nothing even remotely similar to that existed at the time and there was nothing to suggest it could ever exist. The US Constitution is also a minimalist document so it wasn't concerned with enforcing behavior between private citizens.

There is a concerted effort by the establishment through PR campaigns by think tanks, bot networks, and major media outlet connections, to push the narrative that free speech is dangerous and should be curtailed. They are first starting with pressure and leverage on private outlets, while simultaneously floating the idea that there should be legal limitations on online speech. It's all part of the same effort.

Furthermore there are a few private outfits that have near a near monopoly on public speech, so they have the effect of censorship.

> He is more concerned with upholding the principle of the first amendment than supporting the ideology of the moment. Supressing information because its not convenient at the moment is the very definition of hack journalism. Something he wants no part of.

This is a pretty uncharitable read. The Intercept's issue with Greenwald's article is not that it is "not convenient," but that Greenwald doesn't adequately support his own conclusions on a story with tenuous evidence. That's not hack journalism; that's journalism. Journalists and editors are obligated to review stories and ask the question "is what we are reporting true? is it relevant? is it timely?" and if the answer to any of those is "no" or "we're not sure," to hold off. THAT'S the standard that The Intercept is using, and that's where Greenwald fell short. Anything less is the very definition of hack journalism.

It is definitely a two-edged blade. It might serve as a moral pillar to Greenwald, but it also makes him easy to manipulate. One could feed the leak at the time where it would do most damage and know that where other editors would think twice Glenn would jump on it.

Sadly I have the feeling that good faith journalism has no role to play nowadays. It doesn't have the reach and credibility it needs to justify it. People now "inform" themselves in a decentralized manner, seldom break their bubble and don't care much about facts preferring narratives. The hardest facts and science can be presented and it will still come out as narrative.

I completely agree. He notes that "Everything gets interpreted through this lens of, ‘Which side are you helping, and which side are you on?’" It's absolutely true that this framework is unhelpful for comprehending the situation, that it makes it difficult to forming a coherent philosophy, and and that it makes it impedes the process of learning about and sharing complex ideas.

But there is an obvious outcome where this gets published, people realize that Biden has flaws, and choose to elect Trump instead as if he did not have flaws. There is no chance of an outcome where people realize that Biden has flaws and elect a different candidate without flaws instead. If Greenwald was actually concerned about presidential emoluments clause violations, nepotism, and corruption, it would be unwise to publish a hack job against the candidate less guilty of these infractions.

Now, I do think that awareness of progressive causes and systemic shortcomings were advanced during Trump's presidency; perhaps Greenwald is playing the extremely long game, hoping that in 2024 the system is able to make a more permanent reform? But it seems more like he's angry that the game is rigged and is destructively flipping the game board over instead of playing - please don't do that, Glenn, I live here.

>"But it is a bit weird that here we are again, on the cusp of another trump presidency, and Greenwald swoops in to Trump's aid, again. Not sure how I feel about it.But it is a bit weird that here we are again, on the cusp of another trump presidency, and Greenwald swoops in to Trump's aid, again. Not sure how I feel about it."

He does not owe it to anyone to support/be against any particular candidate. His task is to report. And if someone is inconvenienced by the truth it is their problem.

Yes, when two people disagree, one side commonly thinks the other side's argument is nonsense. But, as you admit you don't know the truth of the story, it is impossible to tell whose side is right. Maybe the editors do just think it is garbage journalism. Or maybe the editors are just protecting "their guy".

It isn't impossible to tell who is right or we would never know anything. Maybe Ted Cruz's dad assassinated JFK or maybe he didn't. Who knows, both sides say the other side is nonsense.

I never made the argument that is generally impossible to tell who is right.

His argument is not nonsense. Even assuming you buy the line that the media is not covering the story because it has "has all the hallmarks" of a Russian disinformation campaign as was argued by all the media outlets it makes no sense why they wouldn't cover it (unless your assume they are worried about how it might effect the election). Just months before the idea that a trump administration offical (or close personal adviser/lawyer) was working with a foreign power to effect the election was a impeachable offense! Now it's not even worth informing the public about?

his track record is good enough proof for any editor to know that story is NOT a garbage. I guess this is WHY they actually censored it.

You can't just waive it through on the strength of his reputation, you have to check the sources.

you have to apply the same standard to other stories then. If you wait until everything is 100% verified you'll publish nothing

You're assuming it's a garbage story and that it's intended to influence the election based on absolutely nothing. Why not make counter-arguments to the actual piece, when it comes out?

I'd argue that all of the rampant censorship about any conceivable questioning or criticism of Biden is the thing that history is likely going to look back on in a few months, and perhaps years, as unethical and irresponsible journalistic conduct.

I disagree with some of Greenwald's stances, but he and Matt Taibbi seem to be the only actual journalists left in the country, that I'm aware of. It's mind-boggling.

I strongly dislike Trump as president and as a person, I think he's probably the worst president we've had from a domestic perspective, and I couldn't disagree more with him and his party's agenda, but as of the past few days I almost want to see him win due to all of this recent censorship tipping the scales. Almost like an Oedipus-style prophecy ironically fulfilled by the attempt to prevent it. I don't actually want him to win, but I want these people to have this blow up in their face.

The cover-up is probably a lot worse than the allegations (which don't seem that damaging, going by the leaked emails, but I'm curious to see Greenwald's analysis), and I bet this is turning many more people further from media outlets and closer to Trump or at least further from the left. Even if he loses the election, I think the past few weeks have shown he might have already won. Not due to anything he did, but solely due to an entirely avoidable shooting of oneself in the foot. This could have ripple effects that last longer than the next 4 years.

You're already buying into the propaganda - there is nothing to "cover-up" per se, there can't be a cover-up, because there is nothing to cover up, there is no story.

Imagine multiple media outlets simultaneously get an email saying "Meowface denies being Dogface during the night". If someone refuses to print this, due lack of evidence and lack of truth - that is not called a cover-up. There is no reason to dignify it with airtime in the first place.

After all one can publish this sort of stuff on blogs, internet forums, tabloids etc. Curation is the true news product - sifting of truth from untruth is one way to do it.

I may very well turn out to be wrong, but I think the emails are more likely than not all real. But even if they all turn out to be completely doctored, there's a much more responsible way of handling the information. Of course it'd be absurd to assume the emails are real, but it's almost as absurd to assume they can't be real and that to even attempt to objectively assess the claim is falling for propaganda.

This is a true Shiri's scissor, here. The left-leaning journalists who recognize, in my opinion, how ridiculous this behavior is vs. the rest are basically living on different planets.

It's not based on nothing. It's based on a pattern of the current administration and the media that supports it propping up nonsense and blowing stories that are critical of their opposition out of proportion specifically in order to rile people up and influence elections. Pizzagate, Hillary's emails, Q-Anon, these things all take a toll on people who actually care about what is true and real.

Is it really surprising that after all the overblown conspiracy nonsense we've been battered with from the White House and Trump that people have grown suspicious and weary of new stories that smell even remotely similar? It's gotten to the point where if Trump supports a story I assume it's probably untrue by default just because of the sheer volume of lies and nonsense he retweets on a daily basis. I don't know anything about the Hunter Biden story. Maybe it's loaded with true, damning information against Biden. If so, it's too bad, because we are neck deep in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation here and I'm not going to learn about it until it's been verified and reported by media outlets that I can actually trust.

I fucking hate conspiracy theories. I spend (or waste) way too much time online arguing with conspiracy theorists and debunking conspiracy theories. Trump is definitely the conspiracy theorist in chief. It's beyond insanity.

But just like conspiracy theories are irrational, kneejerk dismissing all negative stories as conspiracy theories is also irrational. There's a much more reasonable way of handling this. Things always have to be taken on a case-by-case basis.

You mention boy-who-cried-wolf, and NY Post is definitely a shitty and extremely biased outlet, but probably about as biased as modern day CNN. Both have peddled a lot of hyperbole and unjustified shit, and both have also reported on real things. As far as I know, the NY Post never supported absurd conspiracy theories like Pizzagate or QAnon.

NY Post certainly hyped up Hillary's private email server well beyond the point of reason and fairness, but this scenario would exactly be like if every non-right-biased news outlet all decided to never publish any story even mentioning that she had a private email server that she may have used for non-personal affairs. Of course it'd be extremely irresponsible to have headlines about her email server every day, but it's just as irresponsible to consider the mere existence of the topic an unspeakable matter, as it would be if Twitter were to have censored every link to an article mentioning that she had a private email server she's alleged to have used for non-personal things. This is the Streisand effect in action, here.

It's simply not rational to assume that any story Trump supports is probably untrue. He lies an unbelievable amount, but if you assume 60% of everything that ever comes out of his mouth is a lie, that 40% could still have some real things worth trying to look at objectively. And in this case, this isn't some thing he just peddled entirely himself out of the blue; a newspaper reported on it, even if they're a very biased newspaper. He's going to support anything that he thinks helps his campaign, and not everything that helps his campaign is necessarily bullshit, even if a lot is.

This absolutist stance is part of the thing that only bolsters his constant accusations of fake news - "fake news" has in some sense become a self-fulfilling prophecy in some cases, like here. The left never followed Hillary's proclamation of "when they go low, we go high". Every year, the opposition sinks lower and lower, gradually trending towards the level of the other side. And that's probably exactly what Trump wants and has been trying to trigger.

They had the hard drive for over a year. Plenty of time to try and do a proper investigation. But instead they sat on it. If they were willing to sit on it for over 12 months, I see no reason why mainstream media can't insist that they continue to sit on it until they verify their sources.

And it is worth mentioning that both Fox New (the news side, not the opinion side) and the Wall Street Journal turned the story down. And the journalists at NY Post refused to put their name in the byline. If I worked at CNN, and saw that right leaning orgs were staying away from it, maybe skepticism is warranted. And keep in mind, they are refusing to release copies of the source material to other journalists. So no one other than the NY Post has the ability to authenticate (even fox business can't get access[1]).

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/523087-giuliani-goes-off-...

In this thread I am seeing both "this story is already running non-stop on Fox, there's no censorship", and "if the editors didn't censor this, it would poison the election, and that's too big of a risk."

Ignoring the mischaracterization of the two points, what are you trying to say? That those two thoughts are not allowed to exist in the same "group" of people, for some definition of "group"?

The rationale for censorship of Greenwald's article is unconvincing, as that rationale is contradicted even by other people who agree with the censorship.

As the story is already running elsewhere, it is unconvincing that there is a pressing need for this particular outlet to suppress it.

If other outlets want to put their reputations on the line for something you can't vet, do you want to jump into the mud with them? The intercept decided no, seems pretty simple.

That isn't the rationale that the editors used to make copy suggestions - that's the rationale that Greenwald is projecting onto them. I suggest reading the email thread he posted on his blog - it does not make him look very good.

Not only do they justify censorship, there is a suspicious amount of comments trying to minimize or delegitimize greenwald in a sneaky boilerplate response: "I used to think he was a good journalist", "I used to respect his journalism 5 years ago", etc. And of course trying to tie greenwald to russia. The exact same thing you see on assange related post.

The sad thing is a lot of these commenters are journalists or work in the news industry. Sad thing to see.

Not to mention the downvote brigading.

"Letting readers decide who is right" is always good thing. But they rarely do that. Most take the spicy title (or out-of-context incorrect quote from Twitter) which reaffirms their opinion and run with it. They share, like and subscribe. And the article keeps being shared, liked and subscribed for months, even if it was disproven minutes after it was published. So instead of being a way to find the truth the article ends up being a way to validate missinformation.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Just wanted to point out that "letting them decide" has a lot of problems.

> all that matters is that the story runs, not whether it's shown to be false months after the election is over

This mentality is authoritarian, anti-democratic, and anti-free speech. It implies that YOU, the editor, or whoever gets to decide for the rest of us what is worth knowing about or not. This is why non-partisan mainstream news is failing. The Internet has shown people the stories (true or not) that were being left out. I want raw information from the news not a carefully selected set of stories that follow a neat narrative.

Investigating whether a story is true or not is a fundamental part of journalism. Not publishing stories about Bat Boy found with Elvis in Atlantas is a good thing.

> That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it

He is/was one of the main editors of The Intercept. He is the second person listed on https://theintercept.com/about/. There is a wide media censorship on this story. If you think it's just this story, they are also squashing reports on the Philadelphia riots.

And all? most? of his colleagues with fairly similar political views and a dedication to good journalism are opposed. Glenn seems to have picked his personal grudge over journalistic integrity

That's apparently how it was supposed to work at the intercept, according to his contract. Strange that he thinks his readers ... are actually going to read the article?

Is this the editor who wore down Snowden's patience with obstinate ignorance how to use encrypted emails despite being written tailored dummies guides, until Snowden wrote in the clear and ruined his life?

I'm not asking rhetorically I'm on my phone, and on the bus but this seems like it could lead to the incident, "I tried to teach GPG to Greenwald but I had the same problem Snowden had encountered when he reached out in December, that Greenwald was busy and couldn’t focus on it. " From : https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret...

I believe that you are talking about Assange and the GPG key, right? I believe that that was a former Guardian journalist, not Greenwald.

It's not like we're talking about some random story that appears out of the aether; it's a story from a cofounding journalist. Glen wanted this agreement between editors and journalists: editors will not censor the journalists they employ. The Intercept violated that.

To put it another way, what's more likely?: that Glenn Greenwald just suddenly decided he'd like to publish garbage articles, or that the Intercept is seeking to filter what content it publishes to achieve political aims?

Obviously it's up to each individual to make their own call on that, but to me, it's pretty obviously almost the latter.

The problem is the selectivity with which the MSM acts. The MSM spent weeks pouring over Kavanaugh's yearbooks and attempting to ruin the lices of the Covington high school kids but they can't do some basic investigation on a story that has been corroborated multiple times?

I'm going to trust Glenn Greenwald's knowledge of journalistic ethics over yours.

What about the editors' opinions? They have a better perspective than anyone.

lol ... The editor though that the truth is less important than the election. It's the same as what happened in Social Media. Sadly, it means they can never be trusted ever again.

> That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election

I doubt that a journalist of greenwald's caliber is going to write "garbage". I take your point about the editorial function in general but we can't lose sight of the context.

I'd give him the benefit of the doubt over your incredibly arrogant assumption that he just wrote a 'garbage story' and is being legitimately dropped. WTF.

The Intercept's editor-in-chief has put out a statement of their own.

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

Greenwald himself just confirmed on twitter he could publish with no editorial oversight. Eventually, his colleagues balked. "A grown person throwing a tantrum", as the editor puts it, sounds about right.

That statement reads, to me, as unprofessional and petulant. What kind of editor makes a personal attack on a former colleague in a public setting in the name of a journalistic organization? It simply drives home to me the idea that it was the editors, not Greenwald, who are being petty dictators.

I guess how this whole debacle is received will probably depend on one's life experience.

Greenwald called them pathological, censorious, illiberal and equates editorial oversight with censorship. It's hardly petulant and unprofessional to suggest, in response, that he's behaving like a grown-ass dude throwing a tantrum.

He's also just published their recent correspondence. It doesn't make him look great either:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

What is the difference between a “grown-ass dude throwing a tantrum” and a “grown-ass dude vociferously disagreeing with the ethics of his former employer”?

I’m not asking to make a point or take a side in this via a pretense of Socratic method, I’m asking to try understanding the motivations and intentions of how Greenwald is being depicted in terms of ‘throwing tantrums’ as a non-journalist fan of journalism.

I think that one's pretty straightforward. 'I completely disagree with your editorial direction' is disagreeing with your employer. 'Your editing is censorship and suppression of truths only I have gleaned' is throwing a tantrum.

I guess it I have a hard time understanding how one can read all of the presented material and come away with the impression Glenn Greenwald is the misrepresented party in some vigorous but rational and fact-based discussion.

Fair enough. I think I would say there's a lot of ugly happening in the whole of this story that doesn't sit right with me as a reader, but the characterization of Greenwald's position being "tantrum"-like seems to be something revealing in and of itself. Of what, I don't know if I can really say without spawning off an entire irrelevant thread of split hairs and doubling-down on definitions without ever coming back up for air, or returning to the source material for discussion.....

...but, your point is taken.

I don't think this is exactly a story full of heroes - a journalism outfit that burned a source (who is now serving time) vs its crank founder. I don't know how familiar you are with Greenwald's work over the years but the reason the tantrum and 'says anyone who disagrees with him is conspiring against him' charge still sticks is that it represents a long pattern of behaviour on his part. There are, like, twitter parody accounts about this!

If you want to compare this with a similar recent situation with an actual high-profile journalist and real high-profile story - Ronan Farrow and his former employer NBC are still bickering over whether NBC unethically spiked his MeToo reporting. I don't think at any point either side has emitted a Greenwald-style screed-de-coeur, despite the bitterness of the dispute.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ronan-farrow-nbc-harvey-wein...

Greenwald has a contractual right to a lack of editorial oversight and they pushed it anyway telling him certain things need to change concerning the content and who exactly is painted as corrupt before the story will be published.

As far as I can tell, the "tantrum" they allude to is better stated as 'exercising his contractual rights he negotiated as a founder for exactly these sorts of cases'.

I can't think of any reasonable reading of the statement (in which they directly say he's throwing a tantrum and why they think he is) that can be read as an allusion to a scare-quoted "tantrum" about a contract dispute. They don't put it in quotes, just straight up say it and their objections, whatever you think of them, are not about contracts.

I'm not sure how you can accuse me of both scare quoting, and actual quoting the same word at the same time.

And he has listed in his contract that he can publish without editorial oversight. The emails from the editor are very clearly are drawing a hard line that certain themes won't be publishable, in contrast to his contractual rights. Him taking offense to that is the basis for them claiming that he's having a "tantrum".

It's very clearly about contracts.

Regardless of your position here, that statement is definitely not a good look for the Intercept. Immediately attacking a former employee and making numerous typos in your statement as the editor in chief? Good lord. Capitalizing the name of your own publication three different ways in three consecutive sentences has to be a record.

I mean, if that's 'Good lord', Greenwald's original letter is 'Jesus H. Fucking Christ On A Stick Rolled In Pigeon Droppings'.

Good thing he's not an editor then.

> ...garbage story...

> I want to be clear that I'm not claiming to know the truth as it relates to this story...

Make up your mind.

You are trying to frame these two quotes as being contradictory by leaving out the words preceding the first quote. Why would you do that?

It should read: "If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story..."

Looks like including the entire sentence makes it pretty clear that this isn't a self-contradicting position to take.

Except the GPs initial framing was not honest to begin with: editors' dismissal is not based on the story being garbage; details of this dismissal is contested and exactly the issue under discussion here. If GP couldn't resist a low effort editorializing of this dismissal reason, they don't get to claim neutrality or agnosticism two sentences later.

Besides, the rest of their post clearly indicates they do think the story is garbage. It looks as if they are giving a spin of legitimacy to that angle as if that was also what editors thought.

lol thank god we have censors like you to determine what articles the greatest, most impactful journalist of our lifetimes can publish. how would we he know whats newsworthy otherwise.

Maybe ... if this was 1990. This is 2020, they know that their actions will cause a streisand effect. I don't think people are watching mainstream media narratives with bated breath , as most journalists think.

If the article contains the truth and is about some serious misconduct, wouldn't influencing the election be a good thing? This is the very role of journalism. It's important that the public makes a decision based on all the facts.

I can totally see his point with journalistic bias and the money strings. The ideal of independent press has long been dropped, and now we have news agencies of every political denomination. Sometimes it feels like objectivity isn't even a goal anymore.

I'm not a Trump supporter in any way. Still, I do want the truth to be known even if it's about a person I support.

If. But if the article contains some outright falsehoods about serious misconduct, and it still influences the election, is that a good thing?

Mind you, I'm not clearly on the "don't publish" side. But that position is not clearly wrong.

I was coming here to say the same.

When you have all of the intelligence agencies you trust saying "Hey there are nation-state actors who are actively trying to sow dis-information in order to affect the outcome of the US elections." as an editor your only response can be "We are going to be really really choosy about stories we publish with respect to either candidate prior to the election."

Maybe it is a big scoop and all legit, and maybe it will like the "Hunter files" that Fox News was touting and have now mysteriously vanished. The responsible thing to do is publish after the election. What ever the story talks about will still be true or untrue then, and the risk of it being an elaborate hoax are non-zero. Nobody wants to be the person who was "duped by a foreign intelligence service into helping them move the election their way." That is not a badge of honor.

The response from The Intercept:

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

> "If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election"

This is bordering on hyperbole.

1. Glenn Greenwald isn't one to produce a "Garbage Story," he's a credible journalist with a long history of dropping bombshells. He's dropped bombshells about both the right AND the left. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Awards

2. It's the job of the media to do exactly what you have alluded to within the last half of the statement above. All sides do just that every single election I've been alive, all the way up to election day. But this time, only one side is allowed to do it.

3. Glenn Greenwald is a co-founder of The Intercept and is provided contractual rights to editorial freedom.

The fact that this comment is the top comment on this thread is extremely worrying. This is censorship, nothing less.

*edit: removed hints of rudeness.

The most shocking part of this whole fiasco is the way The Intercept's editors blatantly play favorites, allowing disinformation that helps Biden while censoring a legitimate story that hurts him:

> 4) Finally, I have to note what I find to be the incredible irony that The Intercept -- which has published more articles than I can count that contain factually dubious claims if not outright falsehoods that are designed to undermine Trump's candidacy or protect Joe Biden -- is now telling me, someone who has never had an article retracted or even seriously corrected in 15 years, that my journalism doesn't meet the editorial requirements to be published at the Intercept.

> It was The Intercept that took the lead in falsely claiming that publication by the NY Post was part of a campaign of "Russian disinformation" -- and did so by (a) uncritically citing the allegations of ex-CIA officials as truth, and (b) so much worse: omitting the sentence in the letter from the ex-CIA officials admitting they had no evidence for that claim. In other words, the Intercept -- in the only article that it bothered to publish that makes passing reference to these documents -- did so only by mindlessly repeating what CIA operatives say. And it turned out to be completely false. This -- CIA stenography -- is what meets the Intercept's rigorous editorial standards:

> "The U.S. intelligence community had previously warned the White House that Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation."

> The Intercept deleted from that quotation of the CIA's claims this rather significant statement: "we do not have evidence of Russian involvement."

> Repeatedly over the past several months, I've brought to Betsy's attention false claims that were published by The Intercept in articles that were designed to protect Biden and malign Trump. Some have been corrected or quietly deleted, while others were just left standing.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

> The Intercept -- which has published more articles than I can count that contain factually dubious claims if not outright falsehoods that are designed to undermine Trump's candidacy or protect Joe Biden -- is now telling me, someone who has never had an article retracted or even seriously corrected in 15 years, that my journalism doesn't meet the editorial requirements to be published at the Intercept.

IMO, this makes Greenwald look bad. “I was willing to be a part of a knowingly incorrect news organization until it affected me directly.”

You're not wrong. To me it highlights inherent flaws in the human psyche.

It’s not about who Greenwald is, it’s about the quality of reporting & the evidence they have to support their claims. You can’t run big stories based on the reputation of the journalist rather than the quality of the reporting. You’re basically suggesting they should get out of the way of Greenwald because he’s a celebrity journalist.

The issue is that we're not privy to the editor and their motives or the strength of Greenwald's evidence. It could very well be that he has a solid story. In this case you have a well known journalist claiming that his editors are censoring him on an important story.

The editors can run the story with a disclaimer outlining their concerns as Greenwald argues.

The editors have made public statements about this conflict as well. Pretty much none of this is hidden from public view by now.

They have now that it has come to the forefront. My point was they could have run the article along with the note.

GG can publish his article and the readers can be the judge.

The job of an editor is literally to make decisions about what to publish, not to publish everything or kowtow to celebrity journalists or potentially big stories.

My focus on character is in response to OP assuming an article written by a notable author was "garbage," while taking the side of unnamed editors. I focused on a single sentence, and fail how to see this is illogical in the context presented.

edit: never talk politics on HN, how many times must I tell this to myself

Edit: Comment removed so removing response, leaving link to the censored article.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

I applaud your self-awareness untog. A good friend once told me

"Never read the comments"

Later expanded to:

"Never respond to the comments"

Greenwald has also been a prominent supporter of a 19 year old rapist running for office, which doesn't help claims to be a credible journalist.

It's probably a good idea to cite your sources at least.

People who claim to be familiar with Greenwald should know about his partisan commitment to Aaron Coleman.

As I wrote in another comment, his faith that the story is there, if only he can find it, is what makes a good investigative journalist, but in this case he wants to publish a story built around that faith and nothing else. What his editor wanted him to take out was his insinuation that other news outlets' failure to come up with corroborating evidence is evidence that they are protecting Joe Biden, despite the fact that he, just like them, is a high-profile professional journalist that has looked into the story and found nothing to corroborate it. On this topic, there is nothing that separates him from any other journalist except his desire to communicate, through his coverage of the same lack of evidence that they already reported, his confidence that the evidence exists.

Well said. I can't believe people agree with this rationale. And he completely missed the part where the article states "these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication. " ...yea so its pretty clear what their agenda is

> That's not how this works. If the editor concludes that it's a garbage story dropped a few days before the election in an attempt to influence the election, you don't run it and then "let the readers decide who is right".

Except if it's about Bad Orange Man, right?

If the "golden showers" is not a garbage story, I don't know what is.

While true, in relation to the stories about Russian collusion without any credible evidence, I think this criticism of editorial decisions is very, very one-sided. Especially considering publicly available evidence.

It is true that it might not be the right thing to publish, in context of current smears in politics not exceptional, aside maybe violation of privacy which also didn't get much focus as of late.

He also seem to have contractual rights to publish it, so the editors aren't responsible. The effectiveness of this censorship is a large concern aside from the story.

Why are you assuming the editors think it's garbage and aren't acting politically. The fact that greenwald just resigned from the org he founded, and the scathing reasons he gave, makes it pretty plausble it's about politics not journalistic standards.

In this case it may actually be how it works. When Glenn Greenwood co-founded The Intercept, he wrote some degree of editorial freedom into his contract.

"The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression."

He was an editor with contractually guaranteed editorial freedom.

> That's not how this works.

It is when it's a media outlet you yourself founded and (according to Greenwald) the other editors were contractually obligated to publish what he'd written, uncensored.

Regardless of whether or not his article is good or bad, it seems like that is indeed how it should have worked.

Why is it a garbage story?

Would it be a garbage story if the photos/sex vids were Trump's? The mainstream media wouldn't call it a "garbage story" they'd call it some kitchsy bullshit thing like "crisis of democracy" or "bombshell"...

You get the idea. You're assuming the quality of the journalism in direct contradiction to the images/videos/SMS that's already in the wild.

That's their position, but he has is his.

This is a strawman. Greenwald didn't say that editing in general isn't ok. He didn't argue that all editorial disputes at all times must be resolved with critical articles alongside controversial ones. He suggested it as a solution here. It's not nonsense to suggest it, whether or not the editor accepts it.

Maybe they did see it the way you outlined: "garbage story dropped a few days before the election." He clearly sees it as censorship of an article that needs to be published. This is a resignation, so sure, the dispute was not resolved. Calling it a nonsense argument though, that takes a good squint.

Objective journalism is dead. Glen Greenwald is not by any measure a Republican or a conservative, but he is a good objective journalist. It's a shame that a newspaper he co-founded will not print one of his stories because of their non-objective partisanship, but unfortunately this is all too common today.

I put more initial weight into someone who published the Snowden disclosures than those who oppose him. But go read what he has to say and examine his sources. If what he says is true, then weigh less those opposing what he said else weigh them more.

Don’t listen to all the voices here seeking to discredit him. They are playing defense. Just go to original sources and make up your own mind.

> Just go to original sources and make up your own mind.

But that's not an easy thing to do, is it? Even if we can do this one time, that's not sustainable. We need to trust somebody, and that's unfortunately getting lot harder.

Usually, I would put more trust on an established media organization like The Intercept over an individual, even though he's a co-founder. But after seeing (what I perceive to be) media's blatant disregard for journalistic standards, specially in last 4 years, I'm not so sure anymore.

I put more trust in him. He has shown more reason to trust him given the Snowden disclosures.

Greenwald's follow up posts:

Article in question https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

Emails with editors https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

A bit reminiscent of when Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias was pressured to avoid expressing certain contentious positions by other Voxxers:

https://twitter.com/neontaster/status/1280937324340281346

Go look at all the comments being downvoted. It's insane how many reasonable, common-sense arguments are being downvoted into oblivion.

HN has a serious astroturfing problem and I can only imagine who's behind it.

I see a lot of boilerplate handwringing about how this is the end of free speech and a reliable media, that kind of stuff gets posted over and over again in every article of this nature.

Its not particularly interesting, or relevant, especially after being repeated ad nauseum.

I agree that there's a problem, though I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming you aren't referring only to the comments on one "side" of this discussion. However, either way, there is also a lot of irrational political side-taking being downvoted, and frankly the state of things looks much better than the vast majority of communities.

They click on your username and downvote any other comments you've made too. It's a real shame. I was hoping HN was more adult than reddit.

It isn't, and in due time enough people will get tired of this and form some kind of an HN-meets-lobste.rs-thing that is more oriented towards diversity of opinions, with less of a fuck-you to everyone who disagrees with the groupthink of HN.

At this point I think many believe their own lies. We read about pee tapes, Russian collusion, foreign intervention and suddenly there is a focus on editorial accuracy. What a joke, Greenwald is far more believable than many of his colleagues and I don't mind him getting a bit invested here.

If all these activists would stop lying and just said Hillary/Biden are better choices because their programs are more foundational, it would have been a walk in the park.

Instead you have these partisan fanatics (not restricted to the US) that are completely fine with undermining democratic processes and restricting freedom for their opponents, even perceived ones.

It makes you feel you can have a reasonable talk with a fundamental Christian instead of a reporter of main stream media. Perhaps there are drugs and blackmail involved, I am running out of explanations. Complete hysteria.

Very sad to read this. Glenn Greenwald is one of the few journalists well known for his integrity. He's famous for the Snowden revelations of course. I don't doubt his story.

I hope he will manage to start another organisation soon.

Amazing the amount of people who are essentially reacting with "Greenwald was spreading foxnews disinfo" without even having read his article.

How many people have asserted that they personally believe Greenwald was spreading disinformation and have also stated that they did not read his article?

His article hasn't been published. Unless they've somehow got access to it, there's no way to verify it.

Further context as to why the editors of the intercept seem to have been acting in an unprecedentedly partisan way here, from Greenwald:

"...under my contract, and the practice of The Intercept over the last seven years, none of my articles is edited unless it presents the possibility of legal liability or complex original reporting, and not one of my articles in the last fifteen years — published with dozens of major media outlets around the world — has ever been retracted or even had appended to it a serious correction."

I like an underdog, but Greenwald is not behaving reasonably. If you read the article that the Intercept refused to publish, it's pretty awful. He's not skeptical about his own story, and surely that is the prime commandment of responsible journalism.

Erik Wemple, Washington Post media critic:

>Intercept EIC Betsy Reed sent me this statement regarding the departure of @ggreenwald, saying there's a "fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship."

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

UPD https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

Joe Rogan strikes again...

Glenn was on his podcast yesterday and looks like that discussion was the tipping point to convince him that yes, he can do this alone, and he doesn't need the backing of a media organisation to do his work and put his ideas out there.

For anyone who hasn't listened to it yet, he was quite scathing of the rest of the mainstream media and the unfiltered aspect of Joe's podcasts gives a bit of insight as to where his thinking was at.

Anyone who believes that the media is interested in the TRUTH should read the old classic: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691134802/li...

The media exists primarily for its own purposes and agendas and only incidentally to promote the honest interplay of facts and ideas.

What happens when Glenn fails to conform to Substack's standards?

To my knowledge Substack hasn't censored yet, but it's inevitable. Glenn should just start his own site, in my opinion.

Hosted with whom? Some private company no doubt that could be pressured to censor if a big enough twitterstorm came along.

Ultimately you just need to own a domain. You have to get pretty damn extreme before domains are confiscated.

Without Cloudflare & co, your domain will exist but your site won't be usable.

There are many many hosting providers. You are unlikely to get banned from all of them.

A hosting provider without strong DDOS-protection does not make your site work, and they will quickly kick you out when their infrastructure suffers because of attacks against your site.

CF & co can protect against DDOS primarily because they fight tooth and nail and weather the storm when a customer is attacked. Attackers know that they won't succeed, that's why they don't even try, and that's why CF doesn't have to deal with constant attacks against their clients. Your average hosting company will quickly fold against a large attack, and will then have to make a decision: suffer the attack, or kick you from their servers. It's obvious that they will kick you out.

Keeping a website available against opponents with some money to spend gives you a handful of companies that you can rely on.

You seriously think AWS or Google is going to shut down a private independent journalism website because of a Twitter storm? When has that happened in the past that makes it remotely possible?

If Cloudflare can be pressured to withdraw hosting for Daily Stormer, it's not hard to imagine AWS withdrawing hosting for Daily Stormer as well.

Well, there is room for a small continent between Gleen Greenwald and that nazi paper.

Repeat to remove all possibility of misunderstanding: DS is a nazi paper.

Glenn Greenwald is a aeard winning journalist.

This is a fair counterexample I had forgotten about.

Greenwald co-founded it; how did it get out of his control and lead to this situation?

It reminds me of what happened with Steve Wozniak.

He was maybe more interested in being a journalist than running a business.

It happens all the time, more often than you may think. More often than not.

Happens regularly. Another example is what happened to Chris Ott and some others at Pitchfork.

I doubt that it did get out of his control. He probably has the authority to override his editor and publish it under The Intercept regardless of their comments, but he's choosing to respect the editorial process and protect the institution by not crossing that red line.

Honestly HN, what in the fuck?? The comments here have run the gamut from conspiracy to arguing there’s a purge coming against the media.

If this is the state of ‘hacking’, I’m cancelling my internet access.

HN is overrun with Trumpalos.

More like HN has started waking up.

Many of us don't like Trump at all, we are just sick and tired of media lies.

My lawn sign, if I had one would be "any reasonable person".

Yeah, this whole discussion is a train wreck. I'm kind of fearful for the US right now, this illogical polarization is off the charts.

This article really struck home for me, it's what I've been observing for a while now:

Study: Republicans and Democrats hate the other side more than they love their own side

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-republicans-democrats-side.htm...

Is there anything worth reading by the Intercept excepting Greenwald?

Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill are consistently fantastic.

Thanks.

I agree. "Deconstructed" is better since Mehdi moved somewhat on to greener pastures. Anyway, neither Grim nor Scahill seem to have disagreed much with Greenwald, that I can recall. He certainly enjoyed this episode of "Intercepted":

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/27/the-day-after-mueller/

I've been following Zaid Jilani.

https://theintercept.com/staff/zaidjilani/

Second Zaid Jilani.

I'll take a look, thanks.

I didn't see any articles at that link written in the last two years. I did find a more recent one by the same author elsewhere. [0] I'm not sure if I'm allowed to read anything at that site...

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-1619-pr...

That was the only reason I went there. There podcast also went off the deep end over the past few months and has been terrible I used to love it and listen to it regularly since 2016ish.

Liliana Segura

Quite a lot actually.

One thing I've wondered is at what point this becomes a campaign finance issue.

Publications (and social networks) are free to only host speech they agree with. However, advertising in the same forum supposedly has value. If a company is promoting stories for a certain candidate or issue, and banning all stories/posts/accounts against, why does that not count as an in-kind donation, worth as much as the equivalent ads would cost?

(Not arguing that this practice is illegal per se, but it seems like it should be acknowledged/reported.)

Without comment, here is The Intercept's reply: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

I wonder if his come-to-Jesus moment happened before, during, or after his recent podcast with Joe Rogan.

The DKIM headers from the emails have been verified, so they are real: https://twitter.com/erratarob/status/1322007153415200768?s=2...

Peter Maas request for edits was reasoned and fair. Greenwald is off his rocker on this.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

There are lots of opinions about his censored story in this thread. But no actual links to it. Is it published yet? Or are we all just speculating here?

According to the post, his contract allows him to publish any story that The Intercept doesn't want to, but they are making threats preventing him from publishing it.

> 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).

Rather than focusing too much on the he-said she-said of this post and the response from the Intercept, I think it's more interesting to read Glenn's article for yourself, along with the email exchange that precipitated the resignation.

Article: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

Emails: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

To me, the article seemed rather light on evidence and heavy on speculation. The first email from the editorial staff seemed reasonable, if perhaps a little heavy-handed. It certainly did not seem to warrant Glenn's immediate escalation - his reply reads like an ultimatum:

> But if the Intercept's position is that it won't publish any article by me that suggests that there are valid questions about whether Joe Biden engaged in wrongdoing, then I think we should agree that the Intercept's position is that it is unwilling to publish the article I want to publish about the Democratic front-runner. Under my contract, if TI decides it does not want to publish something I want to publish, then I have the right to publish it elsewhere, which is a right I would exercise with this article.

Another excerpt that stood out, this one from Glenn's follow-up email (the 3rd in the chain):

> ...this is the first time in fifteen years of my writing about politics that I've been censored... and it's happening less than a week before a presidential election.

So, he first equates the editorial request to censorship, then emphasizes the closeness of the election in order to justify why that editorial concern should be bypassed.

His entire attitude seems to be that since he doesn't write anything factually incorrect, any attempt to influence or challenge the things his writing tries to imply is equivalent to censorship. A misguided attitude, if not downright disingenuous, IMO. But you can read and decide for yourself.

Sad that this will never get as much views as the original complaint by Greenwald. He played his hand well.

Reading the "article", all you see as evidence from him is "Biden did not dispute this"... that's his evidence.

This is the final nail in the coffin for me. Greenwald is officially a wacko.

Serious question, the laptop story... The quote was data recovery from 3 laptops for 85$ ( Apple).

Is that even possible? The quote for 1 laptop for data restore is at minimum 300$/laptop from everywhere I can see.

It's one of the reasons I consider it misinformation by default.

Another reason would be that the FBI already warned for Russian disinformation about the Hunter Biden emails since Burisma got hacked way back in January 2020 ( and they warned the White House in 2019)

On first glance Intercept's editorial staff could be trying to avoid becoming like Wikileaks during the 2016 election. That is, going from a broadly anti-surveillance state, "information wants to be free" publication to one that unintentionally gets involved in partisan electioneering.

I'm surprised this didn't happen 5 years ago when the original group with Lee Fang and Glenn Greenwald were having open feuds on Twitter with the later corporate hires from NYT and WP who clearly held different views on journalism on just about every topic than Greenwald.

This tweet which includes a statement from Intercept EIC Betsy Reed , and it says it all:

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

The Intercept responds: https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

I m sorry but what record of rigorous independent journalism, outside of glenn's contributions (including the ones about Brazil corruption)?

It shocks, and disgusts me to see clearly intelligent people rallying around a guy who wants to publish unverified and irrelevant drivel as an October Surprise. Defenders here are quoting Tucker Carlson for God's sake -- whose defense team in court persuasively argued that no reasonable person should expect to hear the truth from his show. Comments are barely falling short of singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while breathlessly decrying the existential threat this tempest in a teacup poses to our nation.

We in the US are not voting for Hunter Biden and no business meetings in the Ukraine or China took place. Hence, attempting to legitimize this nothingburger is disinformation when it is perpetrated in the closing weeks of a US Presidential election. Fear, uncertainty, doubt all wrapped up in a puff of smoke. Something something before the truth has a chance to lace up its boots, and all that.

The cynical streak in me has to wonder if this isn't simply some kind of clickbait market-share grab by The Intercept.

It’s even more shocking that HN allows such blatant misinformation and conservative propaganda. I would never have thought that this website was at the level of a tabloid like the New York Post. At least we know for sure that all allegations against Biden are just total bullshit given that even Fox News decided to not publish them and they were published only by a cesspool tabloid that writes articles on how miley Cyrus was chased by aliens.

The emails are interesting. I’m surprised Greenwald’s editors give such detailed written feedback instead of, say, over the phone.

The language used offers some scope for compromise, but in general it’s pretty forthright.

In my experience the back and forth of an email chain thread will only further entrench positions rather than engender persuasiveness. We all know this, right? It’s nothing new and it happens all the time on HN comments too.

What’s odd — and maybe I show here how little I know about the people management side of running a commercial journalism org — is that the editor’s critique happens in writing.

Do you do code reviews over the phone? In a professional setting, why would feedback of this nature not be in a written format? Editor feedback is often very detailed ... why would you have a phone call to say "you used your instead of you're on line 40".

If a consequence of the review were to be the E9 / founder resigning — and resigning publicly and noisily — then yes: I’d do it over the phone.

The original draft has been posted. have submitted at the link below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24935216

He definitely needs a copy editor. Some of those sentences are clumsy af.

Truly there is a problem with spin-free news today.

I'm not sure what the solution will be. But we'd better think of something fast, before people lose all faith in the news.

I hate to see this, as I've been following Glenn since the Snowden affair and remember the start of The Intercept. But what strikes me is that this is the difference between being a founder, and being an owner. An owner, of even a (non-trivial) minority percentage, would have had a very different relationship with the editors and would have had significant influence on the publication's policies.

Lots of people here weighing in with their 2c about the authenticity of the data, but why is everyone arguing about this?

Sure, we the technologically savvy people have the means to verify the digital authenticity of these files/emails/documents. But we don't have access to them (and likely won't). So we can't actually claim one way or the other for sure until we do.

"We have VERY damaging information about the presidential candidate surfacing days before the election in outlandish circumstances but it's not available for forensic review/got lost in the mail."

Yes, we can't be 100% sure that these things are fake but it strains credulity to believe them.

It seems that many contrarian journalists have been getting fired recently. For example, journalists from Truthdig were fired recently as well. This is coordinated criminal activity. Those who control the media have crossed over into criminal territory and the people already know it. They are foolish to think they can get away with this.

This was an interesting thread for meta information. Before the very first 150 comments you could immediately see who the spooks on HN were and who not. But since this somewhat useful info is now buried in over 1300 comments, you can only see who is merely influenced by the spooks and their media meddling and who not.

I am willing to make a bet that 5 years from now every journalist I read/follow will end up on substack.

No Greenwald - no Intercept. It will be forgotten within year, as soon as Glenn opens a new thing.

American media's uniformity and compilance to carefully constructed narratives was scary enough as it was. Now the small principled minority who looked beyond that and went for truth are getting ostracized and punished for their principled stands.

Sounds like his major problem was having basically no involvement in the company because he's been in Brazil. The Intercept is only 6 years old and all the editors have been there since basically the beginning...

the biden article

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

Why as the co-founder of the organization, Glenn Greenwald don't have the rights to publish articles and have to yield to The Intercept's New York editorial board? This is baffling to me.

IIRC the money wasn't his, but rather Pierre Omidyar's.

Yes, you are correct, Pierre Omidyar bankrolled First Look Media and is the founder on their about page. [1]

Glenn Greenwald is just a "co-founding editor". And his profile hasn't been removed yet.

Editor-in-chief currently is Betsy Reed. So she's blocking Glenn from publishing Biden report?

[1]: https://theintercept.com/about/#contact-us

Wow, I thought he would have left this limited hangout a long time ago… not surprising since most of the snowden "leaks" remained behind closed doors…

These are the same garbage attacks that succeeded when the FBI directory came out and said "there -might- be something in the emails" and quietly report a bit after "yeah nothing there" but the electorate who are easily persuaded by headlines were firmly of the idea that Hillary was a "benghazi traitor". The general public is woefully apt to have confirmation bias or just decide an important thing on a whim because they saw a headline.

For those arguing caution before an election :- you cannot both argue that AND argue that the story is very unconvincing.

Ummm, yes you can. The story is unconvincing because it is unsubstantiated and of suspicious provenance, both VERY subtle points with less than week before an election.

How come this link with 749+ points and 5hours, is near the bottom of the HN page of lesser rated (and older) articles???

Hackernews down rate articles with lots of comments until overrided by mods

Greenwald is 2020's last-ditch Assange.

We live in dark times..

We rapidly racing to become Chine 2.0

The response on HN to this is a disgrace.

HN is largely a disgraceful place these days, except for content explicitly related to technology.

People are in a frenzy and they have social networks/living situations that reinforce their biases.

It's sad but the elites of society (lots of the software community) think the rest are a scourge and incorrigible.

This is an unfortunately sad low point for some on HN. Hopefully next year we can have a meta-conversation about this thread, where the post-election facts landed, and gain some insight into how media and the political climate got some people so off the rails.

There's a statement both sides can agree on!

(They are, of course, agreeing to opposite understandings of the statement. But half a horse is better than no horse, so we will consider it a show of political unity.)

We are witnessing the biggest concerted censorship effort in the history of the USA.

One for the history books, depending on who gets to write it in the future.

Regardless of whether or not you believe on Tony Bubolinsky, you should at the very least have the opportunity to hear him and make up your own mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zLfBRgeFFo

In what sense? The media has always censored information that can't be verified.

Nytimes doesn't publish articles about flat earth theory.

Even Fox News actual News division refuses to run these Hunter Biden stories. Same thing with Seth Rich, or ideas about crisis actors. How is this different?

This is information that is trivially verifiable and has been verified by numerous sources.

There's already been leaks such as a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack while receiving a footjob (edit: if this seems crude, I'm mentioning it as something that makes it very clear that the info is real) so unless you think it's a deepfake - or that they hacked it from his iCloud account and made up the story about the laptop repair shop - then you cannot deny the veracity of the story.

It's also been corroborated by people like the aforementioned Bobulinski. If this were truly a false story it would be trivial for the Biden campaign to deny the allegations.

The reason this story is not being reported is not because it's not "verifiable"; even ignoring that it is verifiable, the media had no trouble publishing the unverified story of Trump's tax returns, the unverified and now completely debunked Russia collusion hoax (if you're not read up on it, please don't reflexively downvote - with what we know today it is now certain that it was actually a manufactured hoax and not just an innocent misunderstanding), etc. So there is absolutely a double standard at play and it's very plain to see if you go look for it, but if you just stick to CNN and other mainstream media you will literally never see the full story (or even a fraction of it).

I didn't think the story was about Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with girls. That doesn't seem like it qualifies as a story to me that needs to be on national news because who cares? I also do think there is like an 80% chance they hacked his iCloud account though.

I think that there is no source for this information, which is required for hard journalism. Like who is standing by this information and saying it is genuine? I think it bears all the hallmarks of Russian intelligence, and they even did this exact same thing in France.

The entire "story" here is unclear. How is Joe Biden involved? Can you even prove these business deals are real? You can't even verify the contents of these emails are real. Journalists aren't even being allowed to verify the hard drive.

The tax returns did have a real source that the journalists themselves verified. That isn't possible here because the story of the laptop is wildly unbelievable.

https://www.newsweek.com/wsj-newsroom-found-no-joe-biden-rol...

The media isn't ignoring this, but it is incredibly sketchy.

You've got a hard full of emails, texts, and nasty pictures, people on the receiving end of the emails that have verified some of them, the head of one of these companies Hunter Biden set up to do business with China coming forward on the record, and the Bidens haven't even denied that the emails are real. This is mountains more evidence than ever existed for Russia or Ukraine or all the other nonsense that has passed for news during the past four years. This bizarre dodge of saying "it can't be verified" is nonsense. There's plenty here for a journalist to do some journalism on to try and verify.

Its not that it can't be verified, it's that mainstream news doesn't want to verify it and be blacklisted by their peers for taking out Biden. They value their standing in their fancy social circle more than doing their job with integrity. It's pure corruption.

This is false. The people making the claims are refusing to turn over the hard drive or original emails to the journalists who are trying to verify the story.[1]

I can also claim that I have a hard drive with incriminating information on it. Nobody should run a news story on it unless they too can see the evidence for themselves. This is journalism 101.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/rudy-giuliani-giv...

> In what sense? The media has always censored information that can't be verified.

If that was the case, we wouldn't have been involved in any wars in the past few decades.

> Nytimes doesn't publish articles about flat earth theory.

Of course not because lies about "flat earth" doesn't serve their interests. But lies/propaganda about "incubator babies"/nayirah testimony and yellowcake to start wars serves their interests.

Tons of unverified nonsense gets published. And tons of truth gets censored. Media, like the nytimes, are in the business of propaganda. They exist to sell wars and benefit the elite, not to peddle nonsense like "flat earth theory".

If a topic is important (nationally/geopolitically) and it's in a newspaper, you can be sure it's pretty much nonsense. The more respected the news agency, the more likely it is a lie.

Either that, or there are specific sourcing rules for journalists based on the credibility of the sources.

Giuliani has burned his credibility, and the entire laptop story is on its face unbelievable.

These other stories like Yellow Cake came from legit sources that were credible at the time.

You are comparing apples and oranges.

https://www.newsweek.com/wsj-newsroom-found-no-joe-biden-rol...

> Either that, or there are specific sourcing rules for journalists based on the credibility of the sources.

A kuwaiti diplomat's daughter or intelligence officers are not credible sources. And neither is the nytimes, wsj or any major news company at this point.

> Giuliani has burned his credibility, and the entire laptop story is on its face unbelievable.

It's far more credible than incubator babies or yellowcake.

> These other stories like Yellow Cake came from legit sources that were credible at the time.

No they weren't. It was intentionally manufactured lies. The nayirah testimony was a PR generated propaganda. And yellow cake was propaganda conjured up by the nytimes and pro-war intelligence groups.

> You are comparing apples and oranges.

You are right, I am comparing actual lies that led to millions of people's deaths and a possible lie. You are right, we don't know the truth of the hunter story yet. But we know for sure that nayirah and yellow cake were intentionally manufactured lies to start wars.

Colin Powell(Sec of State) and the Head of the CIA(Tenet) were on the record as sources for yellow cake stories.

At that time they had credibility.

You are misrepresenting history. It is not similar to this sketchy laptop with no legitimate source verifying it belonged to Hunter Biden.

> Even Fox News actual News division refuses to run these Hunter Biden stories.

Where do you find fox news's news division? Every part of fox news I see is running it.

I surprised this post did not include the term sheeple in it.

"Censorship"? Fox News has been pushing it non-stop, every night, on 3+ hours of evening programming. Just because every media outlet in the world isn't pushing this (highly questionable) story doesn't mean it's being "censored". You are even free to post about it on Hacker News.

> We are witnessing the biggest concerted censorship effort in the history of the USA.

Bigger than the Office of Censorship, deployed during WW2 to help propaganda efforts? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship)

I seriously doubt that. The Office of Censorship was regularly opening private mail from USPS and purposefully destroying private mail that was unsavory to the war effort.

-------

Historically, the practice of postal censorship extended back to the Civil War: with both Confederates and Union governments censoring the mail within their control.

How is not publishing an unverifiable story "censorship"? That's what we trust real news organizations to do.

And saying that they should at least publish the controversy is absurd -- first of all, the Times did publish the controversy days ago [1], and second of all, it basically allows the peddlers of these unverifiable stories to dictate the news.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/business/media/hunter-bid...

Unverifiable? Plenty of documentary evidence has been produced that could easily be verified. Simply ask the Bidens if it's true.

Sure. By the way, when did you stop beating your wife?

The cognitive dissonance in this thread is melting my brain.

Perhaps the argument here is that the censorship is not being applied equally to both sides of the political spectrum.

It's more than just this one example. It's basically all of the censorship efforts over the past few months aimed to slow or stop the spread of information (true or not) that might be damaging to Biden. Twitter and Facebook actively flag posts that "fact-checkers" deem to be misinformation. There was the recent high profile case of Hunter Biden stories being actively suppressed.

Can you point to recent examples of misinformed anti-Trump articles being fact-checked by Twitter/Facebook/major news sources? As far as I can tell, those "bombshells" always spread unimpeded like wildfire.

> it basically allows the peddlers of these unverifiable stories to dictate the news.

The allegation itself is news, but it's important to label it as such when reporting it. The next step is to investigate it.

If Trump says there are extraterrestrials living in Area 51 that's news regardless if you can verify it.

That would be news because the President said that.

If I, random nobody, show up with an allegation against Trump, using unverifiable "evidence," then that allegation is not newsworthy.

And doubly-so if my whole job is to be a partisan hack trying to delver an October surprise.

Real news organizations breathlessly reported unverified Trump Russia allegations.

That's some pretty weak censorship if there are public YouTube links to it.

The only way this will make history is if it pans out to anything besides what everyone already knows, which is that Hunter Biden is an addict and has been profiting off his family name.

Any evidence connecting that to Joe is very weak so far.

I just Googled his name. I'm in the UK so this probably isn't perfectly representative of the US, but I'm struggling to see a historic censorship effort. I'm seeing articles from WSJ, The Times (UK), Fox News, Spectator, Politifact, NYPost, Washington Post, Yahoo News, MSN, Real Clear Politics - in addition to loads of YouTube videos like the one you linked.

Um. World War 1, 2, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnamese conflict all had a LOT of censorship, not to mention a lot of stuff that got hushed up with buddy buddy relationships.

Also, we're all talking about it, so it's not very censored, now is it?

And you link to Tucker Carlson? Seriously?

No its not..the amount of Trumpers on Hacker News is surprising to me. this Biden scandal is a straight up republican talking point, promoted by Russia and trumpers to try and shift eyes from a collapsing, insane, administration. The lengths of corruption involved in even pursuing this story by trump and Giuliani has already caused Trump to be impeached a short while back.

It's not just 'pot calling kettle black'..both sides are bad logic here. Let assume the biden scandal is true: Complaining about Biden's son getting a lucrative contract because of his last name, is like complaining about the splash from a puddle during a tsunami, ie, It's small potatoes of the worst sort, and the willingness of the right wing to use it as a counter scandal does not bode well for Greenwald's points when he is used a pawn for right wing interests (Tucker Carlson really..)

  A more nuanced consideration of Greenwald's actions and willingness to speak against Biden in context of Trump can be found here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/19/lesser-of-two-evils-chomsky-vs-greenwald-and-the-ignored-factor/  Greenwald is an Idealist and more power to him, But Is idealism better than a pragmatism in 2020 of all years? We are in the middle of a raging pandemic and society torn apart by ethnic strife. In this case between Trump   a racist, ignorant failed casino owner, and overt con man (trump u) who directly caused the deaths of thousands of people because he ignored basic scientific truths, or Biden, a lukewarm status quo (and somewhat corrupt career politician) the answer is clear for survival: Biden.

Greenwald is chiefly concerned with making sure that we all know this story might have legs. And Biden might be a bit corrupt. In fact he might have engaged in behavior that's almost identical in scope and corruption as the sitting President. He also wants you to know that he doesn't like innuendo and insinuation, despite that being all that the currently known facts about Hunter's laptop supports. He also wants us to know that the US media is biased towards Biden, but he's definitely not biased towards Biden despite this style of corruption being demonstrated by both candidates for President.

Does Greenwald have any similar exposes of Trump's alleged crimes? It's the same thing in 2016. At worst, Hillary Clinton's crimes were precisely the same as the Bush admin using a private email server to conduct official business.

Implicit in all of this is a glaring bias of "we all know that Republicans do bad stuff but I expect better of Democrats so they're the _real_ bad actors here."

How bout this? It's unethical to help destroy Biden's shot at the Presidency even if he may have engaged in unethical behavior, simply because Trump is unethical in all of these same ways _and more_. Dispassionately pursuing the facts of this story serves more harm than good and that's an uncomfortable truth if you value objective journalism. Glenn seems to be unwilling to accept that the US media learned the lesson of 2016 which is that they got played once and they don't want to get played again.

I am not interested in what Mr Greenwald wrote, but I want the decision about reading it to be made between myself and Mr Greenwald.

Once the Intercept went beyond not publishing his content themselves to demanding he not publish it anywhere they were engaged in attempting to prevent myself and Mr Greenwald from making that choice.

Down with the Intercept.

The day keeps getting better and better. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-...

The censorship applied by the GAFA and the MSM is frightening, especially when comparing to how the fake dossier of Trump's golden shower was passed around in 2016, while these revelations on Biden's corruptness are censored.

Google was also caught red-handed in 2016, suppressing searches on Hillary's health.

But yes, the problem is that Trump is KGB agent and that Putin hacks Twitter lol

Greenwald was on Joe Rogan recently. It was very interesting. Dude has 25 dogs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rcLsoIKgA

(I assume that even linking to a JRE podcast is cause for mass downvoting on here)

Spreading information: news.

Trying to affect peoples views and behavior: propaganda.

I think with this The Intercept has lost all its credibility as the outlet that will publish stories others will not.

It's clear that Hunter Biden's data was compromised. The data that I have seen is definitely real and definitely his. The provenance of this data is unclear. It's also a common technique to compromise data and doctor a couple of documents to slip in among-st the real ones. My opinion is that it's some kind of a cloud service hack given the type of information that was compromised (video, photos, sms logs, emails.)

I have seen scant little coverage of this in the mainstream, or even alternative, media. Why can't they address what is verifiable in this story and add a codicil that some of it may be false?

Jimmy is funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfn83YmKSKc&ab_channel=TheJi...

GLENN GREENWALD: "Your Honor, I can prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the defendant killed Mr Smith. And I will do it with a single question. I am so certain of the defendant's guilt, I move that the court adjourn so that your Honor can begin deliberating on the sentence."

JUDGE: "Mr Greenwald, we need to establish the facts of the matter first."

GLENN GREENWALD: "That will be a breeze your Honor. A fleeting diversion from the matter at hand. I can prove the defendant's guilt with... One. Simple. Question. Like that! snaps fingers. But, more importantly, I think that forty to life is commensurate with the crime."

JUDGE: "The evidence, Mister Greenwald. I believe you said you had a question about evidence?"

GLENN GREENWALD: "Of course, your Honor. Of course. And let me just say I have the victim's children in the court today, to see justice done. You wouldn't want to not do justice in front of the victim's children would you, your Honor? Look, little Timmy is waving." (Glenn waves toward the rear of the court).

JUDGE: "That appears.. Adjusts glasses and peers intently That appears to be a waving tube man, similar to the one outside the Carpet Salesroom down the block..."

GLENN GREENWALD: (Hurriedly) "Be that as it may, your Honor, to the matter of sentenc-"

JUDGE:"It even says Carpet Warehouse on the sleeve."

GLENN GREENWALD: "I... uh..."

JUDGE:"Mr Greenwald. MISTER GREENWALD! (Bangs gavel) Did you steal this homonculus from the Carpet Warehouse?"

GLENN GREENWALD: (rushes up and snatches gavel) "Bailiff, remove Timmy Victim from the court."

JUDGE: (Stares silently at Greenwald coldly for a heartbeat) "I believe you had a question for the defendant?"

GLENN GREENWALD: "Yes, one that will-"

JUDGE: "And your entire case of guilt is based on this one question which will prove the case (He consults his notes) 'Like that!'?" (Snaps fingers)

GLENN GREENWALD: "Yes, I uh-"

JUDGE: "The question, Mr Greenwald."

GLENN GREENWALD:"I... Uh... did you-"

JUDGE: "Address the defendant, Mr Greenwald. I am not on trial here."

GLENN GREENWALD: "Defendant. Did you... on the night in question... did you kill the victim?"

DEFENDANT: (Leans forward, lips close to the microphone) "No."

GLENN GREENWALD: "Well fuck. I'm all outta ideas."

> These are the raging battles over free expression and the right of dissent raging within every major cultural, political and journalistic institution. That’s the crisis that journalism, and more broadly values of liberalism, faces. Our discourse is becoming increasingly intolerant of dissenting views, and our culture is demanding more and more submission to prevailing orthodoxies imposed by self-anointed monopolists of Truth and Righteousness, backed up by armies of online enforcement mobs.

Well, there goes the intercept.

Since it doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet, I'll point out this mid-2019 article about Hunter Biden in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/08/will-hunter-bi...

Didn't Fox news reject it too? (Apart from the twat who's turning himself orange)"

It sounds like they wouldn't let him publish an article about the Hunter Biden situation.

Why not share details of what he wanted to publish and what they barred and let people make up their own minds?

He says in this letter that he will publish it soon on Substack, but that sort of takes the wind out of the sails of his "liberals are censoring me" argument.

It's published: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...

My take: it's a garbage opinion piece that's peddling his own political views a little too hard. I think the Intercept is totally 100% justified in refusing to run it.

The main issue I see: this story and stories like this generate interest. If it’s not published and discussed in depth on main stream media, then the only source available becomes some crazy right-wing conspiracy theory sites. So readers are forced to choose between no analysis or an analysis done by some nut-job.

With this "2 party system" (which it is not but ok) you get this kind of behaviour, even people that love freedom of expression, hate Trump even more and being pro/con 1 party is essentially the same as being con/pro the other. It's not a nice system, you need more parties my US friends.

Greenwald has done important, admirable work. As has The Intercept. Unfortunately my estimation of both has catastrophically declined. The Intercept outed an important source (Reality Winner) with comically incompetent OpSec, which is unforgivable given their niche. Greenwald was once an important critic from the Left of the Obama Administration---which got a pass on a lot of things (<cough> drones <cough>) that Republicans wouldn't have. Unfortunately (and for some complex and sometimes understandable reasons) he moved away from trenchant criticism and into a sort of foaming unhinged rage at former members of that ådministration. At times, he rivals Infowars performances, except I don't think Glen is just playing a role. He's demonstrably unable to report in a professional manner on Biden, and non-propagandist outlets (are there any left?) are right to decline to publish the article---as is demonstrated by an even casual look at his Twitter feed when Obama, Clinton or Biden are mentioned. Greenwald has some justification for his resentment, but that doesn't make him a credible source.

Greenwald’s article is flawed from the very first sentence: “Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop,” as if the very provenance of the laptop isn’t a hilariously unproven detail. It seems this situation says more about Greenwald than the Intercept.

Is there a newspaper free of political opinions? I want to what's going on in the world in terms of politics, sports, science and society.

It is a bit tiring to be reminded again and again why certain politician is a nazi or a certain politician wants to turn whole country communist.

Viva Glen Greenwald

I find it fascinating that we would never be talking about allegations against the Bidens family on the hacker news if not for the heavy handed censorship from newspaper editors and tech.

A good example of the principle of distraction.

Let us not talk or discuss Covid. Let us not discuss the number of people who have lost their jobs. Let us not discuss the suppression of voting. Let us not discuss that the USA now needs a Pro Democracy movement. Instead, in the guise of freedom of the press, let us discuss some issue, which whether true or not, of substance or not, will cause us to focus in a way that is divisive.

I can as easily claim without proof that Donald Trump intends to flee to Russia if not re-elected. And what about my freedom to express my opinion? OMG. Oh yes, and I am resigning my from job in protest! Virtuous Victims Unite!

My apologies for the sarcasm, but this country has serious issues.

[edited for spelling]

Hey Glen, less drama, more mamma. Good luck.

I think this is the main indictment:

>"Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it 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)"

It was originally supposed to allow dissent from the mainstream but now toes a particular strain of mainstream orthodoxy.

Media mastheads seem to have shorter and short shelf lives before they are consumed by editorial censorship and commercial issues. Right now Taibbi on substack is terrific, his Rolling Stone articles a lot more constrained. I look forward to Greenwald being less restricted and to his Biden commentary and thoughts

I feel like the response from the Intercept should be part of this thread:

GLENN GREENWALD’S DECISION to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship. Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. Thus, the preposterous charge that The Intercept’s editors and reporters, with the lone, noble exception of Glenn Greenwald, have betrayed our mission to engage in fearless investigative journalism because we have been seduced by the lure of a Joe Biden presidency. A brief glance at the stories The Intercept has published on Biden will suffice to refute those claims.

The narrative Glenn presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign — and launder them as journalism.

We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years. It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.

The defining feature of The Intercept’s work in recent years has been the investigative journalism that came out of painstaking work by our staffers in Washington, D.C., New York, and across the rest of the country. It is the staff of The Intercept that has been carrying out our investigative mission — a mission that has involved a collaborative editing process.

We have no doubt that Glenn will go on to launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon. In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks. We get it. But facts are facts, and The Intercept’s record of fearless, rigorous, independent journalism speaks for itself.

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

It would be so very, very interesting if Trump were to pardon Snowden.

It's such a no-brainer since the national security apparatus (the FBI, NSA, etc) were used against Trump and his campaign very transparently. So you'd think he would want to strike a blow against them by pardoning Snowden.

In reality, he doesn't seem to have a deep, principled understanding of the issues of the "national security" apparatus (commonly known as the "deep state"). So I'm not optimistic, although maybe he's just waiting until after the election.

What Trump's administration is doing to Julian Assange is also quite evil (see Cassandra Fairbanks' reporting here - she's a very clear Trump supporter and yet is highly critical of his admin with respect to their treatment of Assange). It's not any more evil than what Biden or others would do, to be clear, so this isn't something unique to Trump, but we can certainly say that Trump has not shown any desire to try to do the right thing here.

I am not saying he would pardon Snowden out of morality.

Something interesting that Snowden says is that he is not asking for a pardon, his condition for going back to the US is to drop the strict-liability qualification of his crime.

It wouldn't be something easy on him, but a judicial precedent could be even better than a pardon.

> It's such a no-brainer since the national security apparatus (the FBI, NSA, etc) were used against Trump and his campaign very transparently.

A Republican-led senate investigation found that the intelligence community was not used against Trump, did not illegally spy on his campaign, and was fully-correct in following up on the Russia leads. [1]

Do you have evidence that the Republican and Democratic senators did not?

1. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/513499-republicans-i...

> It's such a no-brainer since the national security apparatus (the FBI, NSA, etc) were used against Trump and his campaign very transparently.

Except that Trump doesn't even bother to hide his desire to use them even more brazenly than anyone in the past (including Nixon, whose abuses prompted explicit legislative limits) for partisan political purposes; Trump definitely doesn't want to make the existence of a vast security apparatus or its partisan use an issue, only to sell himself as a victim.

> In reality, he doesn't seem to have a deep, principled understanding of the issues of the "national security" apparatus (commonly known as the "deep state").

The "deep state" is more a reference to the permanent official and unofficial establishment of public service as a whole (both the permanent civil service and the network of past and present senior, largely executive, leaders who remain in-the-loop and exert influence even when out of current office); its not particularly associated with the national security apparatus. The use of the term (except as a reference to others using the term directly) is a fairly explicit indicator that the speaker prefers a strong-man rule and factional spoils system to the rule of law and professionalism.

It's most perplexing why Greenwald is being treated as some kind of liberal why he is clearly a conservative nutjob. Supporting Iraq war, going on to Tucker Carlson show, excusing Trump on every possible angle.

Is it all just because of grooming the Snowden case?

Can someone summarize the evidence found against Biden/son?

It's hard to tell if Greenwald was actually censored, or if the rest of the editorial team thought the Biden emails were nonsense and therefore not fit to print.

To me, it looks like the latter.

Erik Wemple (@ErikWemple on Twitter) was forwarded a response from from Intercept Editor in Chief Betsy Reed. (Source: https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283)

I've copied it below to the best of my ability.

===============

Glenn Greenwald's decision to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship. Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. Thus the preposterous charge that The Intercept's editors and reporters, with the lone noble exception of Glenn Greenwald, have betrayed our mission to engage in fearless investigative journalism because we have been seduced by the lure of a Joe Biden presidency. A brief glance at the stories The Intercept has published on Joe Biden will suffice to refute those claims.

The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies - all of the mdesigned to make him appear a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle a political campaign's - the Trump campaign's - dubious claims and launder them as journalism.

The defining feature of The Intercept's work in recent years has been the investigative journalism that came out of painstaking work by our staffers in Washington D.C., New York, and across the rest of the country. It is the staff of The Intercept that has been carrying out our investigative mission - a mission that involved a collaborative editing process.

We have no doubt that Glenn will go on to launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors-- such is the era of Substack and Patreon. In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks. We get it. But facts are facts and The Intercept record of fearless, rigorous, independent journalism speaks for itself.

===============

The current US political landscape is a clear illustration of people willfully ignoring one simple truth in the world: There is no absolute "justice" or "evil". Of course for two sides in a conflict, each side will claim that justice is on their side and that they're fighting against evil, just like how the crusaders and the jihadists each claimed that their god is the true god, while both committing atrocities and acts of benevolence. Turned out they were not that different from each other after all. The lazy mainstream narrative of "justice's triumph against evil" that people have been fed since the childhood could be doing much harm, while cultures that have recently suffered defeat in major conflicts and are forced to endure the humiliation/repatriation and take very hard looks at their past, have a much more nuanced understanding of it. One piece of work that has left a permanent impression on me is the highly rated Japanese visual novel Soukou Akki Muramasa (https://vndb.org/v2016) which explored this theme incredibly well (Unfortunately there's no English translation yet). In painting Trump (or another example, China) as simply "evil" and reducing everything via essentialism, people themselves are becoming just like what they claim to be fighting against. If you want the truth, you should never be too attached to any sort of ideological extreme. It could blind you and mislead you.

Of course, I understand that the very job of mainstream media in any country is to feed its populace a certain narrative, otherwise the media would not be doing their job. And it's apparent that "justice vs. evil" is a mode of thinking that human beings are somehow wired to perform, otherwise how can they easily justify going to war and killing "the others" without batting an eye throughout the millennia? However, for the situation to get so heated and tunnel-sighted even for a lot of highly educated people in the 21st century who are supposed to have independent and critical thinking, not to mention for an "alternative" media outlet whose founding goal was to do the exact opposite of this sort of groupthink, this really isn't a good look.

(Another somewhat tangential comment is an observation that some Europeans make about America's identity politics: How can you achieve the goal of "everybody being treated equally" while each "group" emphasizes their own identity and fights the other group(s)? This in itself is already a paradox. In Europe the idea (at least ideally) is that "if you're here you're part of us. We're all the same", e.g. the French population census never has a "ethnicity" part in it. Of course, I understand that things are really complex in the US due to the history of slavery where in the beginning the only purpose for certain ethnic groups to be there is to serve the other group, so the historic baggage and structure is somewhat intractable, while countries like Germany and Sweden who didn't manage to end up with a lot of colonies ironically can now accept different ethnicities (mostly economic migrants) somehow more easily without this historical structure in place.)

On the one hand, this is shocking because Glenn co-founded the Intercept as a response to the rampant partisan censorship happening at other media outlets.

On the other hand, I had been reading The Intercept regularly since at least 2016 and there was a very noticeable lack of "independent" journalism as the years went by. At some point this year I stopped visiting their website because the worthwhile articles were few and far between, buried in a mountain of partisan rubbish.

If founding your own company isn't enough to avoid censorship, then what is? Is there any hope left for truly independent journalism in this country?

Who knew that even when you fund a company, if you get qualified people with integrity, they'll stop you from peddling foreign nation misinformation even if you're the boss.

You seem to have insider info that the rest of us are not privy to. What misinformation was he attempting to spread?

The fact that Ukraine has been trying to spread these emails, coincidently around the same time Giuliani happened to be there, which ended up getting the president impeached.

https://www.businessinsider.com/time-hunter-biden-emails-sho...

Your own source contradicts you:

> The two people said they could not confirm whether any of the material presented to them was the same as that which has been recently published in the U.S.

Furthermore, they made no effort to determine the authenticity of the documents, so I find it odd that you assume they must be fake:

> The two people who said they were approached with Hunter Biden’s alleged emails last year did not know whether any of them were real

So you used two anonymous sources to support your erroneous conclusion, yet you don't believe all of the sources who have publicly come forward to say the documents are legitimate?

Very interesting.

In order to be misinformation it has to be false. The emails are inconvenient for one political party, not false.

I don't think the GP was speaking of "misinformation" as an alias for "mistruth", I read it as "disinformation", and that is an excellent method where true facts can cover over the larger reality. This is a case in point. Every minute we talk about liberal bias, people stop talking about other things. Arguably, policy on a pandemic that's killed 210,000 people is more important than whether a candidate's son used his last name as cache in a business deal.

>foreign nation misinformation

Source?

> Source?

There is no source that disputes the authenticity of the Hunter Biden documents. On the contrary, there are many pieces of evidence (such as Secret Service travel logs) that support them.

The liberal media spreads disinformation as often as it condemns it, this is just one example. They will happily bend over backwards and contort themselves into the most bizarre logical positions in order to do so: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1320358217382268934

> "We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren't."

The e-mail exchange that Greenwald just published is very damaging to his case. His editors make some reasonable editorial suggestions about the focus of his piece and he immediately screams censorship, impugns their integrity and threatens to resign. I think it's extremely likely that he has been planning to move to an independent venture for a while and was just looking for the most attention-grabbing means of doing so.

I missed this. Do you have a link?

I believe the links was added a little while after the initial post. Here it is:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

I'm surprised Greenwald is using these as evidence of censorship, given the opening line of the memo directly contradicts his claim: "there is some I agree with and some I disagree with but am comfortable publishing." [emph added]

yoichi shimatsu made a compelling argument that "the intercept" is basically a honeypot for catching usgov whistleblowers. yoichi is a little out there, but given the track record--snowden, manning, winner--perhaps he's on the genius side of the line instead of the insanity side on this particular issue?

Worth pointing out that The Intercept has posted a scathing rebuttal.

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

I'm just perplexed by the idea that he gave up that much control of the publication he founded that senior editors are able to dictate what he can and can't publish, on his own publication. You cant be giving up that kinda control.

Inb4 Greenwald takes a job with Trump Campaign as Head of PR lmao how incredibly transparent.

The revolution devours its own children

So what exactly was this "Biden story" that he wanted to publish?

meanwhile, we are watching Trump's entire family profit from DTJ's presidency. Why doesn't Greenwald write a story about that? His article is basically, "well no one confirmed none of the deals happened! So there's still a chance!" Come on man, we're watching this unfold in real time in the current administration. Clean your own house.

It would have been nice if the impeachments had focused on real crimes like that, rather than obvious BS.

Well, the point of the article is that Greenwald was trying to write about how an (ex)(vice)president was using his influence to enrich his family...

Now that WSJ is included in Apple News+, the NYT has a month after the election to clean their shit up, or I dump a decade-long subscription. And by "clean their shit up", I want news on my front page, not political discussion. And by news I mean "Hurricane FooBar Hits FL Coast", not "Hurricane FooBar Hits FL Coast While Trump Plays Golf".

Though I shall stay far, far away from that crazy train WSJ calls an "opinion page".

Trump bragged incessantly that, unlike Obama, he wouldn't have time to play golf if elected President. Instead, he's spent about twice as much time on the links as Obama did, including during various crises that would demand a normal president's full attention.

If they didn't report how the President was responding to a given crisis, you'd criticize them for that. So I don't see how they can win here. They keep pounding the "Orange Man Bad!" drum because yes, in, fact, Orange Man is Bad, and people need to know that. It may not be news, but it's fit to print.

You just fell into the same trap. It is tiring to read news from a Trump-centric context. I cancelled my NYT subscription last week because I feel I’m taken for ride over their politics.

It's not "their" politics, it's just politics. What politicians do matters. Politics matters. "I don't want to hear about how our country is being run because 'politics'" is a really weird attitude to take towards a news outlet. This IS the news. Why do you think it's weird for it to get covered?

Ultimately hurricane foobar hits FL coast is usually of purely regional interest whereas in the current context we are in the midst of an election that will be the most significant issue this decade.

2c he'll be in a Trump/Republican aligned newspaper/media corp next week

I actually don't have very much respect for Glenn Greenwald. Whilst I largely agree with his views on free speech, he has repeatedly shown himself to be a petty and narcissistic man who seems to be unable to have a healthy disagreement with anyone. Once he decides someone is an enemy he seems to lose his head - his attacks on Sam Harris, who I'm by no means an acolyte of, saw him repeatedly seek to discredit Harris not through argument but by claiming Harris was "radicalising" people to adopt extreme right-wing views.

I've seen a few people in this thread refer to his reputation to affirm his account. This is a very dangerous way to evaluate the veracity of conflicting claims. Particularly when part of his reputation is built atop Snowden's choosing of him rather than anything he uncovered himself.

Having read the piece and the emails I don't think this justifies the hysteria, I've had far more aggressive email exchanges at work that didn't blow up this badly. I can see why the editors felt revisions were needed, the title was clickbaity and it read more like an angry blog post with facts interlaced with strangely personal attacks e.g.

by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert approval for deranged conspiracy theories

That is certainly not what I would consider dispassionate and impartial analysis. He has a problem with this person having in the past called him a 'cold war grifter'. He seems to consider any suggestions that Russia may be using internet disinformation to sow discord in the US ridiculous and conspiratorial. Which I find as naive as all the democrats who dismiss all negative stories as Russian disinformation. If the NSA had the opportunity to undermine Russia for geopolitical advantage it would, I have no doubt the GRU/FSB would seek to capitalise on this opportunity.

However, I do think he has some valid general points re: Biden's refusal to engage, as well as the criticisms of the blatantly partisan news media - that includes his sources. I just don't think that particular piece is a good exploration of it.

Disclaimer: I'm not an American and I have no particular affinity for Biden or Trump.

There has been an active investigation on Hunter Biden and associates since 2019, confirmed hours ago by the FBI:

https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-investigating-hunter-biden-money-...

Also, the email in which the Burisma advisor thanks Hunter Biden for the introduction to Joe has been verified through the metadata which matches the private key on Google’s servers.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/cybersecurity-expert-auth...

jesus... that article sounded like a child crying cause they didn't get their way.

When William Roper argued that he'd "cut down every law in England" in order to get the Devil, Thomas More responded with: "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?" ...

This is where the entire mainstream center-left/left news establishment, along with the DNC, ended up after 2016. Trump broke people's brains. It's as simple as that.

... what?

Trump is responsible for destroying the convention of presidents acting 'presidential' through his words, and tweets. His policies are typical Republican policies. He hasn't jailed journalists or whistleblowers. His military engagements have been the most minimal since the Clinton-era. But again, his temperament is not presidential and that bucks the norm. That's on him.

In this quote, Trump is the devil and the DNC and mainstream center-left/left news, in an effort to get the devil, have destroyed every institutional and journalistic norm. Their role is far more damaging then Trump tweeting idiotic and sometimes terrible things.

Per New York Post reporters, the "Hunter Biden" story is total garbage:

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-post-skepticism-in-...

I find it strange that people expect "mainstream" press outlets to run with the story. This is not a story of media with an agenda. They did some basic fact checking and found it to be false. Pretty simple.

Wow.. Why isn't this #1? 743 points...

A year or so ago I was about to donate to the Interept and went to their website to do so. There, together with Bolsonaro investigations I was quite surprised that a lot of Greenwald's stance was quite pro Russia, anti democrats. Not sure in what parallel universe he lives where he thinks that one week before the election Trump needs his help with anti Biden op-eds. What is he thinking?

Glenn is complaining that he can't discuss a story that the Wall Street Journal also looked into and was unwilling to risk their reputation on a story lacking verifiable evidence. The Wall Street Journal is generally a credible but also right leaning news source. GG's politics are to the left on most of the democratic party, and was unhappy with Clinton and now also unhappy with Biden.

Here's the response from the Intercept. https://static.theintercept.com/amp/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...

> The narrative Glenn presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign — and launder them as journalism.

I read the article and in and of itself it's adequate. However, as an editor here are some of changed I'd implement esp. in context:

- no more headlines like "what nobody (read power structure) will tell you .. the real story behind..." which sours information by building mistrust. People are wrong, don't know, sometimes right but the entire msm is not people lying to you and you (readers) are not chumps. Let's do better.

- the constant bitching, whining, sniveling by media group 1 about media groups 2, 3, 4... Look you gotta something to say, say it. You can argue the other side got it wrong. Say it. And leave it there. What I don't want to read is third grader stuff: Biden wears a hair piece and. NPR and CNN know it but but wont say anything. Whining about claimed tribes and tribe favoritism isn't a journalist's task. It has the side effect seen in article of making the writer small, powerless, and unequal to the task.

The last issue I believe has its roots (maybe not chronological firs but in impact) to rush Limbaugh who successfully got am into politics by claiming mainstream media plays favorites. Fox later did the same on TV.

Excellent. His more recent delusional ranting really harmed the reputation of The Intercept.

> I encouraged them 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

Glenn Greenwald is advocating for an abdication of basic journalistic practice. The role of The Intercept is not simply to air Glenn Greenwald’s musings; it is not a blog. The entire point of an editorial process is to hold published materials to a high bar with regards to factual accuracy and quality.

Responding to a disagreement about accuracy or fact-checking with your own editors by claiming they are ‘New York-based’ and ‘Biden is their preferred candidate’ is deeply unprofessional. If you disagree with an editor’s call, have an adult conversation; if you cannot see eye to eye, feel free to resign. If you want, you can even publish a piece about the disagreement - including details over what was alleged as true, and what information you believe editors incorrectly assumed or overlooked.

The one thing you should never do is resort to simply calling your editors ‘angry libs’ and claim you are being ‘censored’. This does nothing to further a conversation, and it certainly disincentives anyone from honestly editing your work in the future.

The fact that this comment is "grayed" out makes me uncomfortable with where this discussion is going on HN. I think you made the most valid argument about this specific article of all the comments I have read here.

> Responding to a disagreement about accuracy or fact-checking with your own editors by claiming they are ‘New York-based’ and ‘Biden is their preferred candidate’ is deeply unprofessional

Even if when the actual article gets released and it's 100% factual and great, the "pre-article" we are reading here is just playing politics -- which is exactly what it claims to be fighting against.

Although that is true, and the Biden story is pretty suspiciously timed and probably not as serious as it sounds (or fabricated). But it really is rather noticeable that the Biden story is being suppressed. Newspaper articles are being removed from twitter, journalists are resigning from their organisations. It is largely unclear that a similar story about speculation of a Trump-Ukraine story tied to Eric Trump would get this treatment. Years were spent on that Russia business that turned out to be largely baseless, and nobody was suppressing articles on Twitter for baseless speculation.

That level of bias is well worth highlighting. This is material information for voters in future elections (after 2020). I wouldn't know about this story at all except for the backlash over the censorship being news. That is pretty impressive from an information-flow standpoint.

A phrase that comes to mind:

Make Orwell Fiction Again!

And HN just removed this from appearing on the front page...

I'm just going to state the obvious and I don't see it anywhere else here. There are a lot of posts here saying you have to trust his integrity over the editors due to all of his accolades.

All of Glenn's accolades are from the reporting around Edward Snowden. I'm a big fan of that reporting and I think that story needed to be told but it was most strategically beneficial to Russia where Snowden eventually took sanctuary. This was also during Obama's presidency.

Now, he seems to be very biased to the point of being a hack, pulls a stunt like this on the eve of an election, has continuously made an effort to discredit the Russian interference in our elections and comes to Trump's aid fairly frequently when it matters (as well as sometimes critiques him and his admin when it doesn't i.e. "he lies")

I don't know what his motives are but it sure doesn't seem like it's about getting out the truth.

Has Greenwald done much journalism since Snowden's revelations? I stopped following him a long time ago as he was using his platform to advocate his own social justice agenda.

Somehow you must have missed the most important work that Intercept ever did:

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-archive-operation...

Funny that he marked the comment section subscriber-only. Regardless of the validity of the story, optics sure look like a ploy to kickstart his new SubStack with an engineered October surprise.

Why was this removed from the front page?

https://youtu.be/YCLkTYwN7VQ

Edit: I'm a moron and it just dropped a bunch suddenly. Was not removed.

Sometimes they manually down-rank stories to take them out of sight, and sometimes the storry gets flagged so much. But it is #6 on the front page right now.

So two thoughts here. Are they artificially inflated and then deflated to counter act “bot” behavior? OR are they organically inflated and then censored? I just wish I could be a fly on the wall and know. I just can’t believe this would be a damning enough piece to artificially inflate unless there’s a serious game of reverse psychology going on behind the scenes

I can’t believe anybody is talking about plain text email without verified cryptographic signatures in 2020. The technology is over 30 years old at this point. Anybody telling you different is a fraud — guaranteed.

The email has been verified with DKIM, apparently: https://twitter.com/erratarob/status/1322007153415200768?s=2...

I like how this link is being suppressed from the front page of HN as well. 309 points in 1 hour, and it's at #52 instead of a single digit ranking as you'd expect. In comparison, the current #1-#3 have 175-80 points in 2-3 hours.

Given the number of comments and downvoted comments, it almost certainly set off an automated flamewar detector.

In my mind, a media organization censoring a story that could aid Trump just days before the election is acting for the greater social good. I don't feel that optimizing for Greenwald's personal value system at this particular time would be the right tradeoff for America as a whole. Greenwald having the satisfaction of doing the right thing while the rest of us endure the rule of a strong man hell-bent on becoming America's Putin is not a fair trade.

It sucks that we don't live in a society where "The Truth" - if it could only be exposed to sunlight - would stand taller and brighter than everything else around it. If Greenwald wants to cosplay Walter Cronkite, and who wouldn't, he has to understand the impossibility of that in our current context. Everything is turned into spin for the disinformation machine. Everything is distorted, filtered, weaponized, super concentrated, and targeted directly to those it will anger the most. Truth has no power and no legitimacy in this context. Have we not learned anything from watching Trump these past four years?

We have to solve that problem before we can enjoy the benefits of truthful journalism. A problem for which we have to take some responsibility, since our technology is being abused to create this wretched hellscape.

It sucks and it isn't the world in which I want to live. I have young children myself. They will grow up with no Walter Cronkite, no trusted source of information. They will grow up in a world where truth is disconnected from reality. It's broken, and we can't ignore that, no matter how much it hurts us personally.

Your opinion is respectable compared to the excuses we hear elsewhere and I would agree.

I think the hit on Bidens family members is beyond good taste, but I also think that journalism failed on a wide front in recent times.

> These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom.

Whew, the Fox News editorial board can breathe a sigh of relief.

If the entire issue boils down to the fact that left-leaning media outlets have finally dropped-down to the same dishonerable level as the right-leaning media outlets, and stooped to supressing anything that doesn't jibe with the world view/propaganda that they respectively push, then what's the problem -- seems like the playing field just got a little more even for everyone.

Knowing Greenwald, what he describes as "censorship" is what a news editor would call "fact-checking."

There are more reasons to junk a story than just fact-checking. It could be that the story has already been covered sufficiently. That there is nothing new it. That it is only of interest to a certain group of people who just want to wallow in that same story every day. He hasn't actually published the story yet so nobody knows for sure, but if it's about Hunter Biden then I think it's probably in this category.

I'm just going by Greenwald's past work where he has repeatedly stated things that are easily verified to be false.

Whether he realizes it or not, Greenwald is a foreign intelligence officer’s dream.

Regardless of the actual authenticity of the Hunter emails, stuff like this is fairly easy to plant. So even if Greenwald got it right this time (maybe, maybe not), I can assure you that he will get it very wrong at least once in the future by the hands of a foreign intelligence officer (assuming he still has an audience).

Folks who aggressively advocate for the verification of authenticity of documents, especially digital documents, have a very good reason for taking the stance that they do.

> Folks who aggressively advocate for the verification of authenticity of documents, especially digital documents, have a very good reason for taking the stance that they do.

And who are those folks? Liberal media? Didn't they publish that embarrassingly fake accusation against Brett Kavanaugh that he gang-raped Julie Swetnick? Didn't they claim mutliple times to find "decisive proof" that Trump (himself) colluded with Russians, only to be humiliated again by Mueller report?

It seems that the media's standard for "verification of authenticity" depends a lot on who, or what party is getting accused.

"The walls are closing in!"

> Folks who aggressively advocate for the verification of authenticity of documents [..] have a very good reason for taking the stance that they do.

This is for me the key quote of his reply to the editors:

"Repeatedly over the past several months, I've brought to Betsy's attention false claims that were published by The Intercept [..] This rigorous editorial process emerges only when an article deviates from rather than recites the political preferences of The Intercept and/or the standard liberal view on political controversies."

In other words, verification is obsessive when the story doesn't support the political side of the newspaper. When it does, any amount of sloppiness is fine.

I'm not surprised an editor wouldn't want to publish

"The Washington Post on Sunday published an op-ed -- by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert approval for deranged conspiracy theories"

That's childish at best, and more importantly, it's ineffective. With paragraphs like those you lose any reader who isn't an hyper-partisan social-media warrior.

With respect to Greenwald, his view that publishing something is an unmitigated good and can be countered by other reporting is only true in theory, not in practice.

Since he’s talking about publishing an article about a Democratic presidential candidate days before an election, let’s compare that to the last time this happened.

Every media outlet starting from the NYT breathlessly repeated “but her emails”. Some of us knew it was a non story at the time, but it was impossible to compete with the front page of the NYT and 24 hour news networks. Literally everyone was focused on the god damn emails, very little on the policy proposals of each candidate. This had an impact on the election and it’s safe to say with hindsight, that it was a non story and shouldn’t have been covered. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald would call not covering it “suppression” and “censorship” but it was also the right thing to do.

I'd like to take a moment to remember my favorite Greenwald story, where he was skeptical of Russian interference in the 2016 election. A whistleblower then provided The Intercept with a document from the NSA proving otherwise.

The Intercept then turned around sent the NSA the letter, asking them to verify it and clumsily burning their source in the dumbest possible way.

It's unfortunate that Glenn's tactic of screaming "DEBATE ME!" at his editors didn't work, and wish Glenn well as he joins the ranks of the other accursed shills, banished from their homelands and forced haunt Twitter whining about cancel culture or whatever.

Aggrieved left leaning pundit throws tantrum, self exiles. So cliche. So performant.

Glenn Greenwald, Mark Crispin Miller, Greg Palast, Keith Olbermann, Harlan Ellison, Bill Maher... just from the top of my head.

I love their work but omg they must be terrible to work with. Greenwald can't even get along inside the org that he cofounded.

I've worked with similar artists, purists, ultimatists. It's exhausting. Harlan Ellison biopic "Dreams with Sharp Teeth" captures it perfectly. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018887/

Contrast Glennwald with others who figure out the working artist schtick.

Bill Maher did a new thing on cable.

Rachel Maddow somehow plays the corporate media game.

Even Chris Hedges, the world's biggest Eeyore (or Marvin the Robot from HGTG), gets paid.

Some leftists figured out the podcast game. Pod Save America, Young Turks, "bread tube".

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias launched a new masthead (vox.com). Seriously impressive.

And contrast the left and right ecosystems.

Rightists have time proven playbook. Merch, weird advertisers, tours and events, stable sources of funding.

If Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Shapiro can find patrons to seed their endeavors, and customers to buy their wares, surely leftists can suck it up too.

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