Sometimes it’s legitimate censorship. Other times, your editor is just insisting you don’t spread misinformation.
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.
This was moments before Glenn Greenwald's resignation.
He has no access to the evidence but he is making very preliminary bets.
Glenn Greenwald's own editor is telling him not to make preliminary bets. What's so surprising here?
https://www.businessinsider.com/ups-said-found-lost-tucker-c...
probably, just a weird coincidence but tucker wasn't lying about the situation.
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?
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
> 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?
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.)
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.
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."
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.
Why would Mueller not say anything to that effect then?
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.
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.
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...
I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but saying something with confidence doesn't actually make it true.
> 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.”
$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.
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.
It reminds me of Shiri's Scissors: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
Greenwald seems to have gone way off the deep end, what the heck happened???
So maybe they never discredited it because they stopped jumping through every hoop that their opponents (Trump or otherwise) hold up for them?
I think you'll be surprised by it. There's nothing about it that is fairly characterized as misinformation.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-tony-bobulinski-...
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.”
> refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Again, this looks exactly like every other KGB/FSB misinformation operation.
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.
Or was it that all the sections in the article critical of Joe were unsubstantiated.
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?
No one has denied the underlying documents' authenticity to my knowledge.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
As for the wapo: https://mobile.twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/132036642124791...
* 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.