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Comment by isaacremuant | Hacker News Reader

Glenn Greenwald and others move there because they got censored elsewhere. Glenn in his own founded news site, the intercept, because he dared talk about something that could affect Biden's chance of winning.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

If you don't address that then you're missing the mark.

Btw, we are already seeing attacks and attempts to control substack. Can't have a medium becoming popular with wrongthink now, can we?

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Substack is funded by VCs, as noted in The Famous Article.

To own someone's debt is to control them. One wonders how long the vibrant opinion will take to shift to propaganda when that debt is bought up by entities with an agenda.

That's correct but doesn't really change his analysis of substack. I do think it's a place where a number of important journalists have gone, like Glenn, Ed Snowden and others.

Because Greenwald helpfully published his correspondence with his editors (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...), as a former journalist I can tell you that the term-of-art for that is "editing," and that this is precisely what editors do every day for every journalist (especially in the better quality organisations). And yes, in many cases editing might reflect the biases of the publication. Editing in the WSJ has a different ideological bias from editing in the NYT. You can think it's bad, and you can even call it censorship if you like, but just so you know, when journalists say "editing," this is the thing they're referring to.

This is why many professional journalist were peeved with Greenwald when he presented the exact same experience all journalists face every day as a normal part of their job as censorship. I guess editing is a censorship of sorts, as is code review and manager approval, but just as programmers say "code review" when they mean that particular kind of censorship, journalists say "editing" when they mean the very ordinary kind of censorship in that correspondence between Greenwald and his editors. When you get a job as a writer, you accept that the editors will "censor" you, because "censoring" is their job, and "being censored" is a part of yours. Like countless journalists before him, Greenwald wasn't happy with the editing his piece received, so he left for a venue with editing that's more to his liking, which in this particular case means virtually none.

> This is why many professional journalist were peeved with Greenwald

It's more likely that professional journalists were and are pissed with Greenwald because Greenwald exposes the cliquishness, triviality, and venality of the whole profession.

Be that as it may, what he calls censoring is just your ordinary editing.

This is why many professional journalist were peeved with Greenwald when he presented the exact same experience all journalists face every day as a normal part of their job as censorship.

That's one version, but another way to interpret it is left-leaning journalist outfits made the 2016 mistake of focusing too much on Julian Assange and the emails fiasco around election time. In their minds, that cost Hillary the election, and they didn't want to do the same thing again with Biden and his son's laptop. And seeing as how virtually no left-leaning publication reported on it, this seems the more likely version of events.

Right wing media stopped talking about it immediately after it had no value to swing the election, which is telling as to how credible the accusations were.

I'm only talking about the reaction to how Greenwald presented the events that led to his departure. What happened to him is called editing, and is a mundane experience for journalists (even though it is, at times, aggravating, and occasionally causes journalists to switch jobs). There was nothing out of the ordinary about it (although it might have been out of the ordinary for Greenwald at The Intercept).

Bias is not just normal; it is unavoidable. Greenwald himself is biased. Professionally and ethically speaking, the only question is whether that editing action deliberately tried to manipulate the truth. From the correspondence it is perfectly clear that it did not -- the editor told him to tone down the rhetoric and/or remove things he did not actually know (or could support) -- and so it was also a pretty professional act of editing.

What you're describing might well be the reason for the editorial caution they exercised in this case, but it certainly did not exceed the boundaries of ordinary, professional editing.

There's also some evidence Greenwald had been planning to leave The Intercept before this collision [1]. The outrage over 'censoring' a clearly bullshit story seems pretty convenient.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/inside-glenn-greenwa...

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