Presidential Pardon Campaigns for Ulbricht, Winner, Assange, Snowden...

[grarpamp]

> The Intercept just canceled Laura Poitras job

https://www.praxisfilms.org/open-letter-from-laura-poitras/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.html
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/871924646148534273
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/laura-poitras-fired-intercept-first-look-reality-winner/2021/01/14/478a9c30-55e7-11eb-a08b-f1381ef3d207_story.html
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept


The Intercept Fires Co-Founder Who Publicly Discussed Reality Winner 'F*ck-Up'

Laura Poitras, co-founder of The Intercept, was fired from the
publication two weeks ago in what she says was retribution for
publicly discussing the outlet's mishandling of a leak by former NSA
intelligence officer, Reality Winner.

"First Look Media and The Intercept were founded upon Edward Snowden’s
whistleblowing and the investigative journalism that Glenn Greenwald
and I all risked our lives to bring to the public, exposing the
National Security Agency’s illegal global mass surveillance programs,"
Poitras wrote in her Thursday open letter.

    First Look Media’s decision to fire me after I raised concerns
about source protection and accountability – rather than to demote or
seek the resignation of anyone responsible for the journalistic
malpractice, cover-up, and retaliation – speaks to the priorities of
The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed and First Look Media’s CEO
Michael Bloom.

    Journalists make mistakes, sometimes with serious consequences.
What is alarming about this case is the multitude of mistakes, the
egregious disregard for source protection, and the mishandling of an
internal review that ended with a cover-up. It goes without saying
that no one should participate in an investigation into themselves,
yet this is what happened at The Intercept. Editor-in-Chief Betsy
Reed, who oversaw the reporting on Winner’s NSA leak, took an active
behind-the-scenes role in the investigation, assigned staff who
reported directly to her to gather facts, and, when the facts pointed
to editorial failures, Reed removed the staff person from the
investigation. -Laura Poitras

As explained by former co-founder Glenn Greenwald, who left The
Intercept in October, he and Laura spent months demanding an
accounting over what happened with the Reality Winner 'fuck-up.'

    Many people (including myself & Laura) spent months demanding that
accounting. Their original excuse was they didn't want to help DOJ in
its prosecution. But that prosecution has been over for 2 1/2 years.
Where is that accounting? Provide the transparency you demand of
others.
    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 14, 2021

    Here's Laura Poitras' post-firing letter, with a focus on the key
role of the top Intercept editors - Betsy Reed and Roger Hodge - in
the Reality Winner debacle.https://t.co/gKppuD0uXr

    I explained what happen in my article announcing my
resignation.https://t.co/dZrlYGfEBf pic.twitter.com/Pyfp5GPC74
    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 14, 2021

First Look reportedly conducted two internal reviews of the Reality
Winner case, neither of which has been made public. However, in a 2017
statement, The Intercept's Betsy Reed concluded that "our practices
fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves for minimizing
the risks of source exposure when handling anonymously provided
materials."

Reed says that Poitras's claim of no accountability is wrong, noting
that "there were two separate reviews, which were comprehensive and
conducted by lawyers with a duty to remain independent and impartial.
They both concluded that the errors we made in our handling of the
story reflected institutional weaknesses, for which I took
responsibility as the editor in chief."

That said, nobody involved in the Winner controversy was fired or
demoted for burning their source to a crisp.








January 14, 2021

On Monday, November 30, 2020, I was fired from First Look Media, an
organization I co-founded. My termination came two months after I
spoke to the press about The Intercept’s failure to protect
whistleblower Reality Winner and the cover-up and lack of
accountability that followed, and after years of raising concerns
internally about patterns of discrimination and retaliation.

I was told my firing was effective immediately and without cause, my
access to email was shut down, and that the company had no plans to
communicate my abrupt termination to the public.

First Look Media and The Intercept were founded upon Edward Snowden’s
whistleblowing and the investigative journalism that Glenn Greenwald
and I all risked our lives to bring to the public, exposing the
National Security Agency’s illegal global mass surveillance programs.

First Look Media’s decision to fire me after I raised concerns about
source protection and accountability – rather than to demote or seek
the resignation of anyone responsible for the journalistic
malpractice, cover-up, and retaliation – speaks to the priorities of
The Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed and First Look Media’s CEO
Michael Bloom.

Journalists make mistakes, sometimes with serious consequences. What
is alarming about this case is the multitude of mistakes, the
egregious disregard for source protection, and the mishandling of an
internal review that ended with a cover-up. It goes without saying
that no one should participate in an investigation into themselves,
yet this is what happened at The Intercept. Editor-in-Chief Betsy
Reed, who oversaw the reporting on Winner’s NSA leak, took an active
behind-the-scenes role in the investigation, assigned staff who
reported directly to her to gather facts, and, when the facts pointed
to editorial failures, Reed removed the staff person from the
investigation.

The Intercept’s claim that an independent investigation was conducted
is false. The so-called “independent” review was done by the same
lawyer who worked on the NSA/Winner story. The Intercept should
correct the record and apologize to its readers.

CEO Michael Bloom and Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed have demonstrated
repeatedly that they consider the whistleblowers and journalists who
risk their lives on behalf of the organization as disposable. They
demonstrated this by their lack of effort to protect Reality Winner.
And again when they didn’t bother to inform Edward Snowden of their
decision to defund the NSA archive. And now by firing me on a day’s
notice from an organization built upon my work and reputation without
even informing the staff or the public of their decision.

First Look Media will issue a statement saying that they did not
terminate me in retaliation, that the organization is moving away from
its co-founders’ mission (even though this mission still appears on
tax filings and fundraising emails), that The Intercept is “under
attack”, that Reality Winner is to blame for the evidence The
Intercept handed to the government, that my contract “wrapped up”
though it has no end date, and that I never really contributed much of
value anyway.

I will share a few things I’m proud of: co-founding The Intercept,
First Look Media, and Field of Vision; supporting filmmakers with
uncompromising artistic and political vision who reach wide audiences
and recognition (including 5 Academy Award nominations); fighting for
non-extractive contracts in which filmmakers maintain copyright of
their creative work; working alongside many extraordinary journalists
and filmmakers; and speaking out when a pattern of impunity and
retaliation puts sources at risk.

Because of The Intercept’s negligence – including their failure to
consult with their own security experts – Reality Winner was arrested
before the story was even published, denying her the crucial window of
time for the focus to be on the information she risked her personal
freedom to reveal to the public. Reality Winner is still imprisoned as
I write this letter.

The government’s prosecution of Winner and her extreme prison sentence
are unconscionable. As I argued last month, the Espionage Act is being
abused by the government to selectively prosecute sources and
whistleblowers, and to intimidate journalists and news organizations
seeking to publish information that the government wants to suppress.
The Biden administration should pardon Reality Winner on their first
day in office. But this does not excuse journalists and news
organizations from doing their job to protect sources.

The tragedy here is that First Look Media and The Intercept had all
the financial resources and digital security expertise to do this
right, and yet they failed to apply their basic founding principles of
source protection and accountability to themselves. Instead of
conducting an honest, independent and transparent assessment with
meaningful consequences, First Look Media fired me for speaking out,
exposing the gulf between the organization’s purported values and its
practice.

– Laura Poitras
Co-Founder, The Intercept, First Look Media, Field of Vision












My Resignation From The Intercept
The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity
plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I
co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.
	
Glenn Greenwald
Oct 29, 2020	1,187	918	

Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news
outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as
well as from its parent company First Look Media.

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.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness
testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not
content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media
outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I
refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this
article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this
Biden evidence shows: 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, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would.
But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So
censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path
these Biden-supporting editors chose.

The censored article will be published on this page shortly (it is now
published here, and the emails with Intercept editors showing the
censorship are here). My letter of intent to resign, which I sent this
morning to First Look Media’s President Michael Bloom, is published
below.

As of now, I will be publishing my journalism here on Substack, where
numerous other journalists, including my good friend, the great
intrepid reporter Matt Taibbi, have come in order to practice
journalism free of the increasingly repressive climate that is
engulfing national mainstream media outlets across the country.

This was not an easy choice: I am voluntarily sacrificing the support
of a large institution and guaranteed salary in exchange for nothing
other than a belief that there are enough people who believe in the
virtues of independent journalism and the need for free discourse who
will be willing to support my work by subscribing.

Like anyone with young children, a family and numerous obligations, I
do this with some trepidation, but also with the conviction that there
is no other choice. I could not sleep at night knowing that I allowed
any institution to censor what I want to say and believe — least of
all a media outlet I co-founded with the explicit goal of ensuring
this never happens to other journalists, let alone to me, let alone
because I have written an article critical of a powerful Democratic
politician vehemently supported by the editors in the imminent
national election.

But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led
to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet
are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the
viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left
political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began
writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting
media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks
involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or
lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free
expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

>From the time I began writing about politics in 2005, journalistic
freedom and editorial independence have been sacrosanct to me. Fifteen
years ago, I created a blog on the free Blogspot software when I was
still working as a lawyer: not with any hopes or plans of starting a
new career as a journalist, but just as a citizen concerned about what
I was seeing with the War on Terror and civil liberties, and wanting
to express what I believed needed to be heard. It was a labor of love,
based in an ethos of cause and conviction, dependent upon a guarantee
of complete editorial freedom.

It thrived because the readership I built knew that, even when they
disagreed with particular views I was expressing, I was a free and
independent voice, unwedded to any faction, controlled by nobody,
endeavoring to be as honest as possible about what I was seeing, and
always curious about the wisdom of seeing things differently. The
title I chose for that blog, “Unclaimed Territory,” reflected that
spirit of liberation from captivity to any fixed political or
intellectual dogma or institutional constraints.

When Salon offered me a job as a columnist in 2007, and then again
when the Guardian did the same in 2012, I accepted their offers on the
condition that I would have the right, except in narrowly defined
situations (such as articles that could create legal liability for the
news outlet), to publish my articles and columns directly to the
internet without censorship, advanced editorial interference, or any
other intervention permitted or approval needed. Both outlets revamped
their publication system to accommodate this condition, and over the
many years I worked with them, they always honored those commitments.

When I left the Guardian at the height of the Snowden reporting in
2013 in order to create a new media outlet, I did not do so, needless
to say, in order to impose upon myself more constraints and
restrictions on my journalistic independence. The exact opposite was
true: the intended core innovation of The Intercept, above all else,
was to create a new media outlets where all talented, responsible
journalists would enjoy the same right of editorial freedom I had
always insisted upon for myself. As I told former New York Times
Executive Editor Bill Keller in a 2013 exchange we had in The New York
Times about my critiques of mainstream journalism and the idea behind
The Intercept: “editors should be there to empower and enable strong,
highly factual, aggressive adversarial journalism, not to serve as
roadblocks to neuter or suppress the journalism.”

When the three of us as co-founders made the decision early on that we
would not attempt to manage the day-to-day operations of the new
outlet, so that we could instead focus on our journalism, we
negotiated the right of approval for senior editors and, especially
the editor-in-chief. The central responsibility of the person holding
that title was to implement, in close consultation with us, the unique
journalistic vision and journalistic values on which we founded this
new media outlet.

Chief among those values was editorial freedom, the protection of a
journalist’s right to speak in an honest voice, and the airing rather
than suppression of dissent from mainstream orthodoxies and even
collegial disagreements with one another. That would be accomplished,
above all else, by ensuring that journalists, once they fulfilled the
first duty of factual accuracy and journalistic ethics, would be not
just permitted but encouraged to express political and ideological
views that deviated from mainstream orthodoxy and those of their own
editors; to express themselves in their own voice of passion and
conviction rather stuffed into the corporatized, contrived tone of
artificial objectivity, above-it-all omnipotence; and to be completely
free of anyone else’s dogmatic beliefs or ideological agenda —
including those of the three co-founders.

The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable
when compared to that original vision. 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), a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and
center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the
approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we
created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.

As a result, it is a rare event indeed when a radical freelance voice
unwelcome in mainstream precincts is published in The Intercept.
Outside reporters or writers with no claim to mainstream acceptability
— exactly the people we set out to amplify — have almost no chance of
being published. It is even rarer for The Intercept to publish content
that would not fit very comfortably in at least a dozen or more
center-left publications of similar size which pre-dated its founding,
from Mother Jones to Vox and even MSNBC.

Courage is required to step out of line, to question and poke at those
pieties most sacred in one’s own milieu, but fear of alienating the
guardians of liberal orthodoxy, especially on Twitter, is the
predominant attribute of The Intercept’s New-York based editorial
leadership team. As a result, The Intercept has all but abandoned its
core mission of challenging and poking at, rather than appeasing and
comforting, the institutions and guardians most powerful in its
cultural and political circles.

Making all of this worse, The Intercept — while gradually excluding
the co-founders from any role in its editorial mission or direction,
and making one choice after the next to which I vocally objected as a
betrayal of our core mission — continued publicly to trade on my name
in order to raise funds for journalism it knew I did not support. It
purposely allowed the perception to fester that I was the person
responsible for its journalistic mistakes in order to ensure that
blame for those mistakes was heaped on me rather than the editors who
were consolidating control and were responsible for them.

The most egregious, but by no means only, example of exploiting my
name to evade responsibility was the Reality Winner debacle. As The
New York Times recently reported, that was a story in which I had no
involvement whatsoever. While based in Brazil, I was never asked to
work on the documents which Winner sent to our New York newsroom with
no request that any specific journalist work on them. I did not even
learn of the existence of that document until very shortly prior to
its publication. The person who oversaw, edited and controlled that
story was Betsy Reed, which was how it should be given the magnitude
and complexity of that reporting and her position as editor-in-chief.

It was Intercept editors who pressured the story’s reporters to
quickly send those documents for authentication to the government —
because they was eager to prove to mainstream media outlets and
prominent liberals that The Intercept was willing to get on board the
Russiagate train. They wanted to counter-act the perception, created
by my articles expressing skepticism about the central claims of that
scandal, that The Intercept had stepped out of line on a story of high
importance to U.S. liberalism and even the left. That craving — to
secure the approval of the very mainstream media outlets we set out to
counteract — was the root cause for the speed and recklessness with
which that document from Winner was handled.

But The Intercept, to this very day, has refused to provide any public
accounting of what happened in the Reality Winner story: to explain
who the editors were who made mistakes and why any of it happened. As
the New York Times article makes clear, that refusal persists to this
very day notwithstanding vocal demands from myself, Scahill, Laura
Poitras and others that The Intercept, as an institution that demands
transparency from others, has the obligation to provide it for itself.

The reason for this silence and this cover-up is obvious: accounting
to the public about what happened with the Reality Winner story would
reveal who the actual editors are who are responsible for that deeply
embarrassing newsroom failure, and that would negate their ability to
continue to hide behind me and let the public continue to assume that
I was the person at fault for a reporting process from which I was
completely excluded from the start. That is just one example
illustrating the frustrating dilemma of having a newsroom exploit my
name, work and credibility when it is convenient to do so, while
increasingly denying me any opportunity to influence its journalistic
mission and editorial direction, all while pursuing an editorial
mission completely anathema to what I believe.

Despite all of this, I did not want to leave The Intercept. As it
deteriorated and abandoned its original mission, I reasoned to myself
— perhaps rationalized — that as long as The Intercept at least
continued to provide me the resources to personally do the journalism
I believe in, and never to interfere in or impede my editorial
freedom, I could swallow everything else.

But the brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter
Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China,
as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply
unholy union with Silicon Valley and the “intelligence community,” to
suppress its revelations — eroded the last justification I could cling
to for staying. It meant that not only does this media outlet not
provide the editorial freedom to other journalists, as I had so
hopefully envisioned seven years ago, but now no longer even provides
it to me. In the days heading into a presidential election, I am
somehow silenced from expressing any views that random editors in New
York find disagreeable, and now somehow have to conform my writing and
reporting to cater to their partisan desires and eagerness to elect
specific candidates.

To say that such censorship is a red line for me, a situation I would
never accept no matter the cost, is an understatement. It is
astonishing to me, but also a reflection of our current discourse and
illiberal media environment, that I have been silenced about Joe Biden
by my own media outlet.

Numerous other episodes were also contributing causes to my decision
to leave: the Reality Winner cover-up; the decision to hang Lee Fang
out to dry and even force him to apologize when a colleague tried to
destroy his reputation by publicly, baselessly and repeatedly branding
him a racist; its refusal to report on the daily proceedings of the
Assange extradition hearing because the freelance reporter doing an
outstanding job was politically distasteful; its utter lack of
editorial standards when it comes to viewpoints or reporting that
flatter the beliefs of its liberal base (The Intercept published some
of the most credulous and false affirmations of maximalist Russiagate
madness, and, horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the
Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation” by mindlessly and
uncritically citing — of all things — a letter by former CIA officials
that contained this baseless insinuation).

I know it sounds banal to say, but — even with all of these
frustrations and failures — I am leaving, and writing this, with
genuine sadness, not fury. That news outlet is something I and
numerous close friends and colleagues poured an enormous amount of our
time, energy, passion and love into building.

The Intercept has done great work. Its editorial leaders and First
Look’s managers steadfastly supported the difficult and dangerous
reporting I did last year with my brave young colleagues at The
Intercept Brasil to expose corruption at the highest levels of the
Bolsonaro government, and stood behind us as we endured threats of
death and imprisonment.

It continues to employ some of my closest friends, outstanding
journalists whose work — when it overcomes editorial resistance —
produces nothing but the highest admiration from me: Jeremy Scahill,
Lee Fang, Murtaza Hussain, Naomi Klein, Ryan Grim and others. And I
have no personal animus for anyone there, nor any desire to hurt it as
an institution. Betsy Reed is an exceptionally smart editor and a very
good human being with whom I developed a close and valuable
friendship. And Pierre Omidyar, the original funder and publisher of
First Look, always honored his personal commitment never to interfere
in our editorial process even when I was publishing articles directly
at odds with his strongly held views and even when I was attacking
other institutions he was funding. I’m not leaving out of vengeance or
personal conflict but out of conviction and cause.

And none of the critiques I have voiced about The Intercept are unique
to it. To the contrary: 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.

And nothing is crippled by that trend more severely than journalism,
which, above all else, requires the ability of journalists to offend
and anger power centers, question or reject sacred pieties, unearth
facts that reflect negatively even on (especially on) the most beloved
and powerful figures, and highlight corruption no matter where it is
found and regardless of who is benefited or injured by its exposure.

Prior to the extraordinary experience of being censored this week by
my own news outlet, I had already been exploring the possibility of
creating a new media outlet. I have spent a couple of months in active
discussions with some of the most interesting, independent and vibrant
journalists, writers and commentators across the political spectrum
about the feasibility of securing financing for a new outlet that
would be designed to combat these trends. The first two paragraphs of
our working document reads as follows:

    American media is gripped in a polarized culture war that is
forcing journalism to conform to tribal, groupthink narratives that
are often divorced from the truth and cater to perspectives that are
not reflective of the broader public but instead a minority of
hyper-partisan elites. The need to conform to highly restrictive,
artificial cultural narratives and partisan identities has created a
repressive and illiberal environment in which vast swaths of news and
reporting either do not happen or are presented through the most
skewed and reality-detached lens.

    With nearly all major media institutions captured to some degree
by this dynamic, a deep need exists for media that is untethered and
free to transgress the boundaries of this polarized culture war and
address a demand from a public that is starved for media that doesn’t
play for a side but instead pursues lines of reporting, thought, and
inquiry wherever they lead, without fear of violating cultural pieties
or elite orthodoxies.

I have definitely not relinquished hope that this ambitious project
can be accomplished. And I theoretically could have stayed at The
Intercept until then, guaranteeing a stable and secure income for my
family by swallowing the dictates of my new censors.

But I would be deeply ashamed if I did that, and believe I would be
betraying my own principles and convictions that I urge others to
follow. So in the meantime, I have decided to follow in the footsteps
of numerous other writers and journalists who have been expelled from
increasingly repressive journalistic precincts for various forms of
heresy and dissent and who have sought refuge here.

I hope to exploit the freedom this new platform offers not only to
continue to publish the independent and hard-hitting investigative
journalism and candid analysis and opinion writing that my readers
have come to expect, but also to develop a podcast, and continue the
YouTube program, “System Update,” I launched earlier this year in
partnership with The Intercept.

To do that, to make this viable, I will need your support: people who
are able to subscribe and sign up for the newsletter attached to this
platform will enable my work to thrive and still be heard, perhaps
even more so than before. I began my journalism career by depending on
my readers’ willingness to support independent journalism which they
believe is necessary to sustain. It is somewhat daunting at this point
in my life, but also very exciting, to return to that model where one
answers only to the public a journalist should be serving.

* * * * * * * *

LETTER OF INTENT TO RESIGN

-------- Forwarded Message --------

Subject: ResignationDate: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 10:20:54 -0300From: Glenn
Greenwald <xxxxxxxx at theintercept.com>To: Michael Bloom
<xxxxxxxxx at firstlook.media>, Betsy Reed <xxxxxxx at theintercept.com>

Michael -

I am writing to advise you that I have decided that I will be
resigning from First Look Media (FLM) and The Intercept.

The precipitating (but by no means only) cause is that The Intercept
is attempting to censor my articles in violation of both my contract
and fundamental principles of editorial freedom. The latest and
perhaps most egregious example is an opinion column I wrote this week
which, five days before the presidential election, is critical of Joe
Biden, the candidate who happens to be vigorously supported by all of
the Intercept editors in New York who are imposing the censorship and
refusing to publish the article unless I agree to remove all of the
sections critical of the candidate they want to win. All of that
violates the right in my contract with FLM to publish articles without
editorial interference except in very narrow circumstances that
plainly do not apply here.

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).

I have been extremely disenchanted and saddened by the editorial
direction of The Intercept under its New York leadership for quite
some time. The publication we founded without those editors back in
2014 now bears absolutely no resemblance to what we set out to build
-- not in content, structure, editorial mission or purpose. I have
grown embarrassed to have my name used as a fund-raising tool to
support what it is doing and for editors to use me as a shield to hide
behind to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes (including,
but not only, with the Reality Winner debacle, for which I was
publicly blamed despite having no role in it, while the editors who
actually were responsible for those mistakes stood by silently,
allowing me to be blamed for their errors and then covering-up any
public accounting of what happened, knowing that such transparency
would expose their own culpability).

But all this time, as things worsened, I reasoned that as long as The
Intercept remained a place where my own right of journalistic
independence was not being infringed, I could live with all of its
other flaws. But now, not even that minimal but foundational right is
being honored for my own journalism, suppressed by an increasingly
authoritarian, fear-driven, repressive editorial team in New York bent
on imposing their own ideological and partisan preferences on all
writers while ensuring that nothing is published at The Intercept that
contradicts their own narrow, homogenous ideological and partisan
views: exactly what The Intercept, more than any other goal, was
created to prevent.

I have asked my lawyer to get in touch with FLM to discuss how best to
terminate my contract. Thank you -

Glenn Greenwald