On Being Greenwalded

Glenn Greenwald's beef with The Intercept, it seems to me, has just as much to do with the violation of his contract as it does with his editor censoring or attempting to censor a piece he wrote about the Hunter Biden scandal, a/k/a "Laptopgate."

As a co-founder of the news organization that paid his salary, Greenwald had written a clause into his contract which granted him total editorial independence and immunity from the dreaded blue pencil of any editor. It's the rare journalist indeed who can draw a handsome salary with one hand and not only write freely with the other, but never even have to bodily show up in the newsroom.

The feeble legal defense being proffered by The Intercept editor is that this immunity only applied to his opinion pieces and not to his news pieces. Given that Greenwald has always written with a civil libertarian slant, the line between news and opinion as it pertained to his work has always been on the fuzzy side. His muckraking articles, at least the ones that I've read in the last decade or so, have always had his unabashed, often sarcastic, and righteously indignant persona running right through each and every one of them.

Although I'd immediately plopped The Intercept right on my eclectic "Blog Roll" almost the minute it went live, I recently found myself reading it less and less, as his work began appearing less and less, and as the rest of the site began going more and more mainstream. When his articles did appear, they were relegated to small-font headlines at the bottom of the page. So rather than checking in every day, I started checking in once or twice a week, at most.

Just because Greenwald is now gone from the site, however, doesn't mean I'm going to ban The Intercept from my own blog list. There's already enough cancel culture out there. I still enjoy reading some of their writers, including Ryan Grim and Lee Fang, while giving others a pass. James Risen, whom I used to so admire for his fight against the New York Times for its own censorship of his investigative series on the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration (until Bush was safely re-elected and after Risen had threatened to go public and independent with a book), has now devolved into a Russiagate mouthpiece for the CIA. I would assume that the undoubtedly generous pay package that Risen is getting from billionaire Pierre Omidyar has a lot to do with his pivot to cooperation.

Of course, since Greenwald himself is reportedly a millionaire thanks to his reporting on the Edward Snowden leak, with the Pulitzer and the Oscar that went along with it, he certainly is in no danger of starving. To his credit, he is continuing the good fight along with a precious few other independent journalists who are still publishing and broadcasting on a national and even international level from widely visible platforms.

As a journalist myself, the closest I've ever come to national "recognition" was my decade or so writing reader comments on the New York Times. before new "community" management and a sharp rise in subscriptions after Trump was elected resulted in most of my commentary being suppressed. I finally decided to quit the endeavor when moderators approved one too many comments hysterically accusing me of being a Trump supporter, a single-handed Hillary-defeater, a Russian asset, or all three. 

 McCarthyism has developed an undeniable liberal bias, and it's become all too damaging to way too many people. 

All the journalists who are now so gleefully and maliciously piling on Glenn Greenwald are probably afraid for their own jobs. With just days to go before the presidential election, none of them wants to be viewed or remembered as the writer who gave us four more years of Trump because they either defended Greenwald, or they dared even ask a question about the Biden scandal. To delve into this story, if it doesn't kill their careers outright, will damage their access to the expected Biden administration.

During my own very first reporting job in the late 70s, at an extremely conservative local newspaper (the long-defunct Newburgh, NY Evening News) a Republican named Joan Shapiro was running for mayor in that majority Black city on the racist "law and order" platform that was so popular at the time. One Saturday morning, as I was perusing the previous night's police blotter at the cop shop, I came across the arrest sheet of Shapiro's own teenage son, who'd been busted with a bunch of his buddies in a vandalism spree. I duly wrote up the incident in my usual low-key crime report roundup, and it passed inspection by the weekend editor, who got a pretty good chuckle over the irony of it all.

And then, come Monday morning, all hell broke loose. Since the newspaper had endorsed Shapiro, and its top brass very much shared her paranoid concerns about Black crime, I was in big, big trouble. My male boss informed me that I had done a very mean bitchy thing, reducing a female candidate to tears and deliberately trying to ruin her political career.

Long story short: Joan Shapiro went on to win that election in a landslide as well as a second term. Me? From that day on, until I finally resigned (when the paper was sold and upon being offered the coveted 6 p.m. - 2 a.m. graveyard shift), I  was silently frozen out of big assignments. My offense was that I had violated the unwritten rule which applies to journalists everywhere: Be a crusading muckraker, sure, and win awards for investigative series, and expose the bad guys - but only as long as the bad guys aren't big advertisers. and only as long as the bad guys don't belong to the favored political party, or only as long as they don't belong to the same country club as the boss.

So, yeah, I definitely empathize with Glenn Greenwald. I can also empathize, to a certain very minimal extent, with the fellow journalists who are piling on - or just as bad, staying completely and complicitly silent. The story of "you have to go along to get along" is as old as human civilization itself, and it applies to every profession.

One good thing about writing this blog for the past 10 years is that I can write whatever I want, with total editorial independence. Nobody is going to fire me, although the censorious Google algorithm has certainly buried me, right along with most other independent bloggers and Youtubers from both the right and the left.

Censorship is real. Big Brother is real. So kudos to Glenn Greenwald for sticking to his principles and - to the probable chagrin of his former employer - bringing all that much more attention to political hypocrisy and corruption. I hopes he sues for breach of contract.

In closing, though I have already written to most of you individually with only a few more thank-you notes left to compose, let me express my profound gratitude for the fantastic reader response to my recent fund-raiser.

Above all, please keep the great comments and suggestions coming!

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