Less than a week before voters across the US headed to the polls in the 2020 presidential election, famed journalist Glenn Greenwald made a stunning announcement: He was leaving the Intercept, the outlet he helped found in 2013, and striking off on his own at the newsletter website Substack.
In a lengthy post at Substack (10/29/20) explaining his departure, Greenwald wrote that Intercept editors were censoring his work—specifically an article, later published at Substack (10/29/20), that reflected poorly on Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden:
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 news set off a firestorm. Greenwald, long a controversial figure in the news industry for his vehement critiques of establishment figures in politics and the media, was alternately celebrated and attacked for his decision.
The drama was fueled by the harsh words exchanged between Greenwald and the Intercept. Hours after Greenwald’s article was posted, Intercept editor-in-chief Betsy Reed (10/29/20) responded, calling the narrative “teeming with distortions and inaccuracies” and casting doubt on his true motivations for leaving:
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.
Tensions had existed at the Intercept for some time between the newsroom operation and the outlet’s outspoken co-founder, according to reporting from New York magazine (10/30/20). And the unique structure of Greenwald’s contract discouraged attempts to steer the direction of his coverage.
Over the following month, many of Greenwald’s critics have suggested that his complaints were overblown, designed to maximize subscriptions at Substack. For the Intercept‘s detractors, the story is different: A once-proud independent outlet has succumbed to the pressures of reporting on politics in the era of President Donald Trump and given the Democrats too much leeway, to the point of pushing out the site’s co-founder and arguably most famous writer in order to stay on the good side of establishment liberals.
FAIR spoke to Greenwald and the Intercept‘s editor-in-chief Reed and deputy editor Roger Hodge about the public dispute that flared up in the wake of the writer’s departure. Both sides held that the other’s actions were to blame for the situation, and appear to have irreconcilable visions of the role of editors in the journalistic process.
In the interest of disclosure, the writer of this article regularly writes for the Intercept on a freelance basis. Greenwald spoke at FAIR’s 25th anniversary fundraiser in 2011.
Groundwork for termination?
One of the central claims in Greenwald’s resignation article and subsequent interviews is that Intercept editors were trying to censor his article on Biden—”The Real Scandal: US Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden From Hunter’s Emails”—by stripping it of large sections editors felt implied Biden was directly involved in the Burisma scandal, and other elements that were critical of the now-president-elect.
Narrowing the focus of the piece to the media, as was asked, was an unusual but not unprecedented request. Greenwald told FAIR that the only pieces he wrote that were edited fell into what he described as a “very narrow category” of reporting, and that he was expected to request an editor if needed. As a unique voice at the outlet with more autonomy than other writers, Greenwald was not given assignments or coverage requirements.
According to Greenwald’s contract with the Intercept‘s parent company First Look Media, portions of which were reviewed by FAIR, the writer was given “the freedom to pursue the journalistic endeavors he finds meaningful”:
His editorial voice will be his own, subject to Sections 4 and 5 below [relating to standard ethical practices and legal protections], he may, if he elects to do so, directly post unedited entries directly to a blog designated for such purpose by mutual agreement.
In comments to FAIR, Hodge said that Greenwald’s contract led to a resistance to editing, which was a driving factor in the famed journalist leaving the outlet he helped found. “Glenn has been pretty clear in his public statements and in his postings on Substack,” said Hodge. “He considers editing censorship.”
“That’s just a basic misunderstanding of the role of editors in journalism,” Hodge added.
As the back and forth over the article between Greenwald and senior editor Peter Maass reached an impasse, Reed emailed the writer to urge him not to publish his article elsewhere, as that might be “detrimental” to the Intercept. It was a message read by Greenwald as a threat, but Reed told FAIR that her intention had been to keep the story at the Intercept. “I think my email was clear,” said Reed:
I meant that since we had been working on the story together, it would be unfortunate for him to bail out of the editing process and publish it somewhere else. I did not intend my message to be read as barring that, but expressing my strong preference that the story be edited and published at the Intercept.
While Reed’s language did not carry any overt threat of barring publication, Greenwald claims that the email was sent to deliver him a message about what might happen if he published elsewhere. According to Greenwald, wording in his contract opened the door for termination if he acted in ways seen as “detrimental” to the publication.
“The word ‘detrimental’ was clearly a lawyer-crafted sentence designed to prepare or lay the groundwork for invoking termination,” said Greenwald.
A portion of the contract reviewed by FAIR stipulates that Greenwald
will not, without the prior written authorization of FLM, perform professional services as a journalist, author or commentator, whether paid or unpaid, whether directly or through Enzuli [Greenwald’s LLC for his journalistic work in the US], for any news organization whose services compete with the services offered by FLM.
Further:
Greenwald will be free to publish books, do media interviews and appearances, give speeches and participate in public discussions, provided that he consults with FLM in advance of undertaking any such activities with a view toward ensuring that such activities reflect well on Greenwald as a representative of FLM.
Reed, in comment to FAIR, denied she was referring to those restrictions in her email to Greenwald. “That is false,” said Reed. “No lawyer had any role in my use of the word ‘detrimental’ in the email. I was unaware it would have any meaning related to Glenn’s contract.”
She added that the publication’s attorney subsequently “told me the word is not in the contract.” The word did not appear in the portions of the contract reviewed by FAIR.
“As a matter of fact, the contract did give me the right to decline to approve the publication of Glenn’s work in a competitive outlet,” added Reed, “but I had no intention of exercising that right.”
Noninterference clause
Greenwald’s unique contract came with an expectation of noninterference stemming from the requirement his opinion pieces were not to be touched. That expectation crashed against editorial concerns over the Biden story, and Greenwald’s insistence on focusing a large part of his piece on accusations around Biden’s involvement in the Burisma scandal, which Maass told Greenwald in an email were not sufficiently grounded in the facts.
“The reality is that never happened before in seven years,” said Greenwald.
That’s why I knew I was dealing with censorship, it was only happening because they were petrified that people would accuse them of having something to help Trump get elected.
While Hodge conceded that Greenwald’s articles always have a measure of opinion in them, he said that there was a distinction between reported pieces and opinion articles. “The Intercept’s approach to journalism is to have a very strong point of view,” said Hodge:
We don’t traffic in the “he said, she said,” one side then the other, putatively objective style of journalism. We don’t really buy the fiction of objectivity. And there’s always a strong point of view in our articles. And so the fact that Glenn is mixing opinion with reporting was not unusual. But this was a reported piece and subject to editing.
Reed told FAIR that because of the structure of his contract, Greenwald was able to have his opinion pieces free from edits, reflecting what Reed described as a “firmly held position by him which long predated his tenure at the Intercept“—referring to his time at the Guardian and Salon.
“In general, his pieces were edited if they were anything other than straight opinion—i.e., if they contained original reporting, sensitive material or required any complex journalistic judgment calls,” said Reed, adding, “All pieces by other writers at the Intercept, including opinion pieces, are edited.”
According to Hodge, charges that the Intercept‘s editorial team is overly amenable to Biden don’t pass muster. Rather, he said, the news organization’s mission to produce adversarial journalism means targeting the party in power—at this moment, the GOP and the Trump administration:
We’ve been covering their abuses of power—their attack on democracy, their voter suppression, and the whole litany of abuses that this government has carried out, their assaults on civil society and journalism in particular. So I make no apologies for being tough on the government and on the Trump administration.
Hodge added that he saw Greenwald as doing everything but endorsing Trump in the run up to the election, by “running offense” for the president and “attempting to intervene in this election by mainstreaming a far-right conspiracy theory,” a reference to allegations that the Bidens were using the former vice president’s name to engage in corrupt business dealings overseas.
The realities of the election, Greenwald said, mean that when reporters follow up on a story reflecting negatively on one candidate, they are helping the other. But he argued that such a perspective on the act of reporting was flawed.
“Obviously, if you report on a candidate during an election year, you are going to actually help the other candidate,” he said. “That’s true in every single case. I don’t understand the critique at all.”
‘Unsupported claims’
Ultimately, Hodge said, Greenwald was unwilling to work with editors to make the piece publishable. This led to a crisis in the newsroom where the outlet’s most famous writer, also a co-founder of the site, ran up against the desire of editors to walk back central claims in the piece—what they saw as undue weight given to vague suggestions of business dealings with China and corrupt influence peddling in the Ukraine—because of questions about their reliability, and what the outlet had already reported about the topic.
“He was insisting on making unsupported claims about the significance of the Biden emails,” said Hodge. “And that’s just not good journalism itself; it’s not responsible.”
Reed sounded the same note of skepticism over the documents central to Greenwald’s piece that Hodge did, and said the sketchy origin of the emails and the reasons they were released was part of why the Intercept was unsure about promoting them:
It appears the New York Post did not do much to verify the emails, and the fact that other news organizations were not given access to the hard drive, to me, explains some of their reluctance to report on its contents.
However, Reed added, that’s not to say that there is evidence the emails are fraudulent. And she conceded the content tracked with what’s known of Hunter Biden:
I agreed with Glenn that it was entirely legitimate to ask the Biden campaign to comment on their authenticity and their contents. We had reported on some of the Hunter Biden emails in another piece, with context about their murky provenance, so I didn’t object in principle to doing that. Given the highly politicized and unusual way these materials came to light, we just felt that context should be provided in the story, and that care should be taken to ensure that we did not read anything into the emails that wasn’t there.
Maass also expressed hesitancy to Greenwald over the origin of the emails, and what he saw as the writer’s disinclination to cite reporting that cast doubt on the claims being made by the scandal’s boosters.
Greenwald told FAIR that he agrees that reporters and journalists should not swallow the spin on the information from Trump allies. “My article did not endorse Rudy Giuliani’s theories,” Greenwald said.
Indeed, Greenwald did provide the basic context for the origins of the documents in his article published on Substack:
The initial documents, claimed the New York Post, were obtained when the laptops containing them were left at a Delaware repair shop with water damage and never picked up, allowing the owner to access its contents and then turn them over to both the FBI and a lawyer for Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani.
To Greenwald, the Biden emails’ provenance had no bearing on whether or not to report on them. Rather, Greenwald said, the standard should be whether they were authentic. Comparing the situation to the Panama Papers and WikiLeaks, Greenwald said that where the information came from and how it was being used was not a determining factor in how journalists should approach the documents.
“The question of provenance or whatever, that may be a different story and an interesting story,” said Greenwald. “But in my view that doesn’t in any way impede whether they should be reported on.”
Featured image: Glenn Greenwald (Creative Commons photo by
the Gadsden Gadfly
I worked in a newspaper composing room. I ran the Atex from which the daily type dump was gathered and then distributed to the compositors awaiting eagerly with xacto knives in hand. I saw first-hand the “role of editors” while reading the edited versions of the Manuel Noriega trial stories in 1991. I could see exactly which parts the copy editor had highlighted for deletion. All of them were such as to cast a cloud on the motivations of George W. Bush.
Page editors edit news-stories to fit the “news hole” – the portion of the pages that isn’t reserved for advertisements, but these main copy editors are the real gatekeepers. When they’re in the pocket of the #Oligarchy, it really doesn’t matter how much integrity your reporter on the ground may have.
This is why George Seldes (you remember him, right?) struck out on his own as well!
TGGF
er, That’s George H.W. Bush.
Fritz
He said. She said. With all those words in print, does that mean we can start criticizing the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party now that Trump has been shown the door? Let me know when it’s okay since the corppress will be on hiatus for at least the next 4 years.
Jay
Fritz:
It’s not “he said, she said”.
Greenwald’s points about Hunter Biden and Burisma were factual, if not news, and in fact Reed in one of her emails to Greenwald explained that the Intercept would need run the piece through editing in NYC since the Intercept had its own “experts”, meaning the Russiagate liar James Risen, and also Peter Maas.
Furthermore it is unequivocal fact that the Intercept has pushed evidence free Russiagate garbage. Something, since his departure, that Greenwald has objected to. He has gone so far as to explain how the Reality Winner leak of NSA documents sort of claiming that possibly Russian intelligence tried to spear phish an election software company was published. It was editors in New York pushing an agenda, so as to absolve the Intercept from publishing articles critical of Hillary Clinton in 2015/16. These moronic editors and reporters didn’t notice that the documents didn’t say what Ms Winner had implied they said when she leaked them. The Intercept has NOT retracted the Winner documents article, going so far as to allow Ms Winner’s mother to publish lies about what the NSA documents said at the Intercept.
Not specifically part of Greenwald’s objections, but the Intercept has repeatedly published dubious reporting advocating for the Al Qaeda types trying to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.
Of course, you are correct that the Intercept, the Atlantic, the NYTimes, the New Yorker, New York, Salon, Alternet (Rawstory) will not be publishing many articles critical of corpo democrats like Biden and Harris.
wkovacs
sorry, you lost me at “famed journalist”
Kyle
Then you’re a partisan with no interest in the truth.
Greenwald received, together with Amy Goodman, the first Izzy Award for special achievement in independent media, in 2009,[175] and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his investigative work on the conditions of Chelsea Manning.[176]
His reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA) won numerous other awards around the world, including top investigative journalism prizes from the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting,[177] the 2013 Online Journalism Awards,[178] the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting in Brazil for his articles in O Globo on NSA mass surveillance of Brazilians (becoming the first foreigner to win the award),[179] the 2013 Libertad de Expresion Internacional award from Argentinian magazine Perfil,[180] and the 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[181] The team that Greenwald led at The Guardian was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their reporting on the NSA.[182] Foreign Policy Magazine then named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013.[183]
In 2014 Greenwald received the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis, an annual German literary award, for the German edition of No Place to Hide.[184] Greenwald was also named the 2014 recipient of the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Georgia.[185]
seedeevee
“and Greenwald’s insistence on focusing a large part of his piece on accusations around Biden’s involvement in the Burisma scandal”
That is about as weaselly of a use of “large part” as you can weasel. Where are your editors!
Larry Erickson
Starting with a confession of my own bias: My long-time admiration for Glenn Greenwald, dating back to Unclaimed Territory, had dropped rather precipitously well before this year’s campaigns to the point where I read The Intercept but skipped anything by him as I could no longer trust that his personal ideology would not overrun the facts.
Which as best as I can gather is what happened here, the issue in a nutshell being that he wanted to report on the Hunter Biden emails without allowing for or even addressing the fact that their veracity is under serious question.
Contrary to his assertion that a reference to “detriment” is lawyer talk, it’s Greenwald who plays the lawyer-crafted argument game. He says that how the documents were obtained is not relevant to whether or not to report on them. And that’s true. But the question of whether or not they are true, is relevant and to report on them without addressing that is wholly improper.
Mike Maddden
What exactly do you believe Greenwald’s “personal ideology” to be? Could you be conflating an unflinching commitment to truth and transparency with an ideology?
It is not the veracity of the documents that is in question, it is their provenance.
Larry Erickson
Probably too late to be seen, but for the record:
Ideology: I deliberately used the phrase “personal ideology” because we all have one. As for Greenwald in particular, he is a self-avowed libertarian – which can and often does make him great on issues of civil liberties and free speech but also leads him to suspect corruption in anything that connects, not even directly, to the word “government.”
There were indeed facts central to the issue that were in contention: The “editors felt [the piece] implied Biden was directly involved in the Burisma scandal” and objected to “vague suggestions of business dealings with China and corrupt influence peddling in the Ukraine—because of questions about their reliability.”
[Sidebar to whoever wrote that: It’s “Ukraine,” not “the Ukraine.”]
As for the documents, provenance is quite relevant to reliability since you cannot reasonably rely on documents if you don’t know where they came from. Considering that the “New York Post did not do much to verify the emails” and “other news organizations were not given access to the hard drive,” there are clear and legitimate questions as to their veracity.
If you can point me to a source where someone involved in the email exchange has confirmed its accuracy, I will stand corrected. Otherwise, otherwise.
Eric
Greenwald’s long-winded version of the controversy involves more than a little ego,
in my opinion, but this FAIR article suggests he was right about the Intercept editors’
fervent desire for Biden to win, at least when it comes to Roger Hodge:
“According to Hodge, charges that the Intercept’s editorial team is overly amenable to Biden don’t pass muster. Rather, he said, the news organization’s mission to produce adversarial journalism means targeting the party in power—at this moment, the GOP and the Trump administration:
“‘We’ve been covering their abuses of power—their attack on democracy, their voter suppression, and the whole litany of abuses that this government has carried out, their assaults on civil society and journalism in particular. So I make no apologies for being tough on the government and on the Trump administration.’
“Hodge added that he saw Greenwald as doing everything but endorsing Trump in the run up to the election, by ‘running offense’ for the president and “attempting to intervene in this election by mainstreaming a far-right conspiracy theory,” a reference to allegations that the Bidens were using the former vice president’s name to engage in corrupt business dealings overseas.”
So it was fine to attack Trump but not Biden until he won, Hodge seems to admit.
This may be a politically defensible position, but has little to do with journalism.
Also: Greenwald dealt with the provenance of the documents in some detail, as I recall,
concluding though they couldn’t be proven authentic, they were in line with what was known and not denied by the Biden camp. Maybe he makes too much of them,
but I don’t see how he can be accused of ignoring facts and doubts.
Further, if there’s an explanation other than corruption for Hunter getting $60k a month
from a Ukrainian gas company, I’d like to see it. The Dems push that down a rabbit hole.
john
Further, if there’s an explanation other than corruption for Hunter getting $60k a month from a Ukrainian gas company, I’d like to see it.
___________________________________________________________________
It’s worth it for the Ukrainian company to just put that name on its letterhead. Think of how much more business and prestige they get by dangling out the Biden name. It’s called “trading on a name” and it’s not corrupt.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that having Hunter Biden in the company means that the company (and its friends) can get access to powerful US politicians. But unless that actually happened, then it’s not illegal in any way. If Burisma was smart, they’d hint at being able to use the Biden connection and then never follow through with any of it.
bevin
The corruption was in the firing of the Ukrainian judge investigating Burisma’s corruption. An action for which Joe Biden took full credit on TV.
john
No, that’s not what happened. The prosecutor (not judge) that the US leveraged out of his position (because he was widely seen as being in the pocket of Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs) was not investigating Burisma at the time and, as far as is known) had no plans to do so.
Larry Erickson
Also, in pushing for his removal, Biden was acting as a representative of declared US foreign policy and in coordination with the EU.
Navi
It is foolish for Greenwald to have sat self-righteously on a moral high horse of his own making and to be publishing something calculated to generate controversy, and thereby garner attention to him and his piece, just before the critical US elections. The contents of his piece could have been exploited by the Trumpspeak propaganda machine to undermine Biden. Greenwald should have waited until the results of the elections became clear.
It would be a good experiment for writers to challenge and test Greenwald’s apparent commitment to freedom from editorial intervention at his own new newsletter website Substack. Any takers?
Jay
Navi,
Stop making excuses for Hunter Biden, and Jon Biden, trading on the father/brother’s name.
They’re corrupt.
Nothing was especially news in this Greenwald piece. In fact, if one were just to take this one Greenwald article, it’s surprising that Greenwald would resign over the Intercept editors refusal to publish it, BUT there’s a context here. The Intercept has been pushing Russiagate lies for years now. And tensions over those lies have been brewing, since Greenwald called them what they are.
john
Stop making excuses for Hunter Biden, and Jon Biden, trading on the father/brother’s name.
They’re corrupt.
___________________________________________________
Talks is cheap. Prove it, pal. There’s no evidence that it’s anything beyond trading on the Biden name, and that’s not corrupt.
anonymous
My daily read of the Intercept ended last January because Greenwald & Scahill were the only writers left that would take down anyone, anytime. The site became unrecognizable as a check on the powerful. Glenn’s departure is long overdue. The Intercept will survive because it has billionaire money behind it not because it is any good.
TeamGlenn:D
The way it reads to me, “ensuring that such activities reflect well on Greenwald as a representative of FLM” is the wording in his contract that Betsy’s remark about publishing elsewhere being “unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept” refers to.
She can deny that’s what she had in mind, and she can say she had no intention of stopping him from publishing w/another paper, but I don’t believe her. You know why? Bc after she published an official statement saying “It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not the Intercept” (cited at the beginning of this article) she goes on to admit that in fact, he’s NEVER strayed from his journalistic roots (“Reed told FAIR that because of the structure of his contract, Greenwald was able to have his opinion pieces free from edits, reflecting what Reed described as a “firmly held position by him which long predated his tenure at the Intercept“—referring to his time at the Guardian and Salon.”)
So maybe stop talking out of both sides of your mouth like this if you want people to believe anything you say about him or your own motivations, k? ;)
bevin
Peter Maas’s rejection of the Burisma narrative is all of a piece with his campaign- at The Intercept- to discredit the Austrian Nobel Literature prize winner, on the spurious grounds that he, the said laureate, refused to go along with the NATO apologia for bombing Serbia and the death of Milosevic in custody.
This divergence from the propaganda line Maas characterised as genocide denial.
Jared
It’s interesting that FAIR’s coverage on this is done by a reporter who also publishes at The Intercept on the side. If this article were truly fair, then it’d be fair to assume that Higgens wouldn’t be published at The Intercept anymore. That means this author could reasonably fear losing a source of income if this article was too unfavorable to The Intercept. Talk about a conflict of interest! And since FAIR is a “media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin…” I have to ask, could you please refer me to even just one thing in the corporate media that is favorable to Greenwald, rather than a billionaire owned outlet? While this article may not have been overtly critical of Greenwald, it sure didn’t challenge the mainstream’s spin, 100% of which either defends The Intercept or attacks Greenwald.
Adrian
I was actually saddened when I first heard about this rift because I felt The Independent, with Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, was a strong indie arrowhead for the left. I don’t know enough to really pass judgement on the split but I’d like to make another, related, point that constantly bothers me: Why is it that we on the left (defined as, say, Bernie and the Squad continuing all the way to far left) can’t seen to get its shit together on a united front to change the system and argue the toss on our lesser differences later. The above story may be an argument over issues, but it hits the wall the same way. We need a united front, a true coalition of leftist forces, but again and again we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Martin
Robert Fisk has died. I pay warmest tribute to one of the last great reporters. The weasel word ‘controversial’ appears in even his own paper, The Independent, whose pages he honoured. He went against the grain and told the truth, spectacularly. Journalism has lost the bravest.
So why do FAIR use the word ‘controversial’ ?
See Media Lens Alert on this subject.”https://www.medialens.org/2020/robert-fisk-death-of-a-controversial-journalist/”
Jared
The subhead of Greenwald’s article: “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.”
The subhead of Betsy Reed’s response: “Greenwald’s decision stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors and the nature of censorship.”
This article’s title: “Greenwald Splits With Intercept Over Visions of Editing”
Notice the similarity between FAIR’s title and The Intercept’s? Okay, just so we can compare with a different opinion, here is a quote from Media Lens that seems relevant:
“Far greater hope for the kind of serious criticism we have in mind seems to lie with renowned dissident Glenn Greenwald who worked for the Guardian for more than a year and who helped secure a Pulitzer prize…Greenwald certainly is willing to criticise the Guardian.”
Lee Baker
Shameless gaslighting! Whether Greenwald is an egotist or not is irrelevant.
Adwoa Oni
I will concede that I’m unsure about the Biden emails having not reviewed them. But whatever merit The Intercept may claim for their principal argument, it’s negated by their past shameful, disgusting reporting on WikiLeaks by Maas and Lee. Micah Lee wrote a reckless, irresponsible article full of holes, lies and unverifiable conclusions about Julian Assange. Not only was this hit piece by Lee outrageous and riddled with errors, it was downright dangerous and detrimental to the fate of a fellow journalist who was being attacked and potentially charged with espionage by the corrupt US government. I question the motives and intention of Betsy Reed and Hodge. Reed approved the aforementioned reporting by Maas and Lee to appear on The Intercept website obviously without any qualms. They can’t now claim the high ground. Further, The Intercept has done negligible reporting on the Assange’s extradition case unfolding in a UK court. Where is their so-called principle for the First Amendment freedom of the press and against government censorship?