gradenko_2000 posted:

Chotiner is fantastic when dealing with dipshits like this, but his interview with Peter Daou was a lot weaker and shows that his style of "just read everyone's words back to them and let them fall on their faces" isn't nearly as clever when it runs up against someone with actual principles

Teriyaki Koinku posted:

I'm not normally one to fault people for things they said when they were young, but if you ever stand for apartheid, Nazism, etc then you should have it branded on your loving forehead permanently a la Inglorious Basterds.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Chotiner is fantastic when dealing with dipshits like this, but his interview with Peter Daou was a lot weaker and shows that his style of "just read everyone's words back to them and let them fall on their faces" isn't nearly as clever when it runs up against someone with actual principles

quote:

This orgy of management largesse has coincided with layoffs of the editor-in-chief, managing editor, national security editor, copy editor, photo editor, multiple senior editors, social media editor, as well as writers and reporters. There are passionate editors and writers left who still want to do news, like Ryan Grim and Ali Gharib, but they are toiling under the impossible odds of the new management regime.

After the initial layoffs in February realizing there wasn’t the bandwidth or the internal advocacy to get my stories through, I threatened to leave for somewhere interested in doing journalism. They hired an interim editor Bill Arkin, one I insisted on. Bill is a legendary national security analyst and reporter with a career going back to the Cold War, a splinter in the eye of every administration since Reagan. Not one for self-promotion, many don’t realize how many major news stories he’s been behind: first to report on the Bush administration’s top secret plan to invade Iraq, first person to reveal where all the nuclear weapons were, first to write about the above-top secret continuity of government system, first to report on the ground about civilian casualties and cluster bombs, first to reveal countless other secret programs and instances of government spying. Bill has worked at NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, but as his frequent job moves attest, he’s not a corporate guy.

Bill laid out his philosophy: stop paying attention to the meltdown of The Intercept and report on American-centric national security topics. Help your readers understand a hidden world. Focus on the mal-practitioners, he insisted. And take no prisoners.

We hit the ground running. My stories under Bill were a wild success for The Intercept, with one of the first — about the FBI’s attempts to root out so-called “extremist” gamers online — quickly becoming the site’s second most viewed article this year.

But then we did a story on the billionaire founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.

It was a straightforward article detailing Bezos’s $50 million charity grant to the retired Admiral William McRaven (whose wife sits on the board of a charity linked to Bezos), calling the contribution a “racket.” The story seemed like vintage Intercept fare. One of our founders, Jeremy Scahill, made an excellent Academy Award nominated documentary about McRaven. My story was essentially a factual overview of McRaven’s own considerable wealth, and it noted the irony that the $100 million grant Bezos gave to McRaven and celebrity Eva Longoria was the exact same amount of money that the Bezos-owned Washington Post lost this past year. The story practically wrote itself.

Enter the Intercept’s general counsel David Bralow, who said he had problems with the article. He didn’t have legal concerns. Bralow instead thought it inopportune, saying that attacking Bezos might not sit well with the Intercept’s own billionaire donor, Pierre Omidyar, especially at a time when he was keeping the organization afloat.

“I confess on a first read that it gives me pause, particularly because the article waits until the back half to say that McRaven actually donated this money to other charities,” Bralow emailed Bill. “And how is that a racket?”

Bralow called the story “naive,” questioning our questioning of Bezos’ commitment to journalism. “A business, just like ours, has the obligation to remain sustainable,” he continued. “That it [the Washington Post] has net operating loss and its owner wants to make charitable contributions seems very different. Even more to the point, that Bezos does not want to subsidize the media anymore seems like we are ignoring our own story.”

[...]

Bill updated the draft — which already said in the subheadline that it was a charity grant — to further stress that Bezos’ $100 million gift was for charity. Bill then sent it back to Bralow.

What happened next, Bralow did not commit to writing, instead calling Bill.

During the call, Bill told me immediately after, Bralow said that Annie Chabel, the CEO, had concerns about how the story might come off to the Intercept’s donors. Bill said that that might be unfortunate but wouldn’t influence his decision to publish, and that if Bralow had any legal concerns — as opposed to editorial — he would be happy to address them.

After a heated back and forth, Bralow declared: “I’m killing the story.”

Bill replied that he would resign, prompting Bralow to back off (I had said I would leave if Bill didn’t edit me, the reason Bralow retreated.)

“I don’t see the point of the story,” Bralow then complained before Bill told him to gently caress off (literally, lol). We published.

The Washington Post journalists who privately thanked us for doing the story seemed to understand the point just fine — as did the people who read it, making it one of the top performing articles that month.

Subsequent stories that Bill edited were repeatedly held up. Chabel and Bralow also saw to it that Bill was not provided access to the company Slack or invited to staff meetings or even be publicly acknowledged, siloing him off. Bill toiled on, editing me and my colleague Dan Boguslaw. Under his tutelage, we went on to produce most of the top performing stories on the site.

Bralow, who resembles a Catholic priest caricatured in one of Martin Luther’s tracts, living well off the generosity of his modest parishioners, is the personification of what The Intercept has become. With his bloated salary (over $300,000, per the most recent nonprofit filing), bureaucrats like him who prevent journalism is what your money is paying for if you contribute to The Intercept these days.

It wasn’t just my stories getting held up. Dan obtained a leaked copy of the membership list for the secretive Bohemian Grove, a private gentlemen’s club that counts business tycoons and former top officials like the late Henry Kissinger among its members. Bill worked with Dan to recreate the membership list as a new document to obscure the source, but the Intercept would have none of it.

Enter Nikita Mazurov, the company’s PhD in “Cultural Studies” who for some reason serves as the manager of digital security. Though Dan had obtained the document over a year ago from a source who was confident it was safe to use, Mazurov acted as if it was the CIA’s family jewels, going on and on about how the protection of the source demanded more work before we could publish.

In a subsequent call that included Bralow, Mazurov peppered Dan and Bill with bizarre questions, like: ‘What if there exists another list, compiled the day before, and then another, compiled the day after, and those list are each different, and the Bohemian Grove went through all three lists to pinpoint the exact date of your list and then went through a list of all people who had access?’ And ‘what if there was CCTV footage in the office where the list was stored, footage that would reveal the person who accessed it and leaked it?’

“This isn’t the CIA!” Bill yelled, calling Mazurov a loving idiot.

“That’s an HR violation!” Mazurov shrieked.

With Dan’s agreement, Bill abandoned the story. (Dan said he was so happy to see an editor stand up to the officious bureaucrats that the pleasure was greater than the story’s publication ever would have been.)

Such an incident happened once again when a source provided me with diplomatic cables revealing the Biden administration’s private attempts to pressure other countries to vote against a Palestinian statehood resolution at the UN. Having received the documents just days before the UN vote, I urgently needed to get the story out in time for it to inform public debate. But again, The Intercept had “legal concerns.” I pushed back, stressing the story’s time sensitive nature, that the documents were unclassified and the source confident they were safe to publish.

But Mazurov didn’t see it that way. He emailed Bill a list of over 20 separate “source protection concerns” he believed needed to be answered before publication. This kind of security theater had emerged in the wake of the criminal prosecution of two Intercept sources; but they had leaked classified information, and this was unclassified. With the UN vote drawing near, it seemed to me that The Intercept’s solution to its past source protection fiascos was not to publish journalism.

Bill wrote to Bralow that Mazurov’s list was surely some kind of “joke,” and he forced publication the day before the vote.

Predictably, the story touched off a firestorm of outrage over the Biden administration’s public support for a two-state solution while secretly backchanneling to kill it.

There were other examples, and I got a window into how the corporation — now in the guise of a billionaire anchored non-profit — tended to itself and its own survival, rather than to journalism.

On Friday, Bill was informed that he was being let go.

I decided there and then that I had to leave. At a time when Israel’s war in Gaza had spread to the rest of the region, drawing in the Iranian superpower, my sources in the U.S. government were leaking more than ever to alert the public to looming catastrophe. I could not in good conscience remain at an outlet that can’t publish these disclosures, nor continue to live off of donor money that is not going toward its stated purpose, journalism, let alone “fearless” journalism that the Intercept was founded around.

The extent of the dysfunction at The Intercept is not publicly known in part because, for all management’s problems, they are very good at one thing: structuring hush money payments. Multiple outgoing Intercept staffers have been offered severance packages in exchange for signing non-disclosure agreements. Following Bill’s firing, I was also offered a “retention” agreement. I did not dignify the offer with a response. I don’t begrudge my colleagues taking the money — people need to pay rent — but I can no longer stay.

Dreylad posted:

more people leaving the Intercept, here's some of the details:

quote:

Enter Nikita Mazurov, the company’s PhD in “Cultural Studies” who for some reason serves as the manager of digital security. Though Dan had obtained the document over a year ago from a source who was confident it was safe to use, Mazurov acted as if it was the CIA’s family jewels, going on and on about how the protection of the source demanded more work before we could publish.

quote:

In a subsequent call that included Bralow, Mazurov peppered Dan and Bill with bizarre questions, like: ‘What if there exists another list, compiled the day before, and then another, compiled the day after, and those list are each different, and the Bohemian Grove went through all three lists to pinpoint the exact date of your list and then went through a list of all people who had access?’ And ‘what if there was CCTV footage in the office where the list was stored, footage that would reveal the person who accessed it and leaked it?’

“This isn’t the CIA!” Bill yelled, calling Mazurov a loving idiot.

“That’s an HR violation!” Mazurov shrieked.

With Dan’s agreement, Bill abandoned the story. (Dan said he was so happy to see an editor stand up to the officious bureaucrats that the pleasure was greater than the story’s publication ever would have been.)

genericnick posted:

Always thought the Intercept was set up in the campaign against wikileaks, firstly to suck away resources and attention and secondly to get a filtered outlet for leaks. But now wikileaks is dead and so is most journalism, so why tolerate it?

genericnick posted:

Always thought the Intercept was set up in the campaign against wikileaks, firstly to suck away resources and attention and secondly to get a filtered outlet for leaks. But now wikileaks is dead and so is most journalism, so why tolerate it?

Teriyaki Koinku posted:

I'm not normally one to fault people for things they said when they were young, but if you ever stand for apartheid, Nazism, etc then you should have it branded on your loving forehead permanently a la Inglorious Basterds.

Ytlaya posted:

I mean, isn't pretty much anyone who supported either mainstream US political party guilty of supporting apartheid?

bedpan posted:

if you go back and look at the reality winner story, the intercept did some very strange and stupid stuff in how they spoke with the government about the material and what information they shared

Real hurthling! posted:

it loving sucks that reality winner is in prison but online loser walks free

AnimeIsTrash posted:

they gave the information she gave them right to the government and thats how they were able to figure out who she was lol

bedpan posted:

they might have had enough without the intercept to isolate the possible leakers down to just a handful of people but the intercept telling the government where the letter was postmarked from and giving the government a full-color scan of the envelope the report arrived in is something I've never been able to adequately explain

AnimeIsTrash posted:

no they straight up gave them the documents and from the identifying marks they were able to figure out which printer, what time it was printed, and later who printed it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

bedpan posted:

should have been more clear that they did this too lmao. they gave literally everything they had and handed it over promptly and gladly

Real hurthling! posted:

it loving sucks that reality winner is in prison but online loser walks free

crispyseaweed posted:

https://twitter.com/montanatucker/status/1784605592977633582

Great discipline here from the students. Can't wait for an Anderson Cooper-type to try this and end up sobbing in the quad because no one will talk to them.

crispyseaweed posted:

https://twitter.com/montanatucker/status/1784605592977633582

Great discipline here from the students. Can't wait for an Anderson Cooper-type to try this and end up sobbing in the quad because no one will talk to them.

poisonpill posted:

lumpentroll posted:

lol that what she leaked was russiagate poo poo

PerniciousKnid posted:

This looks like a 16:9 wallpaper on a 16:10 monitor.

crispyseaweed posted:

https://twitter.com/montanatucker/status/1784605592977633582

Great discipline here from the students. Can't wait for an Anderson Cooper-type to try this and end up sobbing in the quad because no one will talk to them.

Chewbecca posted:

Why is she crying

crispyseaweed posted:

https://twitter.com/montanatucker/status/1784605592977633582

Great discipline here from the students. Can't wait for an Anderson Cooper-type to try this and end up sobbing in the quad because no one will talk to them.

F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:

"Palace courtier" is a great word for someone like Baker, and all the other elite "journalists" who attended that ridiculous WHCA last weekend (?).

comedyblissoption posted:

i thought that the invited court jester was supposed to roast the president and not slobknob him at those events lmao

A Buttery Pastry posted:

he attacked the real president