Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has resigned from the news outlet he co-founded, The Intercept, citing its censorship of an article he wrote about alleged influence-peddling deals involving Joseph R. Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Mr. Greenwald claimed that The Intercept’s pro-Biden editors in New York refused to publish the article unless he “remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.”
The story the editors wanted to block examined the questions the elder Mr. Biden has had to answer about his family’s foreign business deals, his knowledge of alleged influence-peddling by his son and his brother, or whether Mr. Biden was involved in the schemes while vice president in the Obama administration.
Mr. Greenwald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for helping break the Edward Snowden revelation about National Security Agency’s widespread spying on Americans, said the censorship he suffered at his own organization was symptomatic of a partisan sickness infecting mainstream U.S. news media.
“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,” he wrote on substack.com explaining his decision to quit.
“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.”
The censorship targeted his article about the effort by mainstream news organizations and social media platforms to deep six the story because it is potentially damaging to the elder Mr. Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Mr. Greenwald titled the article “The Real Scandal: U.S. Media Uses Falsehoods to Defend Joe Biden from Hunter’s Emails.”
His examination of the evidence concluded that news media shielded the former vice president from hard questions about the business deals. The evidence included emails from a laptop computer purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, which was first reported by The New York Post, and first-hand accounts and documents provided by Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. It outlined an aggressive effort to cash in on the Biden name and political clout in countries such as Ukraine and China, where Joseph Biden wielded influence as vice president.
“All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son’s business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation’s most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them,” Mr. Greenwald wrote in the article his editors refused to publish, which he posted online after his resignation.
He also posted the email exchanges with his editors that led to his decision to quit.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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