My Resignation from the Intercept

Re:My Resignation from the Intercept by meowface on Thursday October 29, 2020 @05:37PM (#24936284)

An editor is absolutely right to push back on a writer potentially publishing disinformation about a candidate before an election, but I disagree that this contains any disinformation or acceptance of disinformation. It covers a lot of ground, but the media censorship parts seem incontrovertible, and the parts specifically critical of Biden seem pretty balanced to me. He seems to hedge a lot of what he says and provides many perspectives and sources.

We should be very careful about disinformation, but another form of information warfare and "active measures" which I'm sure Russian intelligence is and has been deploying is the spread of skepticism of true information and belief that any or all information could be disinformation. Division, discord, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are the goals; not just falsehoods. All of these erode a sense of shared reality. Just as any claims about a political figure need support, so do claims of disinformation.

So, I think it's diatribe time. Could you quote the parts of the article (with full context) that seem like disinformation?

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Re:My Resignation from the Intercept by hluska on Thursday October 29, 2020 @05:58PM (#24936572)

You know, we might not agree on this but I like you and think you’re very cool. :)

I’ll write you the reply you deserve but have to step out. Again though friend, you’re a good person and I respect your mind.

Edit - Seriously friend, I’m having a rough day in my personal life. I feel really lucky that I found you to engage with and get my mind off of things. You’re cool. Thanks for being cool. I’ll pay you back one day for this.

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Re:My Resignation from the Intercept by meowface on Thursday October 29, 2020 @06:02PM (#24936623)

For the record, I read the email exchange Greenwald published and I am a little more sympathetic to the editors now. I don't totally agree with their criticisms, but I think Greenwald unnecessarily escalated into ad hominems before even giving them a chance to reply, and I think there was a valid discussion to be had there before there was no choice but to throw in the towel. He should've just kept the part of the email with the editor comments vs. article comparisons and left out the rest. I understand why he felt like he was being pressured, though.

I still don't think there's anything like blind acceptance of disinformation in the article, but he could've hedged certain parts a bit more.

Also, I kind of regret some of my earlier comments. I still think the way the media and Twitter handled this is absolutely ridiculous, and I really don't think there's a disinformation aspect to this article (bias and dis/misinformation are very different), but I kind of jumped to the conclusion about the rigor of the article after only reading about half of it (mostly the parts about the media). I think the truth about the article's rigor probably lies in the middle between your and my initial opinions of it, and similarly I think proper rigor kind of lies between Greenwald's and the editor's opinions. I prefer Taibbi's reporting on it (and Taibbi's reporting in general).

And to be clear, as I mentioned in my other comments, I've never seen very good evidence of corruption on Joe's part; my concern is pretty much just with the emails and the media's handling of them.

edit: Actually, I just went ahead and removed my very initial comment and another one. I was kind of shooting from the hip, though I definitely still stand by the parts about the media, and probably most of my other comments so far. But I might change my mind tomorrow about some of the other comments, and this definitely isn't the ideal platform for an extremely lengthy and careful debate.

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