NSA whistleblower Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison, thanks to The Intercept revealing her identity to authorities. One year later former FBI agent Terry J. Albury, who shared documents exposing the organization's surveillance of journalists and of religious and ethnic minorities, was jailed after his identity was exposed. Amazingly, in 2019, The Intercept burned their third source, as intelligence analyst Daniel Hale was charged with leaking top secret documents on drone warfare the organization's editor Jeremy Scahill.
The financial backing for the outlet comes from tech billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. With a net worth of over $17 billion, the French-born tycoon has ample cash to fund a myriad of think tanks and initiatives, all with a neoliberal interventionist outlook, many of whom have direct links to Washington and its agenda of regime change around the world. This has included using The Intercept as a vehicle to publish fawning depictions of the White Helmets in Syria. The result of this, according to Alex Rubenstein and Max Blumental, is that Omidyar is conducting "global information war" and shaping the media landscape in his interests. Thus, while The Intercept may appear radical, it does not challenge the power and interests of its own backer.
A staunch Democrat, Omidyar gave hefty donations to anti-Trump super-PACs, while The Intercept began to turn on Wikileaks, attacking the organization for supposedly being a Trump conduit. At the same time, it continues to refuse to publish its own Snowden archive, last year announcing it would shut down the project with fewer than 10 percent of the documents made available to the public.
Pierre Omidyar's Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts Pierre Omidyar has leveraged the Omidyar Network Omidyar and his ties to shady government contractors to push a CIA-friendly agenda. MintPress News | Alexander Rubin
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Greenwald appears to have become seen as quite a problem for the outlet, his skepticism on RussiaGate clashing horribly with establishment Democratic opinion. As Greenwald continued to undermine the mainstream narrative of widespread Russian interference in the 2016 election, Omidyar hired noted Russia hawk James Risen as "Senior National Security Correspondent" to offer essentially the opposite opinion in its pages. Investigating suggests Risen was paid around $16,000 per article written.
This latest incident only adds fuel to the fire that the outlet has become a mainstream, Democrat-aligned organization. As journalist Matt Taibbi noted, "The Intercept uncritically took dictation from John Brennan, Jim Clapper, and Michael Hayden, and killed a piece by their Pulitzer-winning founder because it was critical of the probable next president."
MintPress has been covering the evolution of The Intercept, from investigative outlet to "attack dog of the establishment" for some time, and it appears Greenwald is coming towards that same conclusion, writing in his farewell note:
The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision. Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties, a rigid and narrow range of permitted viewpoints (ranging from establishment liberalism to soft leftism, but always anchored in ultimate support for the Democratic Party), a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.
As someone walking away from a well-paid job in a notoriously competitive and shrinking industry, Greenwald's future is now in doubt. "I am voluntarily sacrificing the support of a large institution and guaranteed salary in exchange for nothing other than a belief that there are enough people who believe in the virtues of independent journalism and the need for free discourse who will be willing to support my work by subscribing," he wrote. Whether you believe he is a principled truth teller or a reckless crusader helping Trump, there is no doubt that his actions this week were a big step into the unknown.
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