Attack on press freedom is led by journalists themselves

Oct 31, 2020 by

by Donald Forbes, The Conservative Woman:

THE departure of a journalist from his publication, in this case Glenn Greenwald from the US website The Intercept, is normally on a par with ‘small earthquake in Chile, not many dead’, an in-house journalistic joke for a non-event.

Its relevance here, however, is that it is part of an alarming trend in the US media to gag editorial dissent or punish offending writers who manage to express opinions that Left-wing progressives want to suppress because they are harmful to their political objectives.

Greenwald is known in the UK for his part in the Guardian‘s publication of the story of Edward Snowden, the American intelligence analyst who in 2013 revealed the extent of US and British government spying on their citizens. Greenwald’s articles won him a Pulitzer. Forget the role of the Guardian, which is a red rag to some.

Governments must have security secrets. But our privacy is a matter of concern to all, regardless of their politics, at a time when so many actors from intelligence services to social media are invading it to an extent we are mostly unaware of. It is an offence against everything liberal democracy means for governments to spy on their peoples just because they can.

Long influential on the Left but known for his independence, Greenwald says he was forced out of The Intercept, which he co-founded, because he wanted to write about potentially criminal allegations linking Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, to corruption in Ukraine and China when he was Obama’s vice president.

His colleagues took the view that even if Biden is a bad guy, he is our bad guy, and that nothing should be written to harm his chances of beating Donald Trump in the election on November 3. The overwhelmingly liberal-Left American MSM, joined by social media, have done their best to suppress the Biden story since emails under FBI investigation were published by the New York Post this month.

In an article about his resignation, Greenwald wrote that ’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’.

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