New York (AFP)
Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald announced Thursday his departure from the American news site The Intercept, which he accuses of having censored one of his articles on Joe Biden which included elements unfavorable to the Democratic candidate.
Known for collecting Edward Snowden's revelations about the US intelligence agency NSA in 2013, Glenn Greewald is one of the three co-founders of The Intercept, an investigative journalism site.
The 53-year-old journalist says he decided to quit the site after editorial officials asked him to “remove all critical passages” from Joe Biden in an article about the former vice president, according to an op-ed on Thursday at his site.
According to Glenn Greenwald, the article referred to recently published emails and testimonies which implicate the actions of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic candidate, accused of having monetized access to his father.
For those who live in Brazil today, this episode illustrates the "virus which has infected almost all the mainstream center-left media and academic institutions".
"The same tendencies towards repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity that plague the national press in general have reached the media that I co-founded with, as a climax, the censorship of one of my articles, "writes Glenn Greenwald.
The emails implicating Hunter Biden and published by the New York Post resulted in the daily and several of those who relayed the article to have their accounts blocked on Twitter.
The social network explained that the article violated several of its rules.
Facebook has also blocked any link to the article posted on its platform.
The mainstream media have been criticized by conservative commentators for the low coverage given to these emails, communicated to the New York Post by Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for Donald Trump.
For Glenn Greenwald, journalism today is "in crisis", "paralyzed" by what he sees as the domination of a current of thought that weakens freedom of expression and the right to challenge.
The Intercept assured, on its site, that the editing of the article was only intended to ensure that it was "fair and accurate".
Officials accused him of wanting, in that article, "to try to recycle the questionable claims of the Trump campaign team and to whitewash them into journalism."
“It was Glenn who lost his journalistic roots,” they continued, “not The Intercept”.
The Intercept was created in 2014 by the First Look Media group of the Franco-American billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay.
© 2020 AFP