‘Journalists desperate to not know’: Glenn Greenwald blasts media coverage of Hunter Biden scandal in piece the Intercept censored

US mainstream media deliberately ignoring the Hunter Biden story is a betrayal of the core principles of journalism, argues Glenn Greenwald in an article that the outlet he co-founded tried to censor, prompting his resignation.

Between the laptop, emails, documents and witness testimonies pertaining to the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his business dealings overseas that basically traded on the family name, there is more than enough reason to at least look into the story, Greenwald said in the article. 

Instead, Silicon Valley and the mainstream media openly sided with the Biden campaign, burying the story completely and censoring or punishing anyone who dared step out of line – Greenwald himself included. His story was posted on Thursday on Substack, after the Intercept, which he co-founded in 2014, refused to publish it. 

It wasn’t the Biden campaign, but the “nation's media outlets and former CIA and other intelligence officials who took the lead in constructing reasons why the story should be dismissed, or at least treated with scorn,” Greenwald wrote. The prevailing view quickly became that it was “irresponsible and even unethical to mention these documents.”

These journalists are desperate not to know. 

Any media outlet that “renounces its core function – pursuing answers to relevant questions about powerful people” deserves to lose the public’s faith. Most US media have done exactly that with the Biden story, Greenwald argues, taking the lead “not in investigating these documents but in concocting excuses for why they should be ignored.”

The refusal of the press to even ask questions is a far bigger scandal than the potential misconduct of the Bidens, Greenwald argued.

Greenwald co-founded the Intercept in 2014, and the outlet’s first mission was to share the materials obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden showing the global extent of mass surveillance by the US and its partners. He went public on Thursday with his resignation letter, citing the censorship of the article as the final straw.

After the editors shot back that his resignation was a personal tantrum, Greenwald published the emails showing the back-and-forth over the article.

Though the lengthy article that was eventually published on Substack contains a comprehensive overview of the story involving the Bidens and their business dealings in China, Ukraine and elsewhere, its focus is on what Greenwald describes as the media’s dereliction of their primary duty.

Eager to avoid a repeat of 2016, when they were “attacked as Trump enablers in their overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal cultural circles,” journalists have “spent four years inventing standards for election-year reporting on hacked materials that never previously existed and that are utterly anathema to the core journalistic function,” he writes.

These days, political reports at major news outlets “make little secret of their eagerness to help Biden win.”

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