Financial backing for The Intercept was provided by Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder. [30] [31] Omidyar told media critic Jay Rosen that the decision was fueled by his "rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world". Greenwald, along with his colleagues Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, initially were working on creating a platform online to support independent journalism, when they were approached by Omidyar who was hoping to establish his own media organization. That news organization, First Look Media, launched its first online publication, The Intercept, on February 10, 2014. [32] Greenwald initially served as editor, alongside Poitras and Scahill. The organization is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable entity. [33] [34]
The Intercept was in contact with Guccifer 2.0 during the 2016 presidential campaign who relayed some of the material about Hillary Clinton, gathered via a data breach, to Greenwald. The Grugq, a counterintelligence specialist, reported in October 2016: "The Intercept was both aware that the e-mails were from Guccifer 2.0, that Guccifer 2.0 has been attributed to Russian intelligence services, and that there is significant public evidence supporting this attribution." [35]
Since the Snowden revelations Greenwald has, according to Simon van Zuylen-Wood writing for New York magazine in early 2018, "repositioned himself as a bomb-throwing media critic". [36] By 2019, he was serving as a columnist without any control over the site's news reporting. [37] |
