It is a surprise to no one who has been paying attention the last 10 years that the corporate media’s fixation on derailing Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidencies has changed the way the press operates. It eroded trust and led to the rise and success of independent media, and no one has seen that sea change better than journalist Glenn Greenwald.
He left The Guardian in 2013 after his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Edward Snowden and widespread NSA surveillance to found The Intercept, but he was eventually forced out of his own outlet due to internal pushback on his coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
On Friday, Greenwald joined Megyn at her Megyn Kelly Live tour stop in San Antonio, Texas, to discuss the state of the media and why investigations into the Biden White House are so necessary.
Greenwald’s Experience
As Greenwald recounted, he started The Intercept with two other investigative journalists with the goal of creating “a completely nonpartisan media outlet that is adversarial to people in power, especially to the agencies that don’t get nearly enough journalistic attention and scrutiny” because, in his view, “a lot of corporate media outlets were very captive to these agencies.”
He said the mission “worked for a while,” but it started to change in 2016 when Trump ran for president. “We did a lot of reporting on the emails that were released from Hillary Clinton through WikiLeaks because it revealed a lot of incriminating information about this very powerful politician who was the frontrunner for the 2016 election,” Greenwald said. “And I think our editors were all kind of liberals… in Brooklyn, but they figured… she’s going to win anyway. And then Trump won and all their friends said, ‘What is wrong with you? You helped Trump win.'”
The night of the 2016 election, he remembers journalists on the team crying “sad tears” while someone else suggested the outlet “publicly apologize” for its “misogynistic” coverage of Clinton. “I was like, ‘Go work for the Democratic Party. We’re not apologizing for anything,'” Greenwald recalled. “This is our job. This is our role.”
Things didn’t get any better in 2020 when Trump ran against Joe Biden and the Hunter Biden laptop story dropped just weeks before the election. “I knew the Hunter Biden laptop documents were authentic from the beginning because I had a lot of experience working on big archives… and I wanted to report on it… because Joe Biden was a major presidential candidate,” Greenwald said.
But his editors had other ideas. “My editors, when they realized that I was working on it, came and said, ‘According to the FBI, this is Russian disinformation.’ Remember, this was a news outlet founded to be adversarial to these security state agencies and they were telling me, ‘according to the FBI,’ as though that is gospel,” Greenwald explained. “I said it’s so obvious these materials are real, but I knew they said there’s no way we can allow you to publish this because the material isn’t verified and the government claims it’s fake.”
That was the final straw. “I didn’t start a media outlet to be told what I can and can’t report, and I knew their motives were not journalistic but political,” Greenwald said. “I had to quit my own organization because if I can’t report on major political candidates because editors want to manipulate the outcome of our politics in one way or another, why would I stay? I can’t do what I want to do.”
Media Malpractice
Greenwald said the cause of his departure “became a reflection of the media writ large” because the industry “renounced completely their journalistic function… to get Donald Trump defeated.” That, he said, is the source of the Russiagate hoax, the lies about the Hunter Biden laptop, and, most recently, the coverup of former President Biden’s health.
The same press that claimed we were witnessing the ‘best Biden ever’ and played along with the “cheap fakes” narrative as it related to alarming footage of a visibly diminished Biden at various official events are now not challenging former administration officials about what they knew and when.
“It’s like watching Kamala [Harris] and now Karine Jean-Pierre on these book tours and these the dishonest media letting them get away with, ‘I only saw him for a brief time’ or ‘I barely saw him on the plane on the way to the debate, so I didn’t know he wasn’t feeling well that night,'” Megyn noted. “Every word of that is a lie. She was the White House press secretary. You were in the White House with him daily for years. You knew he was infirm. You covered it up… But these same journalists were in on the whole thing, so they have to give her a pass.”
The Biden Cover Up
It is why, Megyn said, the investigations into the cover-up are so vital. “I’ve been thinking about the Joe Biden mental infirmity lately because I think so much of what we’re dealing with right now as a country is directly linked to that,” she shared. “I am very much in favor of the full fledged investigation into exactly how it went down because Joe Biden was a leftist, of course, but he wasn’t one of these far, far leftists. He was always a little bit more moderate.”
Greenwald said the “real left hated Joe Biden” because he was “pro-Israel and “pro-corporation,” in addition to being, as Megyn noted, “tough on crime, not pro-open border, and not woke.”
“So, the behavior that Joe Biden brought into office from day one was anomalous to the man that we had come to know… as a U.S. senator,” Megyn said. “And I firmly believe the reason we now have an extra 11 million illegals is because of his mental infirmity. Someone in that White House had an agenda that did not match his, and that is who made those decisions. We still don’t know the answer to that.”
In Greenwald’s view, there is the obvious “political scandal [of] people lying about Joe Biden’s mental state,” but the bigger and more important question is: “Who was running the government, and who was making these very consequential decisions?”
You can check out the full ‘Megyn Kelly Live’ show from San Antonio, TX, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch Megyn live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.