The Intercept
The Intercept is an online American nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts.
For other uses, see Intercept (disambiguation).
Type of site
The Intercept has published in English since its founding in 2014, and in Portuguese since the 2016 launch of the Brazilian edition staffed by a local team of Brazilian journalists.
History[edit]
The Intercept was founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras.[1] It was launched in February 2014 by First Look Media with funding by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar.[2][3] The publication initially reported on documents released by Edward Snowden.[4] Co-founders Greenwald and Poitras subsequently left amid public disagreements about the leadership and direction of the organization.[1] In January 2023 it spun off from the First Look Institute as an independent nonprofit organization.[5]
The Intercept was awarded a grant of $3.25 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. It had only received $500,000 when Bankman-Fried went bankrupt and the shortfall in funding "will leave The Intercept with a significant hole in its budget" according to its editor-in-chief.[6]
In February 2024, The Intercept laid off 16 staff members, one-third of its newsroom.[7][8]
The Intercept Brasil[edit]
In August 2016, The Intercept launched a Brazilian version, The Intercept Brasil, edited in Portuguese, aimed at Brazilian political news, and produced by a team of Brazilian journalists. The Intercept Brasil also features translated news from the English edition.[9]
In June 2019, The Intercept Brasil released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between judge Sérgio Moro, prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and other Operation Car Wash prosecutors.[10][11] In the wake of the reporting, the Brazilian government in January 2020 indicted Glenn Greenwald on cybercrimes charges in connection with his efforts to protect his sources, the legitimacy of President Jair Bolsonaro's election was called into question, and the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in April–June 2021 annulled former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 2018 conviction on corruption charges.[12][13]
Intercepted with Jeremy Scahill
Awards[edit]
In February 2016, The Intercept won a National Magazine Award for columns and commentary by the writer Barrett Brown, and it was a finalist in the public interest category for a series by Sharon Lerner called the Teflon Toxin, which exposed how DuPont harmed the public and its workers with toxic chemicals.[20] In April 2016, The Intercept won the People's Voice award for best news website at the twentieth annual Webby Awards.[21] In May 2016, The Intercept won three awards at the New York Press Club Awards for Journalism. The site was awarded in the "special event reporting" category for its investigative reporting on the U.S. drone program, the "humor" category for a series of columns by the writer Barrett Brown, and the "documentary" category for a short film called, "The Surrender"—about the former U.S. intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim—produced by Stephen Maing, Laura Poitras, and Peter Maass.[22] At the September 2016 Online News Awards, The Intercept won the University of Florida Award in Investigative Data Journalism for its Drone Papers series, an investigation of secret documents detailing a covert U.S. military overseas assassination program.[23][24]
At the 2017 Online News Awards, The Intercept won two awards: the first for a feature story about the FBI's efforts to infiltrate the Bundy family, and the second, an investigative data journalism award for "Trial and Terror", a project documenting the people prosecuted in the U.S. for terrorism since 9/11.[25] The same year, The Intercept won a Hillman Prize for Web Journalism for an investigative series by Jamie Kalven exposing criminality within the Chicago Police Department.[26] The news organization also won a 2017 award for "Outstanding Feature Story" at the sixteenth annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment.[27] Judges of the environmental award praised author Sharon Lerner for her piece "The Strange Case of Tennie White", which they described as a "finely written and disturbing investigation of contamination and injustice near a chemical plant in Mississippi".[27]
Reception[edit]
In August 2014, it was reported that members of the U.S. military had been banned from reading The Intercept.[28][29][30][31]
Erik Wemple, writing for The Washington Post, noted the conspicuous refusal of The Intercept to use the term "targeted killings" to refer to the U.S. drone program, instead referring to the drone strikes as "assassinations". Wemple included Glenn Greenwald's explanation that assassination is "the accurate term rather than the euphemistic term that the government wants us to use"; Greenwald further noted that "anyone who is murdered deliberately away from a battlefield for political purposes is being assassinated".[32] TechCrunch referred to the story as clear evidence of "unabashed opposition to security hawks".[33]
