February 28, 2015

"The Intercept media executives and staff weren’t fans of their own reporting on the case featured in the wildly popular podcast Serial, delaying stories because they were 'siding with The Man'..."

"... former Intercept senior investigative reporter Ken Silverstein wrote in POLITICO Magazine."
“I came to realize that the system working correctly—and the right people going to jail—isn’t a good narrative to tell at The Intercept,” Silverstein wrote.
From Silverstein's piece:
Publishing the Serial stories was a huge headache: There were constant delays and frustrations getting them out, even after it became clear they were drawing huge traffic. Our internal critics believed that Natasha and I had taken the side of the prosecutors—and hence the state. That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.

Some colleagues, like Jeremy Scahill, were upset after the first installment of Natasha’s interviews with Jay, the state’s flawed-but-convincing key witness, and our co-bylined two-part interview with the lead prosecutor, Kevin Urick, both of whom had refused to speak to Sarah Koenig for her Serial podcast. Jeremy even threatened to quit over the second installment, according to two of my colleagues who witnessed what they described as his “temper tantrum” in the New York office. He told them he couldn’t believe that we’d so uncritically accepted the state’s view of the murder—even though our stories were backed up by our own research, our unique reporting and our reading of court documents. One day at the office, frustrated, Natasha wrote “Team Adnan” on a sign on Jeremy’s office door.

15 comments:

Paco Wové said...

"it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man."

Not so "independent", then.
Mindless, thoughtless, brainless Opposition!

traditionalguy said...

Yes, it is an adversarial process. That's because the simple narratives are seldom what really happened and they need to be challenged.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Hardcore libruls are fascists and tend to be mental cases.

Take Bill Moyer or Jeremy Scahill or Gail Collins or the average MSNBC fruit loop, etc there is not a dime's worth of difference between them.

DavidD said...

A temper tantrum because they dared to follow wherever the truth led them.

Whatever happened to objective journalism?

Anonymous said...

I didn't follow the Serial story at all, but from reading this post and your earlier post on the Scott Walker-bans-college-sex-crime-reporting--do they really both star the same reporter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper? How strange that she can be judicious in one case against a lot of opposition from her own camp and completely blindsided by too-good-to-check in the other case.

Drago said...

DavidD: "A temper tantrum because they dared to follow wherever the truth led them."

The left will follow "pravda" whereever it decides to lead them.

The truth? Not so much.

DavidD: "Whatever happened to objective journalism?"

Strange question inasmuch objective journalism has never really existed.

traditionalguy said...

The play is the thing said Crazy Hamlet Today we TV watching raised people want fiction presented as non-fiction which is the very best fiction of them all.

I blame Alfred Hitchcock.

Trashhauler said...

No one likes their cognitive dissonance to be pointed out.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

Are there any people so dogmatic, so doctrinaire, so leadenly predictable as those who celebrate themselves as independent free thinkers of the Left?

Mary Beth said...

Tattycoram said...

I didn't follow the Serial story at all, but from reading this post and your earlier post on the Scott Walker-bans-college-sex-crime-reporting--do they really both star the same reporter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper? How strange that she can be judicious in one case against a lot of opposition from her own camp and completely blindsided by too-good-to-check in the other case.

2/28/15, 8:59 AM


Maybe overcompensating now for actually having looked for facts before?

mccullough said...

And yet they all work for The Man. Responsibility is for individuals, not organizations.

stutefish said...

It's interesting that they never considered that in some contexts, The Man is the NPR-led conventional wisdom, and that by providing an alternative viewpoint to Sarah Koenig's narrative in Serial, they were in fact being true to the spirit of their enterprise.

Lyle said...

stutefish's comment is totally on point. sticking it to the man is speaking the truth to the consensus of untruth.

Robert Cook said...

"Hardcore libruls are fascists and tend to be mental cases.

"Take Bill Moyer or Jeremy Scahill or Gail Collins or the average MSNBC fruit loop, etc there is not a dime's worth of difference between them."


You obviously have not a scintilla of discernment.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Facts don't matter to those people when they have a Greater Truth to shove down our throats.