Latest news with #PulitzerPrizeforPublicService
Time of India
3 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Who is Glenn Greenwald? Known for Snowden revelations, expresses no regrets over leaked sex tapes
Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist best known for exposing the U.S. government's mass surveillance practices, is once again making headlines, this time over a deeply personal matter. On May 30, 2025, videos showing Greenwald in intimate, private settings were leaked online without his knowledge or consent. In a statement on X, Greenwald confirmed the videos' authenticity, condemned the leak as 'maliciously political,' and defended the content, saying all acts were consensual. 'I have no embarrassment or regret about them,' he wrote. While the footage sparked viral interest, Greenwald insisted the real issue is the weaponization of privacy for political ends. The Snowden revelations and Pulitzer-winning work Greenwald rose to global prominence in 2013 after publishing a series of groundbreaking reports in The Guardian based on classified documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden . These documents revealed the extent of domestic and international surveillance conducted by the U.S. government under President Barack Obama. Snowden, who initially contacted Greenwald anonymously in late 2012, passed along a trove of classified documents that showed the U.S. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Giao dịch CFD với công nghệ và tốc độ tốt hơn IC Markets Đăng ký Undo government was collecting vast amounts of metadata and personal communication records, including from American citizens, often without warrants. Greenwald's reports were published in The Guardian, beginning with a bombshell revelation on June 5, 2013, detailing how Verizon was ordered to provide the NSA with phone records for millions of Americans. These revelations triggered a worldwide debate over privacy, civil liberties, and the role of intelligence agencies in democratic societies. Greenwald, along with his collaborators, faced both praise and intense scrutiny for the disclosures. In 2014, The Guardian and The Washington Post jointly received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their work on the NSA surveillance story. Greenwald's involvement also led to his appearance in the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour by Laura Poitras, and he was portrayed by actor Zachary Quinto in Oliver Stone's 2016 film Snowden. Glenn Greenwald's early journalism and independent voice Before the Snowden story catapulted him to global prominence, Greenwald had already established himself as a powerful voice in independent journalism. In 2005, he started the blog Unclaimed Territory, where he focused on controversial issues like the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation and the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. The blog earned the 2005 Koufax Award for Best New Blog. In 2007, he joined Salon as a contributing writer, transitioning his blog to the media platform. At Salon, Greenwald continued to tackle controversial subjects, including the 2001 anthrax attacks and the nomination of John Brennan for CIA Director. His opposition to Brennan's nomination, rooted in concerns about torture and civil liberties, contributed to Brennan temporarily withdrawing from consideration. Greenwald's strong advocacy for whistleblowers became evident in his vocal support for Chelsea Manning. In a 2010 article, he described Manning as a hero who acted out of conscience, likening her to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. His stances often defied party lines, earning him a reputation as a journalist who prioritized principles over political affiliations. The Intercept and move to Substack In 2014, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill. Funded by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, The Intercept was envisioned as a platform for fearless, independent investigative journalism. There, Greenwald continued to report on national security issues and political controversies. However, in 2020, Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, claiming that editors had attempted to censor an article critical of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. He cited a lack of editorial independence and launched his own newsletter on Substack, where he now publishes content free from institutional constraints. As of 2025, he has over 324,000 paid and free subscribers, making him one of Substack's most influential voices. Personal life and response to the leak Greenwald's personal and professional lives have long been intertwined. He lived in Brazil with his husband, David Miranda, a leftist Brazilian congressman and LGBTQ rights advocate. The couple adopted two boys in 2018. Miranda died in 2023 due to complications from a gastrointestinal infection, a loss that deeply affected Greenwald. The recent leak of his private videos, Greenwald stated, represents a criminal invasion of privacy aimed at discrediting him for political reasons. 'Obviously it can be uncomfortable and unpleasant when your private behavior is made public against your will,' he wrote on X. 'But the only wrongdoing here is the criminal and malicious publication of the videos.' Despite the intrusion, Greenwald remains defiant and unapologetic — a stance consistent with the fearless, often controversial career he has built over the past two decades.
Washington Post
06-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
The Post's Investigations Team Announces Expansion
We are pleased to announce the expansion and restructuring of the Investigations team. First, the expansion: The Visual Forensics Team moves from the Video Department to Investigations. The team, founded by editor Nadine Ajaka, under the stewardship of Video Department Head Micah Gelman, has from its earliest days been on the cutting edge of investigative journalism. The hallmark of the team's work is using innovative reporting techniques to answer urgent accountability questions about the major events of our time. This brings it closer to the Investigations Desk's Rapid Response Team, VF's most frequent partner over the years. The teams worked together on a reconstruction of the violent crackdown on protesters in Lafayette Square, winner of the Alfred I. duPont silver baton award in 2021, and on a piece detailing the first minutes of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, part of the package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2022. An examination of how Israel's 'Iron Wall' failed to prevent the Oct. 7 massacre, a project the teams did with Frontline, was a finalist last year for two Emmy awards. The VF team includes Deputy Editor Elyse Samuels and reporters Joyce Sohyun Lee, Meg Kelly, Sarah Cahlan, Samuel Oakford, Imogen Piper, Nilo Tabrizy, Jonathan Baran and Jarrett Ley. The restructuring: Eric Rich takes on a new role as deputy investigations editor, working as the principal deputy to Investigations Editor David Fallis and directly overseeing the VF and Rapid teams. Eric was the founding editor of the Rapid team. Under his guidance, the team has consistently produced high-caliber investigative work within the news cycle, often in partnership with reporters from other desks. Early on, one such partnership revealed the sexual misconduct allegations against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, and then exposed an effort by the group Project Veritas to dupe Post reporters with a false allegation against Moore. Those stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigations, the Toner Prize and a George Polk Award in 2018. The team has landed numerous high-profile scoops since its founding, from building collapses and plane crashes to school shootings and attempts to overturn a presidential election, and it has contributed to other packages that won or were finalists for the Pulitzer. Eric previously served as editor of the Universal News Desk, chief of what is now the Live Editing Desk and as a reporter and editor on the Local Desk. Emma Brown takes on a new role as editor of the Rapid team. Emma, a former Rapid reporter, has proven to be a skilled and thoughtful editor and leader as Eric's deputy during the past year. As a reporter, she introduced the world to Christine Blasey Ford and wrote prescient stories about election security. She was the first reporter to reveal that Trump-allied individuals had attempted to access voting equipment in Coffee County, Ga., activities that later figured into Trump's indictment in Fulton County. As an editor, one of her first pieces was an ambitious reconstruction, staffed by multiple desks, of how D.C. nearly lost two professional sports teams. The story was gripping, nuanced and revealing. Emma is the author of 'To Raise a Boy,' a book about the challenges and expectations boys face in modern American society, and she shared in The Post's Pulitzer for coverage of Jan. 6. Like Nadine, Emma will report to Eric. Emma, a former middle school teacher and wilderness ranger, started at The Post as an intern on Local. Shawn Boburg takes on a new role as deputy editor of the Rapid team. A member of the team from its earliest days, Shawn gravitates toward work that is ambitious and surprising. In the past year, he produced exclusive stories about the communication failures among law enforcement officers in Butler, Pa., work that presaged the findings of various official inquiries into the attempted assassination. He also led a series on how the platform Discord has failed to contain a predatory group that coerces vulnerable children into harming themselves. For the final story, Shawn and the team tracked down a teenager who, under an alias, had pressured a Minnesota man into committing suicide on a live stream while others watched. In addition to sharing in the Pulitzer for the Roy Moore stories, Shawn was a contributor to the American Icon series that won the 2024 Pulitzer for National Reporting. He also received the George Polk Award in 2013 as a reporter for the Bergen Record, for his coverage of the 'Bridgegate' scandal. He is co-author of 'Becoming Manny,' an authorized biography of the great MLB slugger Manny Ramirez. Lisa Gartner takes on a new role as editor of the Long-term Investigations Team, and will report directly to David. Lisa joined The Post in September as deputy editor of the team and quickly established herself as a strong leader and steady hand, elevating and refining investigations already underway while developing new ideas. Lisa came to The Post from the San Francisco Chronicle, where she edited award-winning stories and projects on deadly police chases, children's deaths at a prestigious hospital unit and a Wine Country mayor accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women. A 2022 investigation she led into San Francisco's use of taxpayer money to shelter its homeless population in dilapidated and run-down hotels was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. Other stories Lisa has edited have been recognized with the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence and the IRE Award. Prior to The Chronicle, Lisa was an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and an education and enterprise reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting and George Polk Awards for Justice Reporting and Education Reporting for investigations into racist and abusive schools. Two other strong additions to the team that were recently announced: In October, Kelley Benham French, a gifted journalist who has helped drive distinctive journalism in newsrooms across the country, joined the Investigative Desk as the editor of a new Narrative Accountability Team. Kelley hit the ground running with the team of enterprise reporters formerly embedded in Local to get launched on ambitious narratives that chronicle deep investigative findings. Previously, Kelley edited projects for The Dallas Morning News, including Deadly Fake: 30 Days Inside Fentanyl's Grip on North Texas, which engaged more than 30 journalists to tell 50 stories in a month. She also led ambitious projects at USA Today and the Tampa Bay Times and won a wide range of awards for her work. In Tampa Bay, she was a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing for Never Let Go, the story of the extremely premature birth of her daughter, Juniper, and edited For Their Own Good, which revealed decades of abuse at a boys' reform school and was named a Pulitzer finalist. Last month, Kainaz Amaria, one of the newsroom's architects of immersive, visual-first journalism, became the visual enterprise editor for Investigative. She will help shape investigative projects with a focus on new forms of storytelling to broaden their reach and audience. As National's visual enterprise editor, she oversaw stories that drew large audiences, including a deep-dive into the dangers of underwater volcanoes, the story behind the 'J6 Prison Choir," the remarkable evolution of George Santos' campaign biography and Tucker Carlson's text messages about Donald Trump. She also played a critical role in Terror On Repeat, a visually driven story which was part of the Pulitzer-winning AR-15 series. Kainaz arrived at The Post from Vox in 2022. Please join me in congratulating my colleagues on their new roles.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Jeff Bezos Has a Very Billionaire-ish Idea of What Freedom Means
Billionaire Jeff Bezos has decided to use his newspaper to propagate an outdated story that Americans like to tell themselves: that economic freedom equals human freedom. The myth of meritocracy might be designed to inspire striving, but in a country with the greatest income inequality in the developed world, it does something more harmful. It threatens Americans' health, gaslighting people to believe that unchecked capitalism delivers personal liberty, when decades of research show it shackles people to financial and emotional insecurity. Bezos announced on February 26 that The Washington Post's opinion pages will be 'writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.' The paper will not publish any viewpoints opposing his priorities, he said, while adding, 'Freedom is ethical—it minimizes coercion—and practical—it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.' For an editorial section that long prided itself as a marketplace of ideas, and a newspaper historically dedicated to holding the powerful accountable, this edict by a union-busting business mogul engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with a president who disdains the Constitution is bad for journalism and democracy and, perhaps most personally, Americans' mental health. I worked at The Washington Post from 2017 to December 2023, establishing the Opinion section's first documentary film unit and pioneering a column about mental health and society. In 2021, I covered the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol as part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. When I learned of Bezos's editorial edict, I talked to former colleagues and learned of 'heartbreak,' confusion, and anger in the newsroom. I also reached out to Post leadership for a comment on what defines 'personal liberties and free markets' and who would be the arbiter of who deserved this freedom. No response. What is happening inside the Post is, in some ways, a microcosm of the country. The 'hierarchical, authoritarian nature of most workplaces'—often disguised by language about valuing people's feedback—has been revealed, according to Seth Prins, assistant professor of epidemiology and sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. This forces people to confront the fact they don't have much control under the current structure, which can be extremely stressful—and not just among D.C. journalists and government workers being targeted for cuts. This is bad for Americans' physical health, mental health, finances. Anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease, and other stress-related disorders are all caused by precarious employment, overwork, unemployment, and lack of autonomy and control in the workplace. These problems are rife at another Bezos company: Amazon, the world's second-largest employer. Corporate executives say they're concerned about employee health and safety. The Center for Urban Economic Development notes, however, that the intensity, injuries, surveillance, burnout, and high worker-turnover rate at Amazon 'should raise concerns about the potential long-term effects on wellbeing, medical costs, future employment and overall economic security.' The system Bezos is championing has enabled the rich to get richer faster and the working class to burn out more quickly. And the assignment he's given The Washington Post opinion pages is to make his story look good. There is a dataset that gives it credence: Since the 2020 pandemic, the U.S. economy expanded at a solid pace, wages have grown, and more people are working. But if you widen the lens to look at health, well-being, and human flourishing—some people's definition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the United States does 'abysmally,' social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, a professor emeritus at the University of York in Britain, told me. 'The costs of the way the society works are absolutely horrendous,' Wilkinson said in an interview. 'We must, at some point, get people to address that.' Suicide and drug overdoses are leading causes of death in the U.S., where we're strangled by an epidemic of loneliness—that heartbreaking mix of anxiety, depression, and fear that chips at our physical and mental health. The American mind—some might say spirit—is in crisis. Don't blame Covid-19 alone. In the decade leading up to the pandemic, high school students' persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness increased by about 40 percent. This isn't an individual failing, and it can't all be pinned on social media and cell phones, either. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, his co-author of the book The Spirit Level, have found that in more unequal societies, kids do less well on math and literacy tests, teenage birth rates are higher, there's more homicide, more people in prison, lower levels of trust and public engagement, and higher obesity rates. Wilkinson focuses on what psychologists refer to as social evaluative threat. It's measurable. In experiments, people facing threats to their self-esteem or social status show sharp spikes in cortisol, while other tasks have little effect. 'That's what makes being lower down on the hierarchy so painful,' Wilkinson told me, noting that research shows people not only despise poverty, they despise themselves for being poor. Self-loathing and internalized shame can play out as violence and tension or conflict in the family, at work, and with authorities. The rich may be able to buy their way out of some angst, but they can't escape the stress of being judged. Plus, income inequality and low trust can breed resentment, which can inspire violence—and the fear of it. After the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, several major health care executives reportedly increased personal security measures. 'Whether you are quite resilient or vulnerable to all the social anxieties,' Wilkinson said, 'everyone is more worried about others' judgments of them in more unequal societies.' Censoring critiques of Bezos's world-view, as is now the rule at Post opinions, doesn't make the problems go away, though. Similarly, the Trump administration's executive order to ban mentions of racism, inequality, and gender in scientific research will not erase them from our lives. One can understand why it is trying, however. The illusion of truth can be powerful and effective. Misinformation about the 2020 election and the Capitol attack propagated by right-wing media helped President Donald Trump win back the White House. And in a Pew Research Survey conducted before the election, just 30 percent of conservatives said economic inequality is a very big problem in their country, compared with 76 percent of liberals. When powerful elites control the information ecosystem, perception can feel like reality. But here's the truth: Deregulation and tax breaks for the wealthy have enabled Bezos and his peers, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, to rack up $227 billion, $230 billion, and $359 billion in worth, respectively, according to Forbes. These oligarchs would like people to believe that if you're innovative and hardworking, you can achieve their success too. At the same time, however, they oppose labor rights and data protections, consumer safety, and regulations—the measures that shield Americans from exploitation and promote social mobility. So while the wealth gap grows, the poor and working classes are slipping down or stuck on the rung their parents stood on. Free markets and personal liberties are excellent ideas that can complement each other, but only when society collectively decides that dignity, health, and well-being are included in the definition of freedom. 'One of the major purposes of the 'individual liberty' language is to divide workers and make them think only of themselves,' Prins told me. 'We know that actually we are stronger when we come together to demand what we want.' Americans want to do better and feel better. In 2022, 79 percent of Americans said they believe mental health is a public health emergency and needs more attention from lawmakers. And last year, a majority of Americans suggested they wanted the government to look out for people's health and to regulate business to protect the public interest, according to a Pew Research Survey. But just 22 percent said they trust the government in Washington to do what is right. It's hard to trust the government to help people feel better when our culture blames individuals for collective problems. Bezos's ideological pivot at one of the world's most influential newspapers reinforces a false narrative that economic freedom and human freedom are the same thing and that it's up to the individual to achieve both. At a time when economic anxiety, loneliness, and distrust in institutions are deepening, the shift is not just misguided—it's dangerous. We need media that advocate for well-being, not gaslight people into believing their suffering is liberty.
