The Intercept
The Intercept is an American left-wing nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts online. The Intercept has published in English since its founding in 2014, and in Portuguese since the 2016 launch of the Brazilian edition. It has been noted for its pro-Palestinian coverage.
Notable events in the organization's history include the Juan M. Thompson scandal, in which an Intercept reporter fabricated quotes and invented sources, and the Reality Winner controversy, in which The Intercept's mishandling of anonymously submitted governmental materials exposed the military contractor as a source and led to her arrest.
History
The Intercept was founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras. It was launched on February 10, 2014, by First Look Media with funding by billionaire eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, starting with $250 million in pledged funding. The publication initially reported on documents released by Edward Snowden. Co-founders Greenwald and Poitras left in 2020 amid public disagreements about the leadership and direction of the organization.In January 2023 it spun off from the First Look Institute as an independent nonprofit organization. In February 2024, The Intercept laid off 16 staff members, one-third of its newsroom. In April 2024, the outlet fired William Arkin and Ken Klippenstein resigned in protest. Later that month, Semafor reported that The Intercept was running out of money "and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control."
In June 2024, the unionized staff of The Intercept made several demands to the group's board of directors, including "the immediate dismissal and termination of CEO Annie Chabel and Chief Strategy Officer Sumi Aggarwal, a commitment to restructure the business, and transparency about the board's recent discussions with prospective donors." In July 2024, after unsuccessfully asking the organization's board of directors if they could take over the organization, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim left The Intercept to found their own news website, Drop Site News.
Finances
At launch, Omidyar pledged $250 million in funding. The non-profit arm of First Look Media budgeted $26 million in both 2017 and 2018, according to public filings, much allocated to The Intercept. High-profile journalists were well compensated, with Greenwald being paid $500,000 in 2015.The Intercept was awarded a grant of $3.25 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. It had only received $500,000 when Bankman-Fried went bankrupt; the shortfall in funding "will leave The Intercept with a significant hole in its budget," according to its editor-in-chief.
Omidyar ceased financial support in 2022. First Look Media offered a $14 million grant when The Intercept spun off. In 2023, the CEO discussed a financial pivot to small donors and major gifts. Donations doubled from $488,000 to $867,000 from 2022 to 2023, but failed to meet expenses. Semafor reported in April 2024 that the organization was losing $300,000 per month. The organization led a fundraising campaign in April 2024 which resulted in 3,500 additional recurring donors.
Reception
In August 2014, it was reported that U.S. military personnel had been banned from reading The Intercept. 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". TechCrunch referred to the story as clear evidence of "unabashed opposition to security hawks".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. In April 2016, The Intercept won the People's Voice award for best news website at the twentieth annual Webby Awards. 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. 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.
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. 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. The news organization also won a 2017 award for "Outstanding Feature Story" at the sixteenth annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment. 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".
In April 2024, Semafor reported that despite facing significant financial difficulties, The Intercept "is riding high among its readers for its aggressively pro-Palestinian coverage." In July 2025, Prism reported that "The Intercept has published bold reporting on Israel’s occupation and genocide that seems conspicuously absent from other publications". It wrote that The Intercept's CEO Annie Chabel identified the organization's coverage of Israel and Palestine "as a principal reason behind the publication's inability to secure large donations from philanthropic foundations." Chabel said "specific funders have told her that The Intercept is 'biased on Israel-Palestine.'"
Activities
Edward Snowden archives
The Intercept had hosted an archive of documents leaked by Snowden to Greenwald and Poitras. First Look deprecated the archive and laid off its associated research team in 2019, saying that their editorial priorities had changed and that they no longer reported from the archive. This marked the end of The Intercept original vision of being a platform to report on the NSA disclosures. Barrett Brown burned the National Magazine Award he had received for his Intercept column in protest of First Look's decision to offline the Snowden archives.Podcasts
''Intercepted''
Intercepted was a weekly podcast hosted by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and produced by First Look Media. Intercepted was launched on January 25, 2017. It regularly featured The Intercept editor and journalist Glenn Greenwald as well as senior correspondent, author, and journalist Naomi Klein. The editor-in-chief was Betsy Reed. Music for the show was created and performed by DJ Spooky. The last episode was July 3, 2024. It was replaced by The Intercept Briefing.The premiere episode, on January 25, 2017, "The Clock Strikes Thirteen, Donald Trump is President" featured an interview with Seymour Hersh, who criticizes the media's response to the alleged Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, calling the way the media went along with the story, "outrageous".
''Deconstructed''
Deconstructed is a podcast hosted by The Intercepts Washington, D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim. The show was previously hosted by British political journalist and broadcaster Mehdi Hasan for its first two years, from 2018 to 2020. Grim took over as permanent host in October 2020 when Hasan began hosting a news broadcast for Peacock.''The Intercept Brasil''
In August 2016, The Intercept launched a Brazilian version, The Intercept Brasil. In June 2019, The Intercept Brasil released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between judge Sergio Moro, prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and other Operation Car Wash prosecutors. 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.Juan M. Thompson scandal
In February 2016, the site appended lengthy corrections to five stories by reporter Juan M. Thompson and retracted a sixth, about Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, written over the previous year, focused on the African-American community. Shortly afterward, a note from editor Betsy Reed indicated that Thompson had been fired recently after his editors discovered "a pattern of deception" in his reporting. According to Reed, he had "fabricated several quotes in his stories and created fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people, one of which was a Gmail account in my name".Reed apologized to readers and to those misquoted. She noted that some of Thompson's work, most of it using public sources, was verifiable. Editors alerted any downstream users of the affected stories, and promised to take similar action if further fabrication came to light.
Thompson suggested that the greater problem was racism in the media field. He had made up pseudonyms for some of his sources, whom he described as "poor black people who didn't want their names in the public given the situations" and would not have spoken with a reporter otherwise. "he journalism that covers the experiences of poor black folk and the journalism others, such as you and First Look, are used to differs drastically", he argued. He also said he had felt a need to "exaggerate my personal shit in order to prove my worth" at The Intercept given incidents of racial bias he said he had witnessed there. When Gawker published his email, Reed said those allegations had not been in the version he sent her.
He was fired by The Intercept in early 2016 and, according to Reed, did not cooperate with the investigation into his actions.