The Intercept

What you're reading

The Intercept is a US digital investigative news outlet founded in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, originally to publish documents from the Snowden NSA disclosures and to build an adversarial investigative newsroom focused on national security, surveillance, civil liberties, and US foreign policy. The audience is national and international, weighted toward readers on the anti-establishment left, civil-libertarians, journalists at other outlets who use the Intercept's reporting as source material, and policy researchers who follow the surveillance-and-foreign-policy beat.

Format is web-first plus podcasts (Intercepted, Deconstructed) and email newsletters. Ownership is First Look Media, the nonprofit news organization founded by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar. The Intercept has been through significant editorial turbulence — Greenwald's departure in 2020 over editorial disputes, multiple rounds of staff layoffs, and recent shifts in coverage focus — but the investigative mission has continued. It is best known for the Snowden documents reporting, sustained investigations of the US national-security state, original reporting on US wars, surveillance, and civil-liberties cases, and an adversarial editorial posture that has produced more original scoops than its small staff would suggest.

Ownership & funding

First Look Media (Pierre Omidyar) until 2024; now independent nonprofit. Funded primarily through nonprofit + reader donations.

Nonprofit funding plus reader donations through First Look Media is structurally insulating. The Omidyar-backed nonprofit umbrella supplies the operational backing; the reader-donation base provides recurring revenue tied directly to readers who want adversarial national-security journalism. That model funds the long, document-driven investigations the Intercept is known for — work that would not pencil out on an ad-funded site and that legacy newsrooms have generally retreated from. The trade-off is the donor-and-funder dynamic that affects all nonprofit news: editorial direction is influenced by what the donor base supports, which is part of what produced the public editorial fights and Greenwald's departure when the editorial direction moved relative to where the founding team sat.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The Intercept at Left with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

nwsly rates The Intercept as Left because the editorial line is consistently adversarial toward US military, intelligence, and corporate power from a left vantage that is more anti-establishment than mainstream-progressive. Coverage of US foreign policy is critical regardless of which party holds the White House; coverage of the intelligence community, surveillance, and national-security apparatus is adversarial by default; coverage of corporate power, particularly tech and defense industries, is unsentimental. Headline voice is openly skeptical of institutional authority, and source selection favors whistleblowers, dissidents, and adversarial researchers over official spokespeople.

The Intercept breaks the standard Left pattern by going after Democratic administrations as sharply as Republican ones — Obama-era drone reporting, Biden-era foreign-policy coverage, and sustained criticism of Democratic civil-liberties positions have all drawn praise from libertarians and conservatives even as the Intercept's overall politics remain on the left. The Mostly Factual rating reflects strong document-driven reporting (the Snowden corpus, multiple original-document investigations since), careful editor sign-off on national-security pieces with serious legal exposure, and a corrections record that is real and public. What keeps the rating below High is editorial-direction turbulence over the past several years, a thinner overall corrections process than legacy-paper standards, and specific framing decisions on some opinion pieces that have drawn pushback from across the spectrum.

Editorial vs news side

The Intercept blends investigative news and signed opinion on the same surface, with bylined opinion pieces clearly labeled. The reported investigations follow standard sourcing and editing practice; the essays and podcast content are openly voiced and adversarial. There is no neutral news layer underneath the opinion. The Left rating reflects the publication overall; the reported investigations sit closer to Left and the opinion side sits firmly in the Left band.

Why we include them in nwsly

Adversarial investigative journalism focused on national-security and surveillance state.

The Intercept earns its slot because it produces document-driven investigations of US national security, surveillance, corporate power, and foreign policy at depth no other outlet in the nwsly source set matches. The Snowden corpus alone established a beat the mainstream press underweighted; the post-Snowden work on US wars, intelligence operations, and civil liberties has continued to surface stories that cross over. In the Left band it pairs with Jacobin and Democracy Now! to give nwsly an adversarial-left view that catches surveillance and foreign-policy stories before the centrist press picks them up.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The Intercept

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