Lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald's work with whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal illegal government surveillance won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. That same year he helped launch The Intercept, but he abruptly resigned six years later after a disagreement over editorial policy. In July, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Greenwald at FreedomFest 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Q: You regularly inveigh against corporate media—including places you have worked, such as Salon and The Guardian. Have you changed or has the world changed?

A: I think it's mostly the latter. The main reason Edward Snowden has said that he was drawn to me wasn't so much because of my views about privacy and surveillance, although those aligned with his. But he saw that I looked at journalism in a radically different way than most of the media. I've always had a very prominent component of my work be media criticism. The views that I've always espoused are heard more on Fox than CNN and MSNBC, where they're not welcome.

Q: Fifteen years ago, Fox News was the national security network and CNN was the critic. What has changed that?

A: I think the primary impetus was the reliance on "Russiagate" as the principal theme of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Once you start positing that there's some evil foreign villain bent upon wreaking havoc inside the U.S. and that the political opponent domestically is aligned with that foreign power, that's a very jingoistic way of looking at the world. On top of which, Russiagate itself emanated from the bowels of the CIA, the bowels of the U.S. security state, which was feeding leaks to The Washington Post and The New York Times. Liberals began viewing those security state agencies, the hatred of which has been fundamental to left-wing politics for decades, as not just their allies, but as guardians of all that was good and decent in the world, and that began this radical transformation about these kinds of questions.