Oracle executive bullies The Intercept reporter about stories

An editor’s note posted on The Intercept Friday defends reporter Mara Hvistendahl‘s reporting about Oracle’s involvement in Asia.

The note states, “In response to The Intercept’s recent coverage of Oracle, the company’s executive vice president and lobbyist Ken Glueck wrote two lengthy posts on Oracle’s blog that went beyond normal media discourse. In the first post, he published the email and Signal number of Intercept reporter Mara Hvistendahl, who reported and wrote two stories about Oracle’s marketing of its analytics software for surveillance by police in Brazil, China, and the United Arab Emirates. In the second post, he called for people who had information about Hvistendahl to send it to his Protonmail account. (The call for details on Hvistendahl was removed Wednesday evening. An archived version is here.) He later posted Hvistendahl’s contact information on Twitter, which temporarily suspended Glueck for violating its terms of service.

“Glueck’s personal attacks on our reporter are appalling and unprofessional, and his attacks on her work are baseless and uninformed. Mara Hvistendahl is a veteran journalist and former China-based foreign correspondent who has long covered the tech sector and whose work has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Each of her recent Oracle articles was the culmination of months of investigation, research, and editing by a team of journalists, and each entailed extensive back and forth with company representatives prior to publication. (Tatiana Dias contributed significant reporting to the first story and separately published an investigation for The Intercept Brasil.) The Intercept stands behind Hvistendahl and our Oracle stories and condemns Ken Glueck’s bullying on behalf of his employer, Oracle. This type of conduct has become increasingly common from prominent tech companies faced with journalists doing their jobs, but it should not be normalized.”