The main argument against The Intercept is a technical journalistic point.
It's very good practise at a news organisation for investors to have zero editorial control. This is especially necessary for investigative journalism, since the main aim is to dig dirt.
The Intercept doesn't have this - Pierre Omidyar has influence over what gets published. That makes it difficult (probably impossible) to publish stories that reflect Omidyar or his business interests in a negative light.
For contrast, note how Pando has publically attacked its own investor Peter Thiel over his secret funding of the Hulh Hogan/Gawker lawsuit.
I've met Oliver (Ironholds), Martin (who wrote the code with the dodgy variable name), and Duncan (who banned Oliver and others from the bug tracker for "shit-stirring"). All three of them are smart, delightful people in my experience.
This strikes me as a bit of a storm in a tea-cup, but there is some background context worth noting. R's academic roots have created some interesting cultural aspects within the community. For example, in academia you spend a fair amount of time critiquing other people's work and trying to find flaws. It's perfectly acceptable to trash someone's argument, even to their face when they give a presentation. Once you accept that it's not personal but necessary for research to progress, it's OK, but to begin with its a horrible experience. Outside of academia, this is mostly just awful impolite behaviour.
That attitude of being allowed to correct people's arguments without bothering with any formalities has been a feature of the many aspects of the R community since its inception. In particular, the R-help mailing list and the R bug tracker can be scary places for new users. As the R community has grown beyond the confines of academia, this has led to tensions within the community. These sorts of cultural issues have long worried a lot of R users, and I can only guess that Oliver's position on the R Foundation Task Force on Women led him to worry about diversity issues more than most.
The other relevant aspect of the R community is that R is developed and managed by the R Core Team (https://www.r-project.org/contributors.html), which consists of 20 guys, about half of whom are actively working on R, and all of whom have day jobs beside being in R Core. They do a great job, but the R community is now several million people, which means that managing the mailing lists and the bug tracker - dreadfully tedious tasks at the best of times - must now be rather overwhelming. I've personally been (mildly) scolded a few times when submitting bugs that I thought were reasonable but members of R Core thought differently. While I think that Duncan's response was a big overreaction, in the context of him trying to optimize not having to spend time dealing with the bug tracker, I can understand why he chose to ban Oliver.
My opinion is that a lot of strife could be avoided if R Core delegated a lot more of the admin work - I'm sure there are plenty of grad students who could be persuaded into acting as first line support on the bug tracker, or moderators on a mailing list.
It's very good practise at a news organisation for investors to have zero editorial control. This is especially necessary for investigative journalism, since the main aim is to dig dirt.
The Intercept doesn't have this - Pierre Omidyar has influence over what gets published. That makes it difficult (probably impossible) to publish stories that reflect Omidyar or his business interests in a negative light.
For contrast, note how Pando has publically attacked its own investor Peter Thiel over his secret funding of the Hulh Hogan/Gawker lawsuit.