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thesquanderer

(11,955 posts)
Sat Jul 25, 2015, 01:01 PM Jul 2015

Greenwald eviscerates the NY Times (and others)

Last edited Sat Jul 25, 2015, 03:50 PM - Edit history (2)

Great piece.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/21/spirit-judy-miller-alive-well-nyt-great-damage/

For those who find even the excerpt below too long to read, key points include:

* the "secret" information revealed to terrorists was already known by terrorists

* even IF terrorists learned anything from Snowden's revelations (a very big if), they only would have done so because outlets such as the NYT chose to make this information available, having decided that it was in fact not too helpful to the enemy to be able to publish -- i.e. it was the Times that decided to make this information public, not Snowden

* once the NYT reports info -- even un-attributed, non fact-checked "stenography" -- many other journalists pick it up, figuring it must be true because, after all, it was in the NYT.

* This is just how Judith Miller and the Times helped cheerlead the country into the Iraq war... reporting anonymous, non-verified/non-verifiable statements as facts, which then most of the rest of the press accepted as facts as well.


July 21, 2015
The Spirit of Judy Miller is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great Damage
...

The New York Times’ claim that ISIS learned to use couriers as a result of the Snowden revelations is almost a form of self-mockery. Few facts from Terrorism lore are more well-known than Osama bin Laden’s use of couriers to avoid U.S. surveillance. A 2011 article from the Washington Post — more than two years before the first Snowden story — was headlined: “Al-Qaeda couriers provided the trail that led to bin Laden.” It described how “Bin Laden strictly avoided phone or e-mail communications for fear that they would be intercepted.”

Terrorists have been using such surveillance-avoidance methods for almost two full decades. In May, we published a 2011 NSA document that quoted Jon Darby, NSA’s then-associate deputy director for counterterrorism, as saying that “[o]ur loss of SIGINT access to bin Laden actually occurred prior to 9/11 — it happened in 1998.”

If one were engaged in journalism, one would include some of these facts in order to scrutinize, question and express skepticism about the claims of anonymous officials that ISIS now uses encryption and couriers because of Snowden reporting. But if one is engaged in mindless, subservient pro-government stenography, one simply grants anonymity to officials and then uncritically parrots their facially dubious claims with no doubt or questioning of any kind. Does anyone have any doubts about what these New York Times reporters are doing in this article?

There’s one more point worth noting about the New York Times’ conduct here. As has been documented many times, Edward Snowden never publicly disclosed a single document: Instead, he gave the documents to journalists and left it up to them to decide which documents should be public and which ones should not be. As I’ve noted, he has sometimes disagreed with the choices journalists made, usually on the ground that documents media outlets decided to publish should have, in his view, not been published.

One of the newspapers that published documents from the Snowden archive is called “The New York Times.” In fact, it is responsible for publication of some of the most controversial articles often cited by critics as ones that should not have been published, including ones most relevant to ISIS. When it comes to claiming credit for Snowden stories, the New York Times is very good at pointing out that it published some of these documents. But when it comes to uncritically publishing claims from anonymous officials that Snowden stories helped ISIS, the New York Times suddenly “forgets” to mention that it actually made many of these documents known to the world and, thus, to ISIS. What the New York Times is actually doing in this article is accusing itself of helping ISIS, but just lacks the honesty to tell its readers that it did this, opting instead to blame its source for it. In the NYT’s blame-its-source formulation: “The Islamic State has studied revelations from Edward J. Snowden.”

...

Look at what the New York Times, yet again, has done. Isn’t it amazing? All anyone in government has to do is whisper something in its journalists’ ears, demand anonymity for it, and instruct them to print it. Then they obey. Then other journalists treat it as Truth. Then it becomes fact, all over the world. This is the same process that enabled the New York Times, more than any other media outlet, to sell the Iraq War to the American public, and they’re using exactly the same methods to this day. But it’s not just their shoddy journalism that drives this but the mentality of other “journalists” who instantly equate anonymous official claims as fact.


MUCH more at the link. Well worth reading.

6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Greenwald eviscerates the NY Times (and others) (Original Post) thesquanderer Jul 2015 OP
K&R'd! snot Jul 2015 #1
I put the NYT in the same category as cable news Oilwellian Jul 2015 #2
The sad thing is... thesquanderer Jul 2015 #6
NYT, WAshington Post lark Jul 2015 #3
NYT, WaPo must be awesome! KG Jul 2015 #4
HEAR F****** HEAR!!! brett_jv Jul 2015 #5

thesquanderer

(11,955 posts)
6. The sad thing is...
Sun Jul 26, 2015, 01:24 AM
Jul 2015

...NYT is still one of the better news sources. Which just goes to show how bad everything else is.

lark

(23,003 posts)
3. NYT, WAshington Post
Sat Jul 25, 2015, 02:46 PM
Jul 2015

fishwraps or birdcage liners, that's what they are mostly good for. Oh wait, NYT is good for one other thing - Krugman's columns. That is all.

brett_jv

(1,245 posts)
5. HEAR F****** HEAR!!!
Sat Jul 25, 2015, 03:58 PM
Jul 2015

NAILS IT!!!

Love it!

Now, let's see if the DC stenographers at the NYT can be arsed to respond to these extremely trenchant points!?!

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