The
Baltimore Green Party [baltimoregreens@gmail.com] wants you to know Jill Stein
will be in Baltimore as the Green Party candidate for president. There
will be a fundraising party on Fri., July 31 from 5 to 9 PM. NO! Anyone
can come, hear what Jill has to say, and ask her a question. By the end, you
just may WANT to give a sizeable donation. Remember, successful campaigns need
money. Jill's plan is to raise $5,000 in 20 states so that she can qualify for
federal matching funds. Text (443)449-4159 for directions. The evening will
begin with snacks and a light dinner. Then at 7 PM hear from Margaret
Flowers and Jill Stein. Contributions will be accepted from 8 to 9 PM. Note
Jill is speaking the next day at a national single-payer march in D.C. Go to http://www.baltimoregp.org/.
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Reuters)
The Spirit of Judy Miller Is Alive and Well at the
NYT, and It Does Great Damage
By
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
22 July 15
ne of the very few Iraq War advocates to pay any
price at all was former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, the
classic scapegoat. But what was her defining sin? She granted anonymity to
government officials and then uncritically laundered their dubious claims in
the New York Times. As the paper’s own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about
the role they played in selling the war: “We have found a number of instances
of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases,
information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was
insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.” As a result, its own handbook adopted in the
wake of that historic journalistic debacle states that “anonymity is a last
resort.”
But 12 years after Miller left, you can
pick up that same paper on any given day and the chances are high that you
will find reporters doing exactly the same thing. In fact, its public
editor, Margaret Sullivan, regularly lambasts the
paper for doing so. Granting
anonymity to government officials and then uncritically printing what
these anonymous officials claim, treating it all as Truth, is not
an aberration for the New York Times. With some exceptions among
good NYT reporters, it’s an institutional staple for how the
paper functions, even a decade after its editors scapegoated Judy
Miller for its Iraq War propaganda and excoriated itself for these precise
methods.
That the New York Times mindlessly disseminates
claims from anonymous officials with great regularity is, at this point, too
well-documented to require much discussion. But it is worth observing how
damaging it continues to be, because, shockingly, all sorts of self-identified
“journalists” — both within the paper and outside of it — continue to
equate un-verified assertions from government officials as Proven Truth,
even when these officials are too cowardly to attach their names to these
claims, as long as papers such as the NYT launder them.
Let’s look at an illustrative example from yesterday
to see how this toxic process works. The New York Times published an article about ISIS by
Eric Schmitt and Ben Hubbard based entirely and exclusively on unproven claims
from officials of the U.S. government and its allies, to whom they
(needless to say) granted anonymity. The entire article reads exactly
like an official press release: Paragraph after paragraph does nothing other
than summarize the claims of anonymous officials, without an iota of
questioning, skepticism, scrutiny or doubt.
Among the assertions mindlessly repeated by the Paper
of Record from its beloved anonymous officials is this one:
Excerpt with data on IS and leaked documents. (photo: The Intercept)
Leave to the side the banal journalistic
malpractice of uncritically parroting the self-serving claims of
anonymous officials, supposedly what the paper is so horrified at Judy Miller
for having done. Also leave to the side the fact that the U.S. government has
been anonymously making these Helping-The-Enemy claims not just about Snowden
but about all whistleblowers for decades, back to Daniel Ellsberg,
if not earlier. Let’s instead focus on this: the claim itself, on the
merits, is monumentally stupid on multiple levels: self-evidently so.
To begin with, The Terrorists™ had been using couriers
and encryption for many, many years before anyone knew the name “Edward
Snowden.” Last August, after NPR uncritically laundered claims that Snowden
revelations had helped The Terrorists™, we reported on a 45-page document that
the U.K. government calls “the Jihadist Handbook,” written by and distributed
among extremist groups, which describes in sophisticated detail the encryption
technologies, SIM card-switching tactics and other methods they use to
circumvent U.S. surveillance. Even these 2002/2003 methods were so
sophisticated that they actually mirror GCHQ’s own operational
security methods for protecting its communications.
Data covering the “Jihadist Handbook” from 2002-2003. (photo: The Intercept)
This “Jihadist Handbook” was written in 2002 or 2003:
more than a full decade before any Snowden revelations. Indisputably,
terrorists have known for a very long time that the U.S. government and its
allies are trying to intercept their communications, and have long used
encryption and other means to prevent that.
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.”
When I was first told about the Sunday Times’ now
disgraced story claiming that Russia and China obtained the full Snowden
archive, my initial reaction was that the story was so blatantly inane and so
journalistically corrupted — based exclusively on unproven,
self-serving accusations from anonymous U.K. officials — that it
wasn’t even worth addressing. I changed my mind and decided to write about it only
when I saw huge numbers of journalists sitting around on Twitter that night
uncritically assuming that these claims must be True because, after all,
government officials said them and a newspaper printed them.
I went through exactly the same process when I
saw this Snowden-helps-ISIS claim laundered yesterday in the New York
Times. I assumed that the “journalism” here was so glaringly shoddy
that nobody needed me to write about it, and that a few mocking tweets would
suffice. Everyone knows by now to treat anonymous government claims like this
critically and not accept them as true without evidence — or so I reasoned.
But then I began seeing one self-described journalist
after the next treat the accusation from these anonymous officials as
tantamount to Proven Truth. They just started asserting that Snowden’s
revelations helped ISIS without a molecule of doubt, skepticism or critical
thought. That’s what makes this process so destructive: once the New
York Times uncritically publishes a claim from a
government official, even (maybe especially) if anonymous, huge numbers
of “journalists” immediately treat it as Truth. It’s shocking to watch, no
matter how common it is.
Here are just a few examples: first, from New
York Times reporter Alex Burns, stating the Snowden-helped-ISIS claim as
fact:
Now here’s long-time journalist Kurt Andersen,
demanding that Snowden be confronted and made to say whether he regrets this:
Here’s a tweet claiming the NYT “reported” this,
re-tweeted by long-time NYT and CNBC journalist John Harwood:
After I noted that the NYT “reported” no such thing
but merely uncritically wrote down what anonymous officials said, here’s
Harwood explicitly defending classic stenography as “reporting”:
Here’s a CNN and Miami Herald columnist, Frida Ghitis,
nakedly treating the anonymous claim as true by blaming Snowden for helping
ISIS:
Here’s a tweet Business Insider sent to its 1.1
million followers this morning:
Here’s self-proclaimed “terrorism expert” Will McCants
mindlessly repeating it as fact:
And now the bottom-feeding British tabloid Daily Mail
has a just-published screaming, hysterical story based exclusively on the
anonymous assertion laundered by the New York Times:
The British tabloid Daily Mail's headline for a New York Times story. (photo: The Intercept)
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.
The peak of the Sunday Times’ humiliation
was when its lead reporter, Tom Harper, went on CNN and expressly admitted that the paper did
nothing other than mindlessly print anonymous government claims as fact without
having any idea if they were true. What made Harper a laughingstock was this
sentence, captured in a Vine by The
Guardian’s HannahJane Parkinson (to listen, click the “unmute” button in
the lower right-hand corner):
How is this not exactly what the New York Times, yet
again, has done? In fact, if one replaces “British” with “American,” is that
not the actual motto describing how this paper so often behaves, one might even
say their core function?
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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