The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The first couple paragraphs make it clear that The NYT is still smarting from having been overshadowed by the Guardian and Intercept for the Snowden era leaks. The author gleefully dances on the conviction of Winner while lambasting the Intercept as having broken NewsRule No.1.
As seems to be the case with most of the NYTs stories in this year, the source for this article is concealed as well. NYT proposes that they have a couple pdfs of leaked internal emails that explain the internal tumult for this event. Two questions arise for this though: “Are we supposed to just blindly trust the NYT with their continued “anonymous sources” programme?”, and also “What of it?”
What of it that a public failure led to internal tumult in a firm? I’m sure it happens a lot at the NYT as well. Is this really what journalism has gotten to? Petty reporting about another outlets infighting?
This isn't mere dunking (unlike https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgrace..., which spends an entire article lambasting WaPo for mentioning an organization that was mentioned in passing in a larger article that mostly interviewed other people and organizations). How a source ends up found and jailed is news of the investigative type.
I guess the stories mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Awards count for nothing to the New York Times. The Times, who is so deeply part of the establishment, they write public school curriculums [1], while the Intercept gets "In August 2014, it was reported that members of the U.S. military had been banned from reading The Intercept".
It's hard to read this story as anything but an establishment attack on independent media.
[1] https://reason.com/2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-pu...
It’s funny that a group so out of touch with America is supposed to be the arbiter of truth.
The NYT is criticizing the Intercept for verifying its documents and showing them to the public. That's exactly what journalists are supposed to do, and something that the NYT regularly doesn't. Trying to justify it by raising concerns about security of the sources is bogus: the purpose of journalism is to inform the public, and sources risk everything to that end. At best, overzealously withholding information from the public is an insult to the source's sacrifice; in many cases it simply hides questionable evidence from reasonable criticism. The NYT is guilty of this in this very article.
No, the NYT is reporting on a newsworthy event. We, as readers, can criticize The Intercept for bumbling things so badly.
I'm not going to claim that The Intercept made no mistakes ever. The fact that they took on Winner's legal defense bills are a clear sign they took responsibility for those mistakes and did what they could to make them right. I would think an institution which reported that there were WMDs in Iraq, leading directly to a war that killed hundreds of thousands, ruined the lives of millions more, cost trillions of dollars, and whose full ramifications have still not been felt, issued nothing more than a belayed mea culpa, and profited handsomely reporting on the chaos they helped cause would be more hesitant about dredging up the past mistakes of news organizations.
The event happened three years ago, but the investigation just finished, and the new information resulting from the investigation include the internal communications at The Intercept about their screwup. The Globe's reporting on the Catholic Church's coverup took time to investigate too and wasn't mere dunking just because they took the time to gather all that information.
> I would think an institution which reported that there were WMDs in Iraq
By that standard, The Intercept should just close up shop. At least the NYT issues corrections.