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The fourth estate seems to have added disappointingly little here. If the government decided they would release details of the program, the NYT would "scoop" th
by dmurray 8y ago
The fourth estate seems to have added disappointingly little here. If the government decided they would release details of the program, the NYT would "scoop" them by publishing it a day or two earlier. If the government decided not to release details, the NYT heard nothing, saw nothing, spoke nothing.
Not exactly "all the news that's fit to print".
- Waterluvian 8y agoConsider it payment for doing their job. Without this journalism, the government would have probably never been compelled to bother telling anybody about Argus. So the fourth estate seemed to have performed its role perfectly.
- toyg 8y ago“Perfectly”, no: if they had done it properly, the explosions would never had happened, our precious Universe would be a bit cleaner, and scientists wouldn’t have wasted time trying to understand the resulting “unexplicable” phenomena.
- Waterluvian 8y agoCleaner? Source?
- archgoon 8y agoI think it's depicted as a little more complicated than that; the New York Times started pressuring the government to let them publish out of fear that another news agency would publish before them; which pushed the government to start doing the release, which prompted the New York Times to do it instead, preventing the government from perpetually delaying the release.