5 ms·

The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit

14 points by mitchbob 6y ago

rbecker 6y ago
> Vanity Fair asked in 2015 “whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren’t about itself?” I guess the stories mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Awards 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-public-schools/ https://reason.com/2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-pu...
no-dr-onboard 6y ago
This comes off as a petty establishment dunk on an independent media source. 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?
- jgalt212 6y ago
  I would go so far as to say the NY Times and most establishment media have lost their way in the age of Trump. Too much joust and parry, and not enough charting one's own course.
  - ilyaeck 6y ago
    I used to read the NYT every day. Not anymore, now they are on my "disgraced media" list.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  The NYT got the Snowden leaks correct just one day after the PRISM story appeared in The Guardian and WaPo. To this day, The Guardian still hasn't issued corrections for the multiple errors that Greenwald made in his articles. WaPo issued a wishy washy correction that just made it's reporting even more confusing. This isn't mere dunking (unlike https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/ 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.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I’m still sad that it happened to be the NYT to win out in this internet age of ‘winner take all’ It’s funny that a group so out of touch with America is supposed to be the arbiter of truth.
jjk166 6y ago
So either the NYT knew that the NSA was using secret codes on printer pages to track people and sat on this information, or the NYT had no idea about that security measure and is criticizing a fellow journalism institution for having the same lack of information. This is a shitty and unprofessional article that the NYT should be ashamed to have published.
- rbecker 6y ago
  I'm afraid we can't blame the NYT for that - printer tracking dots are public knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
  - jjk166 6y ago
    That the dots existed was public knowledge. That the NSA had the means to recover them from a document that had been scanned and faxed and reprinted was not. 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.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      > The NYT is criticizing the Intercept for verifying its documents and showing them to the public No, the NYT is reporting on a newsworthy event. We, as readers, can criticize The Intercept for bumbling things so badly.
      - jjk166 6y ago
        What is the event here? The Reality Winner story happened 3 years ago and was picked apart thoroughly at the time. The event right now is that the NYT claims to have acquired secret documents, but since they are not sharing those documents, nor the testimony of anyone willing to go on record verifying the documents, that doesn't rise to the level of newsworthy. 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.

14 points by mitchbob 6y ago

> Vanity Fair asked in 2015 “whether First Look Media can make headlines that aren’t about itself?” I guess the stories mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Awards 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-public-schools/ https://reason.com/2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-pu...

no-dr-onboard 6y ago

This comes off as a petty establishment dunk on an independent media source. 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?

jgalt212 6y ago
I would go so far as to say the NY Times and most establishment media have lost their way in the age of Trump. Too much joust and parry, and not enough charting one's own course.
- ilyaeck 6y ago
  I used to read the NYT every day. Not anymore, now they are on my "disgraced media" list.
lern_too_spel 6y ago
The NYT got the Snowden leaks correct just one day after the PRISM story appeared in The Guardian and WaPo. To this day, The Guardian still hasn't issued corrections for the multiple errors that Greenwald made in his articles. WaPo issued a wishy washy correction that just made it's reporting even more confusing. This isn't mere dunking (unlike https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/ 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.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I’m still sad that it happened to be the NYT to win out in this internet age of ‘winner take all’ It’s funny that a group so out of touch with America is supposed to be the arbiter of truth.

jjk166 6y ago

So either the NYT knew that the NSA was using secret codes on printer pages to track people and sat on this information, or the NYT had no idea about that security measure and is criticizing a fellow journalism institution for having the same lack of information. This is a shitty and unprofessional article that the NYT should be ashamed to have published.

rbecker 6y ago
I'm afraid we can't blame the NYT for that - printer tracking dots are public knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
- jjk166 6y ago
  That the dots existed was public knowledge. That the NSA had the means to recover them from a document that had been scanned and faxed and reprinted was not. 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.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    > The NYT is criticizing the Intercept for verifying its documents and showing them to the public No, the NYT is reporting on a newsworthy event. We, as readers, can criticize The Intercept for bumbling things so badly.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      What is the event here? The Reality Winner story happened 3 years ago and was picked apart thoroughly at the time. The event right now is that the NYT claims to have acquired secret documents, but since they are not sharing those documents, nor the testimony of anyone willing to go on record verifying the documents, that doesn't rise to the level of newsworthy. 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.