To walk a story back is journalism industry jargon for slowly dropping claims made in your initial story, until there's nothing of substance remaining. Going f

To walk a story back is journalism industry jargon for slowly dropping claims made in your initial story, until there's nothing of substance remaining. Going from "NSA has direct access to servers of major internet companies" to "Some NSA analysts' database accesses inadequately audited, according to random sysadmin" is a textbook walk-back. Of course you will never see the latter headline on Greenwald's blog.