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

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.html

by mitchbob • 6 years ago

14 12 6 years ago

rbecker2• 6 years 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 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...

no-dr-onboard• 6 years 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

I used to read the NYT every day. Not anymore, now they are on my "disgraced media" list.

lern_too_spel3• 6 years 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-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• 6 years 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.

jjk1663• 6 years 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.

rbecker2• 6 years 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

jjk1663• 6 years 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.

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

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