{"id":85523,"date":"2017-01-16T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=85523"},"modified":"2017-01-16T11:33:55","modified_gmt":"2017-01-16T11:33:55","slug":"watch-how-casually-false-claims-are-published-new-york-times-and-nicholas-lemann-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/01\/watch-how-casually-false-claims-are-published-new-york-times-and-nicholas-lemann-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch How Casually False Claims Are Published: New York Times and Nicholas Lemann Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

10 Jan 2017 – <\/em>Like most people, I\u2019ve long known that factual falsehoods are routinely published in major media outlets. But as I\u2019ve pointed out before, nothing makes you internalize\u00a0just how often it really happens, how completely their editorial standards so often fail, like being personally involved in a story that receives substantial media coverage. I cannot count how many times I\u2019ve read or heard claims from\u00a0major media outlets about the Snowden story that I knew, from firsthand knowledge, were a total fabrication.<\/p>\n

We have a\u00a0perfect example of how this happens from the New York Times today, in a book review<\/a> by Nicholas Lemann, the Pulitzer-Moore professor of journalism at Columbia University as well as a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker.\u00a0Lemann is reviewing a new book by Edward J. Epstein \u2014 the longtime neocon, right-wing Cold Warrior, WSJ op-ed page writer, and Breitbart contributor<\/a> \u2014 which basically claims Snowden is a Russian spy.<\/p>\n

The book has been widely discredited even before its release\u00a0as it is filled with demonstrable lies. The usually rhetorically restrained\u00a0Bart Gellman, whose work on the Snowden story at the Washington Post won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, called the book<\/a> \u201cbad faith work\u201d that is filled with \u201cdistortions\u201d and \u201cbaseless\u00a0and\u00a0bizarro claims,\u201d several of which he documented. I\u2019ve documented<\/a>\u00a0some of the other obvious falsehoods in the book.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say, so fringe is Epstein\u2019s conspiracy claim that even top NSA<\/a> and CIA officials<\/a> \u2014 who despise Snowden and have repeatedly attempted to disparage\u00a0him \u2014 have rejected the\u00a0book\u2019s central conspiracy theory that Snowden has worked\u00a0with the Kremlin. In 2014, Epstein, citing what he claimed a government official told him \u201coff the record,\u201d\u00a0wrote my favorite sentence<\/a> about this whole affair, one that\u00a0I often\u00a0quoted in my speeches to great audience laughter: \u201cThere are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation; or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.\u201d He\u2019s apparently now opted for Door No. 1.<\/p>\n

Lemann himself is highly dismissive of the book\u2019s central accusations about Snowden and does\u00a0a perfectly fine job of explaining how the book provides no convincing evidence for its key conspiracies:<\/p>\n

Epstein proves none of this. \u201cHow America Lost Its Secrets\u201d is an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly souffl\u00e9 of speculation, full of anonymous sourcing and suppositional language like \u201cit seems plausible to believe\u201d or \u201cit doesn\u2019t take a great stretch of the imagination to conclude.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lemann\u2019s review is worth reading to see what a farce\u00a0this book is,\u00a0and especially \u2014 for all those authoritarian liberal\u00a0New Cold Warriors tempted to embrace the book because it smears Snowden as a Russian operative \u2014 to understand who Epstein is and the ideological agenda\u00a0to which he\u2019s long been devoted.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, there is\u00a0one statement in Lemann\u2019s\u00a0review that is misleading in the extreme and another that is so blatantly, factually false that it\u2019s mind-boggling it\u00a0got approved by a NYT editor and, presumably, a fact-checker. But it is worth looking at because it illustrates how easily this happens. Here\u2019s the first one:<\/p>\n

Snowden, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and their immediate circle of allies come from a radically libertarian hacker culture that, most of the time, doesn\u2019t believe there should be an NSA at all, whether or not it remains within the confines of its legal charter.<\/p>\n

Though ambiguous about who exactly it is describing, this passages strongly implies that Snowden \u201cdoesn\u2019t believe there should be an NSA at all.\u201d Snowden\u00a0believes nothing of the kind. In fact, he believes exactly the opposite: that the NSA performs a vital function and many of its\u00a0programs are legitimate and important. He has said this over and over. That\u2019s why he wanted to work for the agency. It\u2019s why he refused to dump all the documents he took and instead gave them to journalists, demanding that they only publish<\/a> those that\u00a0exposed information necessary to inform the public debate<\/a>: precisely because he did not want to destroy NSA programs he believes\u00a0are justifiable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear who Lemann means by Snowden\u2019s\u00a0\u201cimmediate circle of allies,\u201d but I personally have never heard anyone who qualifies as such express the cartoon view Lemann has manufactured here. What I\u2019ve heard from both Snowden and his\u00a0\u201cimmediate circle of allies\u201d has been quite consistent: that \u2014 as is true of all countries \u2014 it is legitimate for NSA to engage in targeted surveillance<\/em>\u00a0(i.e., monitoring\u00a0specific individuals whom a court, based on evidence, concludes are legitimate targets) but inherently illegitimate to engage in suspicion-less\u00a0mass surveillance<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(i.e., subjecting entire populations<\/a> to monitoring). Everything Snowden has said and done is the antithesis of this absolutist\u00a0abolish-the-NSA view Lemann concocted (indeed, Snowden has been harshly criticized by actual radicals for being too protective and supportive of NSA\u2019s functions, as have the journalists who worked with him for refusing to dump the whole archive).<\/p>\n

But while that passage from Lemann is misleading, his\u00a0final paragraph is outright\u00a0false as a clear factual matter:<\/p>\n

This time around, [Epstein\u2019s]\u00a0concern seems to be half with the celebratory closed loop between Snowden and the journalists who covered him, and half with the causes and consequences of a major security breach at the NSA. The heart of the matter is the second of these concerns, not the first. In the Snowden affair, the press didn\u2019t decide what stayed secret, and neither did Congress, the White House or the NSA. Snowden did.<\/p>\n

This is the exact opposite of the truth. It is a fundamentally false description of what happened. Most amazingly, the New York Times knows firsthand that this claim it just published is false because of its direct involvement in reporting the Snowden archive.<\/p>\n

Not a single document that saw the light of day was published because Snowden decided it should be: literally not one. Snowden played no decision-making role whatsoever<\/a> in determining which documents were published and which were withheld.\u00a0What happened was exactly the opposite of what Lemann told New York Times readers: It was the press, not Snowden, that\u00a0decided what stayed secret and what was reported.<\/p>\n

After giving\u00a0the journalists with whom he worked the documents and asking them to withhold those that\u00a0could harm innocent\u00a0people or destroy legitimate programs, Snowden lost all ability to control what was and was not published. As is true of most\u00a0leaks \u2014 from the routine to the spectacular \u2014 those publishing decisions rested solely in the hands of the media outlets and their teams of reporters, editors, and lawyers. Every Snowden document ever published was published by a media outlet with teams of professionals, which means that not one Snowden document was ever published without multiple reporters, editors, and lawyers jointly deciding that the public interest was served by its publication.<\/p>\n

The New York Times knows firsthand that Lemann\u2019s claim is false because that paper\u00a0possessed a large portion of the Snowden archive and published all of its stories without ever\u00a0obtaining Snowden\u2019s permission. Indeed, Snowden at times vehemently disagreed with the decisions made by the NYT and other outlets to publish certain material.<\/p>\n

As Snowden told Time<\/a>: \u201cThere have of course been some stories where my calculation of what is not public interest differs from that of reporters, but it is for this precise reason that publication decisions were entrusted to journalists and their editors.\u201d As the ACLU\u2019s Ben Wizner, who represents Snowden,\u00a0explained<\/a>: \u201cHe didn\u2019t want and didn\u2019t think that he should have the responsibility to decide which of these documents should be public.\u201d\u00a0Anyone who has even casually\u00a0followed this story knows this was the journalist-driven process that determined which documents got published.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the most controversial Snowden stories \u2014 the type\u00a0his critics cite<\/a> as the ones that should not have been published because they exposed sensitive national security secrets \u2014 were often the ones the NYT itself decided to publish, such as its very controversial expos\u00e9<\/a>\u00a0on how NSA spied on China\u2019s Huawei. It was the NYT\u2019s David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth and their editors \u2014 not Snowden \u2014 who decided that this program should be exposed. That\u00a0same dynamic drove\u00a0every story\u00a0based on Snowden documents.<\/p>\n

Even if one wants to argue that Snowden bears some moral responsibility for exposure of this program by virtue of having made these documents\u00a0available to news outlets, it is undeniably true \u2014 to reverse Lemann\u2019s formulation\u00a0\u2014 that Snowden\u00a0didn\u2019t decide what stayed secret. The press did.\u00a0As the ACLU\u2019s Wizner put it simply<\/a>\u00a0about Lemann\u2019s review: \u201cThe last lines are just false.\u201d<\/p>\n

(One great irony highlights this dynamic: In September, Perlroth \u2014 after exploiting Snowden\u2019s\u00a0leaks\u00a0for her own benefit \u2014\u00a0argued<\/a> that her own source\u00a0should not<\/em> be pardoned on the ground that he leaked documents \u201cthat had nothing to do with privacy violations.\u201d\u00a0But\u00a0it was she<\/em>, Nicole Perlroth \u2014 not Snowden \u2014\u00a0who decided to expose, on the front page of the NYT, the NSA\u2019s spying activities on Huawei.)<\/p>\n

How can the New York Times allow Lemann to make such a blatantly false claim about how this reporting took place and who made the decisions about what should and should not be secret? One of the great benefits of new media \u2014 of online reporting \u2014 is that one can provide proof of one\u2019s claims in the form of links (as I\u2019ve done here), so that readers can determine if journalistic claims have evidentiary support. That is such a vital exercise because, as\u00a0Lemann and the NYT just demonstrated, it is so often the case that the most influential media outlets\u00a0publish\u00a0factually false statements using the most authoritative tones. This episode illustrates yet again why everyone is well-advised not to believe assertions\u00a0from any authority or institution that are unaccompanied by evidence you can see and evaluate for yourself.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

As is true of many enduring news stories, there are several zombie myths associated with the Snowden story that will never die no matter how often they are debunked. Perhaps the most annoyingly persistent is that Snowden said at the\u00a0start that he was only exposing privacy violations on Americans, so that one can prove he\u2019s a liar by demonstrating that he also leaked documents pertaining to spying on\u00a0foreigners.<\/p>\n

But Snowden never said anything like that. From the beginning, he\u00a0always said the exact opposite: that he greatly values the privacy rights of Americans but also values the privacy rights of the 95 percent of the world\u2019s population called \u201cnon-Americans.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0As Snowden said in his first online interview<\/a> with readers that I conducted back in June 2013: \u201cSuspicionless surveillance does not become OK\u00a0simply because it\u2019s only victimizing 95 percent of the world instead of 100 percent.\u201d That Snowden said he only wanted to expose privacy violations on Americans is just one of those falsehoods that no matter how many times you disprove it, commentators\u00a0for some reason feel perfectly entitled to keep repeating it.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>Glenn Greenwald<\/a> – \u2709glenn.greenwald@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Paper of Record publishes a claim it knows to be false about the Snowden reporting. Why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}