Yes, Mideast militants knew the NSA was tracking their cell phones when Edward Snowden was still a teenager. (graphic: Intercept)
Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept, 7/21/15) traces the transmission of a demonstrably false claim–that ISIS’s “top leaders now use couriers or encrypted channels that Western analysts cannot crack to communicate” as a result of “revelations from Edward J. Snowden”–from nameless “intelligence and military officials” to a front-page piece by the New York Times‘ Eric Schmitt and Ben Hubbard (7/20/15) to other journalists gleefully retweeting and reprinting the false claim as fact.
As Greenwald summarized:
Look at what the New York Times, yet again, has done. Isn’t it amazing? All anyone in government has to do is whisper something in its journalists’ ears, demand anonymity for it, and instruct them to print it. Then they obey. Then other journalists treat it as Truth. Then it becomes fact, all over the world. This is the same process that enabled the New York Times, more than any other media outlet, to sell the Iraq War to the American public, and they’re using exactly the same methods to this day.
This is a concise description of how the US government uses prestigious–and pliable–media outlets to manufacture facts.
In the case of Snowden, of course, corporate journalists have a special interest in believing the government’s smear: They’re largely in the business of retailing government “secrets,” doling out information that the government wants to get out in a controlled fashion that maintains its value through artificial scarcity. Whereas Snowden is really trying to expose actual government secrets–one of the biggest of which is that the main reason they’re secret is to keep them from the government’s own citizens, not from official enemies.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.