Greenwald writes: "She granted anonymity to government officials and then
uncritically laundered their dubious claims in the New York Times."
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Reuters)
The Spirit of Judy Miller Is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great
Damage
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
22 July 15
One of the very few Iraq War advocates to pay any price at all was former
New York Times reporter Judy Miller, the classic scapegoat. But what was her
defining sin? She granted anonymity to government officials and then
uncritically laundered their dubious claims in the New York Times. As the
paper's own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about the role they
played in selling the war: "We have found a number of instances of coverage
that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information
that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently
qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged." As a result, its own handbook
adopted in the wake of that historic journalistic debacle states that
"anonymity is a last resort."
But 12 years after Miller left, you can pick up that same paper on any given
day and the chances are high that you will find reporters doing exactly the
same thing. In fact, its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, regularly
lambasts the paper for doing so. Granting anonymity to government officials
and then uncritically printing what these anonymous officials claim,
treating it all as Truth, is not an aberration for the New York Times. With
some exceptions among good NYT reporters, it's an institutional staple for
how the paper functions, even a decade after its editors scapegoated Judy
Miller for its Iraq War propaganda and excoriated itself for these precise
methods.
That the New York Times mindlessly disseminates claims from anonymous
officials with great regularity is, at this point, too well-documented to
require much discussion. But it is worth observing how damaging it continues
to be, because, shockingly, all sorts of self-identified "journalists" -
both within the paper and outside of it - continue to equate un-verified
assertions from government officials as Proven Truth, even when these
officials are too cowardly to attach their names to these claims, as long as
papers such as the NYT launder them.
Let's look at an illustrative example from yesterday to see how this toxic
process works. The New York Times published an article about ISIS by Eric
Schmitt and Ben Hubbard based entirely and exclusively on unproven claims
from officials of the U.S. government and its allies, to whom they (needless
to say) granted anonymity. The entire article reads exactly like an official
press release: Paragraph after paragraph does nothing other than summarize
the claims of anonymous officials, without an iota of questioning,
skepticism, scrutiny or doubt.
Among the assertions mindlessly repeated by the Paper of Record from its
beloved anonymous officials is this one:
Excerpt with data on IS and leaked documents. (photo: The Intercept)
Leave to the side the banal journalistic malpractice of uncritically
parroting the self-serving claims of anonymous officials, supposedly what
the paper is so horrified at Judy Miller for having done. Also leave to the
side the fact that the U.S. government has been anonymously making these
Helping-The-Enemy claims not just about Snowden but about all whistleblowers
for decades, back to Daniel Ellsberg, if not earlier. Let's instead focus on
this: the claim itself, on the merits, is monumentally stupid on multiple
levels: self-evidently so.
To begin with, The TerroristsT had been using couriers and encryption for
many, many years before anyone knew the name "Edward Snowden." Last August,
after NPR uncritically laundered claims that Snowden revelations had helped
The TerroristsT, we reported on a 45-page document that the U.K. government
calls "the Jihadist Handbook," written by and distributed among extremist
groups, which describes in sophisticated detail the encryption technologies,
SIM card-switching tactics and other methods they use to circumvent U.S.
surveillance. Even these 2002/2003 methods were so sophisticated that they
actually mirror GCHQ's own operational security methods for protecting its
communications.
Data covering the "Jihadist Handbook" from 2002-2003. (photo: The Intercept)
This "Jihadist Handbook" was written in 2002 or 2003: more than a full
decade before any Snowden revelations. Indisputably, terrorists have known
for a very long time that the U.S. government and its allies are trying to
intercept their communications, and have long used encryption and other
means to prevent that.
The New York Times' claim that ISIS learned to use couriers as a result of
the Snowden revelations is almost a form of self-mockery. Few facts from
Terrorism lore are more well-known than Osama bin Laden's use of couriers to
avoid U.S. surveillance. A 2011 article from the Washington Post - more than
two years before the first Snowden story - was headlined: "Al-Qaeda couriers
provided the trail that led to bin Laden." It described how "Bin Laden
strictly avoided phone or e-mail communications for fear that they would be
intercepted."
Terrorists have been using such surveillance-avoidance methods for almost
two full decades. In May, we published a 2011 NSA document that quoted Jon
Darby, NSA's then-associate deputy director for counterterrorism, as saying
that "[o]ur loss of SIGINT access to bin Laden actually occurred prior to
9/11 - it happened in 1998."
If one were engaged in journalism, one would include some of these facts in
order to scrutinize, question and express skepticism about the claims of
anonymous officials that ISIS now uses encryption and couriers because of
Snowden reporting. But if one is engaged in mindless, subservient
pro-government stenography, one simply grants anonymity to officials and
then uncritically parrots their facially dubious claims with no doubt or
questioning of any kind. Does anyone have any doubts about what these New
York Times reporters are doing in this article?
There's one more point worth noting about the New York Times' conduct here.
As has been documented many times, Edward Snowden never publicly disclosed a
single document: Instead, he gave the documents to journalists and left it
up to them to decide which documents should be public and which ones should
not be. As I've noted, he has sometimes disagreed with the choices
journalists made, usually on the ground that documents media outlets decided
to publish should have, in his view, not been published.
One of the newspapers that published documents from the Snowden archive is
called "The New York Times." In fact, it is responsible for publication of
some of the most controversial articles often cited by critics as ones that
should not have been published, including ones most relevant to ISIS. When
it comes to claiming credit for Snowden stories, the New York Times is very
good at pointing out that it published some of these documents. But when it
comes to uncritically publishing claims from anonymous officials that
Snowden stories helped ISIS, the New York Times suddenly "forgets" to
mention that it actually made many of these documents known to the world
and, thus, to ISIS. What the New York Times is actually doing in this
article is accusing itself of helping ISIS, but just lacks the honesty to
tell its readers that it did this, opting instead to blame its source for
it. In the NYT's blame-its-source formulation: "The Islamic State has
studied revelations from Edward J. Snowden."
When I was first told about the Sunday Times' now disgraced story claiming
that Russia and China obtained the full Snowden archive, my initial reaction
was that the story was so blatantly inane and so journalistically corrupted
- based exclusively on unproven, self-serving accusations from anonymous
U.K. officials - that it wasn't even worth addressing. I changed my mind and
decided to write about it only when I saw huge numbers of journalists
sitting around on Twitter that night uncritically assuming that these claims
must be True because, after all, government officials said them and a
newspaper printed them.
I went through exactly the same process when I saw this Snowden-helps-ISIS
claim laundered yesterday in the New York Times. I assumed that the
"journalism" here was so glaringly shoddy that nobody needed me to write
about it, and that a few mocking tweets would suffice. Everyone knows by now
to treat anonymous government claims like this critically and not accept
them as true without evidence - or so I reasoned.
But then I began seeing one self-described journalist after the next treat
the accusation from these anonymous officials as tantamount to Proven Truth.
They just started asserting that Snowden's revelations helped ISIS without a
molecule of doubt, skepticism or critical thought. That's what makes this
process so destructive: once the New York Times uncritically publishes a
claim from a government official, even (maybe especially) if anonymous, huge
numbers of "journalists" immediately treat it as Truth. It's shocking to
watch, no matter how common it is.
Here are just a few examples: first, from New York Times reporter Alex
Burns, stating the Snowden-helped-ISIS claim as fact:
Now here's long-time journalist Kurt Andersen, demanding that Snowden be
confronted and made to say whether he regrets this:
Here's a tweet claiming the NYT "reported" this, re-tweeted by long-time NYT
and CNBC journalist John Harwood:
After I noted that the NYT "reported" no such thing but merely uncritically
wrote down what anonymous officials said, here's Harwood explicitly
defending classic stenography as "reporting":
Here's a CNN and Miami Herald columnist, Frida Ghitis, nakedly treating the
anonymous claim as true by blaming Snowden for helping ISIS:
Here's a tweet Business Insider sent to its 1.1 million followers this
morning:
Here's self-proclaimed "terrorism expert" Will McCants mindlessly repeating
it as fact:
And now the bottom-feeding British tabloid Daily Mail has a just-published
screaming, hysterical story based exclusively on the anonymous assertion
laundered by the New York Times:
The British tabloid Daily Mail's headline for a New York Times story.
(photo: The Intercept)
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. But it's not
just their shoddy journalism that drives this but the mentality of other
"journalists" who instantly equate anonymous official claims as fact.
The peak of the Sunday Times' humiliation was when its lead reporter, Tom
Harper, went on CNN and expressly admitted that the paper did nothing other
than mindlessly print anonymous government claims as fact without having any
idea if they were true. What made Harper a laughingstock was this sentence,
captured in a Vine by The Guardian's HannahJane Parkinson (to listen, click
the "unmute" button in the lower right-hand corner):
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Glenn Greenwald. (photo: Reuters)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/21/spirit-judy-miller-alive-well-
nyt-great-damage/https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/21/spirit-judy-m
iller-alive-well-nyt-great-damage/
The Spirit of Judy Miller Is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great
Damage
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
22 July 15
ne of the very few Iraq War advocates to pay any price at all was former
New York Times reporter Judy Miller, the classic scapegoat. But what was her
defining sin? She granted anonymity to government officials and then
uncritically laundered their dubious claims in the New York Times. As the
paper's own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about the role they
played in selling the war: "We have found a number of instances of coverage
that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information
that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently
qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged." As a result, its own handbook
adopted in the wake of that historic journalistic debacle states that
"anonymity is a last resort."
But 12 years after Miller left, you can pick up that same paper on any given
day and the chances are high that you will find reporters doing exactly the
same thing. In fact, its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, regularly
lambasts the paper for doing so. Granting anonymity to government officials
and then uncritically printing what these anonymous officials claim,
treating it all as Truth, is not an aberration for the New York Times. With
some exceptions among good NYT reporters, it's an institutional staple for
how the paper functions, even a decade after its editors scapegoated Judy
Miller for its Iraq War propaganda and excoriated itself for these precise
methods.
That the New York Times mindlessly disseminates claims from anonymous
officials with great regularity is, at this point, too well-documented to
require much discussion. But it is worth observing how damaging it continues
to be, because, shockingly, all sorts of self-identified "journalists" -
both within the paper and outside of it - continue to equate un-verified
assertions from government officials as Proven Truth, even when these
officials are too cowardly to attach their names to these claims, as long as
papers such as the NYT launder them.
Let's look at an illustrative example from yesterday to see how this toxic
process works. The New York Times published an article about ISIS by Eric
Schmitt and Ben Hubbard based entirely and exclusively on unproven claims
from officials of the U.S. government and its allies, to whom they (needless
to say) granted anonymity. The entire article reads exactly like an official
press release: Paragraph after paragraph does nothing other than summarize
the claims of anonymous officials, without an iota of questioning,
skepticism, scrutiny or doubt.
Among the assertions mindlessly repeated by the Paper of Record from its
beloved anonymous officials is this one:
Excerpt with data on IS and leaked documents. (photo: The Intercept)
Leave to the side the banal journalistic malpractice of uncritically
parroting the self-serving claims of anonymous officials, supposedly what
the paper is so horrified at Judy Miller for having done. Also leave to the
side the fact that the U.S. government has been anonymously making these
Helping-The-Enemy claims not just about Snowden but about all whistleblowers
for decades, back to Daniel Ellsberg, if not earlier. Let's instead focus on
this: the claim itself, on the merits, is monumentally stupid on multiple
levels: self-evidently so.
To begin with, The TerroristsT had been using couriers and encryption for
many, many years before anyone knew the name "Edward Snowden." Last August,
after NPR uncritically laundered claims that Snowden revelations had helped
The TerroristsT, we reported on a 45-page document that the U.K. government
calls "the Jihadist Handbook," written by and distributed among extremist
groups, which describes in sophisticated detail the encryption technologies,
SIM card-switching tactics and other methods they use to circumvent U.S.
surveillance. Even these 2002/2003 methods were so sophisticated that they
actually mirror GCHQ's own operational security methods for protecting its
communications.
Data covering the "Jihadist Handbook" from 2002-2003. (photo: The Intercept)
This "Jihadist Handbook" was written in 2002 or 2003: more than a full
decade before any Snowden revelations. Indisputably, terrorists have known
for a very long time that the U.S. government and its allies are trying to
intercept their communications, and have long used encryption and other
means to prevent that.
The New York Times' claim that ISIS learned to use couriers as a result of
the Snowden revelations is almost a form of self-mockery. Few facts from
Terrorism lore are more well-known than Osama bin Laden's use of couriers to
avoid U.S. surveillance. A 2011 article from the Washington Post - more than
two years before the first Snowden story - was headlined: "Al-Qaeda couriers
provided the trail that led to bin Laden." It described how "Bin Laden
strictly avoided phone or e-mail communications for fear that they would be
intercepted."
Terrorists have been using such surveillance-avoidance methods for almost
two full decades. In May, we published a 2011 NSA document that quoted Jon
Darby, NSA's then-associate deputy director for counterterrorism, as saying
that "[o]ur loss of SIGINT access to bin Laden actually occurred prior to
9/11 - it happened in 1998."
If one were engaged in journalism, one would include some of these facts in
order to scrutinize, question and express skepticism about the claims of
anonymous officials that ISIS now uses encryption and couriers because of
Snowden reporting. But if one is engaged in mindless, subservient
pro-government stenography, one simply grants anonymity to officials and
then uncritically parrots their facially dubious claims with no doubt or
questioning of any kind. Does anyone have any doubts about what these New
York Times reporters are doing in this article?
There's one more point worth noting about the New York Times' conduct here.
As has been documented many times, Edward Snowden never publicly disclosed a
single document: Instead, he gave the documents to journalists and left it
up to them to decide which documents should be public and which ones should
not be. As I've noted, he has sometimes disagreed with the choices
journalists made, usually on the ground that documents media outlets decided
to publish should have, in his view, not been published.
One of the newspapers that published documents from the Snowden archive is
called "The New York Times." In fact, it is responsible for publication of
some of the most controversial articles often cited by critics as ones that
should not have been published, including ones most relevant to ISIS. When
it comes to claiming credit for Snowden stories, the New York Times is very
good at pointing out that it published some of these documents. But when it
comes to uncritically publishing claims from anonymous officials that
Snowden stories helped ISIS, the New York Times suddenly "forgets" to
mention that it actually made many of these documents known to the world
and, thus, to ISIS. What the New York Times is actually doing in this
article is accusing itself of helping ISIS, but just lacks the honesty to
tell its readers that it did this, opting instead to blame its source for
it. In the NYT's blame-its-source formulation: "The Islamic State has
studied revelations from Edward J. Snowden."
When I was first told about the Sunday Times' now disgraced story claiming
that Russia and China obtained the full Snowden archive, my initial reaction
was that the story was so blatantly inane and so journalistically corrupted
- based exclusively on unproven, self-serving accusations from anonymous
U.K. officials - that it wasn't even worth addressing. I changed my mind and
decided to write about it only when I saw huge numbers of journalists
sitting around on Twitter that night uncritically assuming that these claims
must be True because, after all, government officials said them and a
newspaper printed them.
I went through exactly the same process when I saw this Snowden-helps-ISIS
claim laundered yesterday in the New York Times. I assumed that the
"journalism" here was so glaringly shoddy that nobody needed me to write
about it, and that a few mocking tweets would suffice. Everyone knows by now
to treat anonymous government claims like this critically and not accept
them as true without evidence - or so I reasoned.
But then I began seeing one self-described journalist after the next treat
the accusation from these anonymous officials as tantamount to Proven Truth.
They just started asserting that Snowden's revelations helped ISIS without a
molecule of doubt, skepticism or critical thought. That's what makes this
process so destructive: once the New York Times uncritically publishes a
claim from a government official, even (maybe especially) if anonymous, huge
numbers of "journalists" immediately treat it as Truth. It's shocking to
watch, no matter how common it is.
Here are just a few examples: first, from New York Times reporter Alex
Burns, stating the Snowden-helped-ISIS claim as fact:
Now here's long-time journalist Kurt Andersen, demanding that Snowden be
confronted and made to say whether he regrets this:
Here's a tweet claiming the NYT "reported" this, re-tweeted by long-time NYT
and CNBC journalist John Harwood:
After I noted that the NYT "reported" no such thing but merely uncritically
wrote down what anonymous officials said, here's Harwood explicitly
defending classic stenography as "reporting":
Here's a CNN and Miami Herald columnist, Frida Ghitis, nakedly treating the
anonymous claim as true by blaming Snowden for helping ISIS:
Here's a tweet Business Insider sent to its 1.1 million followers this
morning:
Here's self-proclaimed "terrorism expert" Will McCants mindlessly repeating
it as fact:
And now the bottom-feeding British tabloid Daily Mail has a just-published
screaming, hysterical story based exclusively on the anonymous assertion
laundered by the New York Times:
The British tabloid Daily Mail's headline for a New York Times story.
(photo: The Intercept)
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. But it's not
just their shoddy journalism that drives this but the mentality of other
"journalists" who instantly equate anonymous official claims as fact.
The peak of the Sunday Times' humiliation was when its lead reporter, Tom
Harper, went on CNN and expressly admitted that the paper did nothing other
than mindlessly print anonymous government claims as fact without having any
idea if they were true. What made Harper a laughingstock was this sentence,
captured in a Vine by The Guardian's HannahJane Parkinson (to listen, click
the "unmute" button in the lower right-hand corner):
