
The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit - mitchbob
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.html
======
no-dr-onboard
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
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
I used to read the NYT every day. Not anymore, now they are on my "disgraced
media" list.

------
rbecker
> 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](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...](https://reason.com/2020/01/28/1619-project-new-york-times-public-
schools/)

------
mensetmanusman
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.

------
jjk166
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.

~~~
rbecker
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code)

~~~
jjk166
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.

~~~
lern_too_spel
> The NYT is criticizing the Intercept for verifying its documents and showing
> them to the public

No, the NYT is reporting on a newsworthy event. We, as readers, can criticize
The Intercept for bumbling things so badly.

~~~
jjk166
What is the event here? The Reality Winner story happened 3 years ago and was
picked apart thoroughly at the time. The event right now is that the NYT
claims to have acquired secret documents, but since they are not sharing those
documents, nor the testimony of anyone willing to go on record verifying the
documents, that doesn't rise to the level of newsworthy.

I'm not going to claim that The Intercept made no mistakes ever. The fact that
they took on Winner's legal defense bills are a clear sign they took
responsibility for those mistakes and did what they could to make them right.
I would think an institution which reported that there were WMDs in Iraq,
leading directly to a war that killed hundreds of thousands, ruined the lives
of millions more, cost trillions of dollars, and whose full ramifications have
still not been felt, issued nothing more than a belayed mea culpa, and
profited handsomely reporting on the chaos they helped cause would be more
hesitant about dredging up the past mistakes of news organizations.

~~~
lern_too_spel
> What is the event here? The Reality Winner story happened 3 years ago

The event happened three years ago, but the investigation just finished, and
the new information resulting from the investigation include the internal
communications at The Intercept about their screwup. The Globe's reporting on
the Catholic Church's coverup took time to investigate too and wasn't mere
dunking just because they took the time to gather all that information.

> I would think an institution which reported that there were WMDs in Iraq

By that standard, The Intercept should just close up shop. At least the NYT
issues corrections.

