These Modern Times

THREE OF THE FOUR media outlets which received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden – The Guardian, The New York Times and The Intercept – have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which – by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them – implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

  The Intercept

It's not always made expressly clear that Edward Snowden did not make ANY documents public. Edward Snowden turned over everything he had to journalists who shared the documents amongst three major publications: The New York Times, The UK Guardian, and The Washington Post. (Glen Greenwald took documents with him when he later moved from The Guardian to The Intercept.) Editors and publishers of those news outlets then decided which documents to publish. They, not Snowden, revealed the NSA's secret programs.

But not The Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page not only argued today in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — their paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” “accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

In doing so, The Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own paper’s source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against their paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.