{"id":9112,"date":"2015-06-15T06:05:34","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T11:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9112"},"modified":"2015-06-15T06:05:34","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T11:05:34","slug":"the-sunday-times-snowden-story-is-journalism-at-its-worst-and-filled-with-falsehoods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9112","title":{"rendered":"The Sunday Times’ Snowden Story is Journalism at Its Worst–and Filled With Falsehoods"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sunday Times’ Snowden Story is Journalism at Its Worst–and Filled With Falsehoods<\/a><\/h3>\n

Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it\u2019s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept\u00a0those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they\u2019ve learned no such lesson. That tacticcontinues to be the staple<\/a>\u00a0of how major US and British media outlets \u201creport,\u201d especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reports\u00a0continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials \u2013 laundered through their media \u2013 as gospel, no matter how dubious are the claims or factually false is the reporting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

We now have one of the purest examples of this dynamic. Last night, the Murdoch-owned\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em>\u00a0published their lead front-page Sunday article,\u00a0headlined<\/a>\u00a0\u201cBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.\u201d Just as the conventional media narrative was shifting to pro-Snowden sentiment in the wake of\u00a0a key court ruling<\/a>\u00a0and a new surveillance law, the article\u00a0(behind a\u00a0paywall<\/a>: full text\u00a0here<\/a>) claims in the first paragraph that these two adversaries\u00a0\u201chave cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries,\u00a0according to senior officials<\/strong>\u00a0in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.\u201d It continues:<\/span><\/p>\n

Western intelligence agencies say<\/strong>\u00a0they have been forced into the rescue operations after Moscow gained access to more than 1m classified files held by the former American security contractor, who fled to seek protection from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after mounting one of the largest leaks in US history.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sunday Times’ Snowden Story is Journalism at Its Worst–and Filled With Falsehoods Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it\u2019s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[5437,442,462,512,4546,1426,3180,655,694,3007,6377,1250],"class_list":["post-9112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-glenn-greenwald","tag-iraq","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-mi6","tag-misinformation","tag-narrative","tag-propaganda","tag-russia","tag-snowden","tag-sunday-times","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9113,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9112\/revisions\/9113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}