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posted by n1 on Tuesday June 16 2015, @08:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the following-orders dept.

Techdirt has already written about the massive problems with the Sunday Times' big report claiming that the Russians and Chinese had "cracked" the encryption on the Snowden files (or possibly just been handed those files by Snowden) and that he had "blood on his hands" even though no one has come to any harm. It also argued that David Miranda was detained after he got documents from Snowden in Moscow, despite the fact that he was neither in Moscow, nor had met Snowden (a claim the article quietly deleted). That same report also claimed that UK intelligence agency MI6 had to remove "agents" from Moscow because of this leak, despite the fact that they're not called "agents" and there's no evidence of any actual risk. So far, the only official response from News Corp. the publisher of The Sunday Times (through a variety of subsidiaries) was to try to censor the criticism of the story with a DMCA takedown request.

Either way, one of the journalists who wrote the story, Tom Harper, gave an interview to CNN which is quite incredible to watch. Harper just keeps repeating that he doesn't know what's actually true, and that he was just saying what the government told him -- more or less admitting that his role here was not as a reporter, but as a propagandist or a stenographer.

[Video]: http://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/06/14/tom-harper-nsa-files-snowden-howell-intv-nr.cnn/video/playlists/intl-latest-world-videos/

[Also Covered By]: The Intercept


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday June 16 2015, @12:39PM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Tuesday June 16 2015, @12:39PM (#196829) Homepage Journal

    Almost all journalism works that way today. Staff at even the larger organizations is pretty thin on the ground. If you manage to get the interest of a journalist, they will expect you to have a pre-written text for them to use. They may change around a couple of words, but if it gets used, it will likely be almost exactly what you wrote.

    It's no different on the news front. Pick any news article, big or little. Copy a key sentence and put it into google. You'll find the same article appearing all over the place. Someone wrote it, and everyone else printed it. The interesting bit is trying to figure out where it originated, and why it was written.

    Certainly any article with a political angle was written with a specific political goal in mind. Neutral reporting pretty much doesn't exist. The same in this case: this is a pretty obvious attack on Snowdon and the credibility of his whistleblowing. Scripted by the UK government, likely at the behest of the US government.

    Tom Harper was a sock puppet - no surprise at all. The interesting question is: why he has now admitted this?

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday June 16 2015, @04:28PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday June 16 2015, @04:28PM (#196919)

    >Tom Harper was a sock puppet - no surprise at all. The interesting question is: why he has now admitted this?

    Maybe he began to consider the long-term implications of the policies he was helping to whitewash? Did he maybe have a child recently? Or perhaps his conscience just finally started bothering him? Sure, those are typically surgically removed when joining the modern media, but the procedure usually isn't as thorough as when performed on major politicians, and sometimes it does grow back.

    Or, to be more cynical, how have his ratings been doing lately? Has he fallen out of the limelight? Could just be a classic case of "there's no such thing as bad publicity" thinking.