NYT Lies About Snowden To Peddle ‘Evil-Leaker’ Propaganda, Then Stealth-Edits When Caught

“That’s just massive ignorance that made it through all their editors…”

When the New York Times wonders why they went from ‘the paper of record’ to BuzzFeed in a suit, they can look no further than this article on whistleblowers written by ‘Diplomatic correspondent’ Michael Crowley – which for 12 hours, despite undergoing a full editorial process, contained major fabrications about whistleblower Edward Snowden, who in 2013 exposed vast domestic and international spying operations run by the NSA and other organizations.

For starters, Crowley wrote that Snowden “handed them off to the website WikiLeaks for publication,” which is a complete lie. Snowden in fact gave the documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald when he was with The Guardian, and the Washington Post – where they went through the editorial process.

Second, Crowley wrote that a disclosure that the NSA was spying on former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone came from the Snowden archive – another total lie. Both of these lies could have been debunked with a 10 second look at Wikipedia. In reality, the Merkel findings were the result of a 2015 internal investigation in the Danish Defense Intelligence Service into the NSA’s role in the partnership, and broken by Reuters.

Source: NYT Lies About Snowden To Peddle ‘Evil-Leaker’ Propaganda, Then Stealth-Edits When Caught

Holy shit: this NYT news article by @michaelcrowley has 2 gigantic, glaring factual errors in the first 3 paragraphs:

1) Snowden didn’t give the archive to WikiLeaks for publication, but rather to me and Laura Poitras.

2) The Merkel story didn’t come from the Snowden archive: https://t.co/NV8Oj3l0ty pic.twitter.com/9beBloZQZN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2023

As Greenwald notes, “This story was published by the NYT 12 hours ago. Numerous top editors who oversaw publication of our reporting — then-Guardian-editor-in-chief @janinegibson and Intercept’s @MargotWilliams — quickly corrected them, but the paper ignored it.”

Of course all journalists and outlets make minor errors but these are major. No journalist has any business writing about the Snowden reporting if they believe WikiLeaks published it. That’s just massive ignorance that made it through all their editors.https://t.co/H8SPQDz42E

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2023

The entire liberal corporate media just banded together to proclaim the TwitterFiles debunked based on 2 minor errors with acronyms (which, as @lhfang proved, were not, in fact, errors). These NYT errors are in a different universe.https://t.co/HgGPebaKhx

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2023

Then, without saying a word, the Times stealth edited the lies out of the article more than 12 hours later.

Just now, the NYT silently deleted its false statements from the article, without bothering to add a correction, an editor’s note or any other indication that this happened.

Just a stealth edit after these errors were up for more than 12 hours, as if it never happened: pic.twitter.com/6GMuFDCBGC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2023

Reactions have been… appropriate.

The New York Times publishing disinformation fits a long-standing pattern of its indefensible deference to the military industrial establishment.

Its reporting on the recent Pentagon leaks, and refusal to cover facts on the Nordstream bombing, each prove the point. https://t.co/ALOapmsSGx

— Shahid Buttar (find me on Substack) (@ShahidForChange) April 14, 2023