A convenient one, it seems.
Heāll fit in nicely with existing culture.
He actually used that excuse? āBut, but, the story was hard, so I just decided not to let anyone write itā¦ā
Arenāt reporters supposed to be able to write stories about stuff they arenāt subject matter experts in, by calling up on sources for assistance if need be, more or less all the time? And, of course, in this case two of his reporters already had the story, and the messy wiring diagrams boiled down to a fairly concise punchline.
Thatās one of those excuses thatās so bad it makes things worse.
Well I donāt know we should be too judgmental. The ānot because of official pressureā part of the explanation is just dumb and would have been better not offered as an excuse; but surely weāve always known that the editors, owners, and advertisers of established media are expected to play nice with the guvmint men. Who knew that this time they wouldnāt have to?
When asked for comment, Mr Baquet was heard to reply:
āIs that a question? What does that even mean? Iām afraid I canāt unpack your overly technical use of language.ā
Its worth noting that Snowden specifically avoided involving the New York Times because it sat on the warrantless surveillance program story for a year, and only ran the story once a reporter involved threatened to tell the story in a book.
So yes, it does seem like the New York Times is happy to do what the government tells it to do.
The New York Times is a paper that I read because itās willing to run the hard stories, and put in the depth it takes to do real coverage of complex issues. (And yeah, thatās mostly an opinion of what they were like decades ago rather than today.)
The underlying āsnarkinessā of the article is filled with unstated questions about the ability of Dean Baquet to assume the position recently held by Jill Abramson. What supposedly transpired in 2000 under his helm at the LA Times has little to do with whether he will pursue credible stories while steering the NY Times. There is ever so much more to question about whether the āpowers that beā at the NY Times will overcome its past indiscretions parlayed by Judith Miller or Bill Kellerās refusal to run a story about the NSA in 2004. Truthfully, I expect far better from Boing Boing, especially seeing that there are so very few sites that try to be unbiased in their reportage.
But Dean Baquet had little to do with the decision not to run the story about the overreach of the NSA in 2004.
Noā¦what he said was āwe canāt understand the value of the story as presentedā. Funny thatā¦len Greenwald even questioned the story from Edward Snowden, originally. Context peopleā¦CONTEXT!
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