UK’s Suppression Of Freedom Of The Press Drives Guardian To Partner With NYT On Snowden Reporting


Mike Masnick
Techdirt
August 24, 2013

With the Guardian forced on orders directly from the Prime Minister’s office to physically destroy some hard drives with the Ed Snowden documents on them, the Guardian made it clear that the reporting on the leaks would continue, but out of its NY offices, rather than the London ones (and, of course, via Glenn Greenwald in Brazil and Laura Poitras in Germany). However, another bit of fallout from all of this is that the Guardian has teamed up with its nominal “competitor,” the NY Times to share some (not all) of the documents and to work together on the reporting of what’s in them.

Amusingly, this comes just after a NYT editor argued (somewhat ridiculously) that the NYT has done more to advance the story than any other publication after the very first stories from The Guardian and the Washington Post. That statement is laughable. While the NYT has done some very good reporting on all of this, the Washington Post and the Guardian have continued to “break” a variety of big stories from the documents. The NYT has certainly added to the coverage, and added very important details to some of those stories, but it’s been way, way, way behind. It will be interesting to see what happens now. Of course, one of the reasons why Snowden says he didn’t go to the NYT originally, was due to stories of how they held onto some other stories, such as the original story about warrantless wiretapping, which it held for many months at the request of the feds.