On Sunday, the New York Times published a report by its media columnist, Ben Smith, supposedly shedding new light on The Intercept’s failures to protect Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency employee who is now serving time in federal prison for leaking a document to The Intercept in 2017. The article is about neither Reality Winner nor the documents she leaked nor the legal controversies over her prosecution and conviction. Instead, Smith’s concern is with The Intercept itself, as the title suggests: “The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit.” In fact, the first eight paragraphs of the column are not about Winner but about the internal “chaos” that has ostensibly plagued The Intercept since its launch in February 2014.
To be sure, news media outlets frequently write stories about each other, often with good reason. But in the case of Smith’s article on The Intercept, important questions arise regarding the originality, angle, and—most importantly—timing of the piece. When these three factors are accounted for, we ought to conclude that the New York Times is actually trying to obfuscate its own history of endangering those it regards as “sources”—most notably Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
As we enter the second week of Julian Assange’s extradition trial, which poses an existential threat to press freedom as we know it, we must remember the New York Times’ role in the social execution of Julian Assange. For a decade, the Times has sought to simultaneously benefit from the scoops made possible by WikiLeaks’ documents and denounce Assange as a mere “source” who supposedly suffers from all manner of character flaws, from being smelly to hating America. Likewise, Ben Smith has personally joined in on the Assange bashing, both before and since joining the Times.
It is within this context that we must understand Smith’s recent criticism of The Intercept. While the rhetorical function of Smith’s column is to reinforce the Times’ own supposed “journalistic responsibility” by diminishing that of The Intercept’s, the material result of Smith’s column is to deflect from the Times’ own history of journalistic irresponsibility at a time in which we are witnessing one of its most harmful results come to fruition—the persecution of Assange.
Smith’s Unoriginal Reporting and Dubious Angle
According to Smith, his reporting is based on “more than 100 pages” of internal documents from The Intercept—including “two internal reports on the Reality Winner incident that have not been made public”—provided “by people who were senior employees in 2017 and contend that the organization failed to hold itself accountable for its mistakes and for what happened to Ms. Winner as a result.” With such privileged access to previously unavailable documents, one might expect Smith’s reporting to provide new insights or a fresh angle in relation to the Winner whistleblowing story.
Yet Smith’s column is neither original nor fresh. It simply reiterates years of the media’s attempts to scandalize the internal operations of The Intercept and fails to credit independent journalists who have already provided deeper insights regarding Winner’s arrest.
Stories about The Intercept’s contentious internal dynamics stretch back to early 2015, when Vanity Fair published an exposé declaring that “First Look’s reliance on high-maintenance personalities made the turmoil it has experienced almost inevitable.” That story was followed immediately by a story published by Politico and written by Ken Silverstein, who described his six months with First Look Media, parent company of The Intercept, as “a slowly unfolding disaster” resulting form “epic managerial incompetence.” Other such stories have appeared over the years, including a New Yorker profile of Glenn Greenwald—which aims primarily to psychologize both his refusal to blindly accept the Russiagate narrative and his apparent clashes with colleges at The Intercept and across the profession—and a Politico article about the effect of The Intercept’s internal ideological divisions on the conflicts among left-of-center political factions in the United States.
Smith traffics in the same sort of gossip but fails to even contribute any new insights. The drama of his account stems form the apparent conflict between The Intercept’s editor in chief, Betsy Reed, and its founders, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras. Yet not only are such conflicts are well known, they are hardly news-worthy in a moment when the entire profession of investigative journalism is threatened by a United States government victory in Assange’s trial.
What’s more, Smith’s analysis is a superficial as his reporting is unoriginal. The most we get from Smith is that the document Winner provided to The Intercept was given to two journalists who failed to handle it in the most secure manner possible.
Incidentally, Smith ignores the broader context surrounding the two journalists in question, Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito. As Ben Norton reported for The Grey Zone in May 2020, Cole and Esposito “played an integral role in the arrest and imprisonment of another source, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou,” who brought to light the CIA’s torture program. The two had previous worked for corporate media outlets, including ABC News and NBC News, where “the vast majority” of their stories “were fed to them by US intelligence officials” and where they “attempted to discredit Snowden, regurgitating information from US intelligence officials.” In January 2020, while Reality Winner languished in prison, Esposito “was promoted to the top communications position in the New York City Police Department.”
By comparing Norton and Smith’s reporting on this story, we see that Norton at least attempts to provide an account of the systemic problems that led to Winner’s arrest while Smith offer nothing but facile platitudes about failure to securely handle a document. Conveniently, Smith completely ignores the connection between corporate media, government agencies, and the culture of militarism at the heart of the scandal.
Thus, given Smith’s column offers no new facts and no compelling narrative, the column must have some other function.
Smith’s History of Bashing Assange and WikiLeaks
Even before joining the New York Times, Ben Smith made it known his contempt for Assange and WikiLeaks. In a November 29, 2010 article for Politico, Smith claimed that WikiLeaks’ intended targets were “U.S. foreign policy, prestige and power.” The article appeared as the first stories of what would be called Cablegate were appearing in the media, and Smith got out in front of of the narrative, suggesting that “the documents—most of which weren’t classified ‘secret’—don’t actually reveal particularly ugly or surprising diplomatic behavior.” Apparently, the lesson of Smith’s article is that Assange is primarily driven by his dislike of the United States and that his efforts to embarrass the United States had been futile.
Interestingly, Smith’s article anticipated the official State Department and New York Times narrative on Cablegate. As documents published by WikiLeaks reveal, on November 29, 2010, Sidney Blumenthal emailed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and suggested that “The Wikileaks documents can be cast as reflecting a positive light on the U.S. government and diplomacy.”
On December 2, 2010, the New York Times published a piece by columnist Roger Cohen, who condemned Assange and praised U.S. diplomats, arguing that “perhaps the biggest shock of all is just how professional, sober and short on embarrassment all these cables are and just how much they conform with the world as we already knew it.” Referring to Assange as a “thin-skinned… self-styled foe of the United States,” as a “brainy naïf” and a “loose cannon,” Cohen claims that Cablegate “has done significant damage to the courageous work of America’s diplomats and may endanger lives.”
That afternoon, Blumenthal emailed Clinton a link to Cohen’s article, to which she responded: “Not bad—thx.” The apparent coordination between the State Department and the New York Times is only one piece in a broader relationship between Clinton and the corporate press. What is important here, however, is the fact that, given the striking similarity between Smith and Cohen’s takes on Cablegate, Clinton would have likely appreciated Smith’s attempt to buttress the government’s image in a time of shocking leaks.
In addition to to his spontaneous articulation of the Official State-Media Narrative in the Cablegate era, in typical partisan fashion, Smith has also compared Assange to Donald Trump. In October 2016, under Smith’s editorial direction, Buzzfeed News published an article titled “Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange,” authored by James Ball, coauthor of the eminently terrible book WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era (coauthored with Charlie Beckett). Smith promoted the article on his Twitter feed, adding the comment, “On Assange’s Trump-like mastery of the art of bullshit.”
Since he began writing as the Times’ media columnist, Smith has published forty-two weekly columns, none of which even mentions Assange. And now that Assange’s trial is under way, Smith feels compelled to resurrect an old issue in order to smear his employer’s competition by scandalizing editorial room debates instead of reporting on the ongoing rampant legal abuses in the trial of a fellow journalist. Given his position as the media columnist of the self-styled “paper of record” in the United States, one might conclude that Smith has a duty to aggressively report on and denounce the persecution of a fellow journalist, a persecution that threatens his entire profession. He has instead chosen this moment to engage in petty gossip about an industry rival.
Smith’s Obfuscation of the NYT’s Betrayal of Assange
In the context of Assange’s trial, Ben Smith’s criticism on The Intercept’s apparent procedural and moral failure to protect Reality Winner its source conveniently creates a narrative situation in which The Intercept staff and those sympathetic to them will be on the defensive. “Failing to protect an anonymous leaker is a cardinal sin in journalism,” Smith sanctimoniously proclaims, “though the remarkable thing in this instance is that The Intercept didn’t seem to try to protect its source.” “The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report,” he adds, “ignoring the most basic security precautions.”
My intent here is not to weigh in on the debate about The Intercept and Reality Winner, for as Smith’s column demonstrates, there is little new to say about it. However, if we buy into Smith’s attempt to control the narrative, we risk diverting our attention away from Assange’s extradition hearing and, just as importantly, we run the risk of accepting a spokesperson from the New York Times as an authority on journalism ethics. The Times’ treatment of Assange over the years suggests that the “paper of record” has no moral authority when it comes to the topic of source protection.
Already in January 2011, while WikiLeaks was partnering with the New York Times to publish the Iraq War Logs and the State Department cables, the Times’s then-executive editor Bill Keller penned an 8,000-word screed, replete with ad hominem attacks against Assange, making it clear that he did not consider Assange a member of the media. “I do not regard Assange as a partner,” Keller insisted, “and I would hesitate to describe what WikiLeaks does as journalism.”
Most importantly, Keller repeatedly and openly refers to Assange as a “source.” Here are the representative passages (with emphasis added):
The Guardian suggested…that The New York Times be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source agreed. Was I interested? I was interested…the project also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile (and ultimately openly hostile to The Times and The Guardian)…We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator, but he was a man who clearly had his own agenda…we were dealing with a mass of classified material and a source who acted like a fugitive, changing crash pads, e-mail addresses and cellphones frequently…On conference calls, we spoke in amateurish code. Assange was always “the source”…The Times’s relationship with our source had gone from wary to hostile…Throughout this experience we have treated Assange as a source…as any reporter or editor can attest, sources are rarely pure or simple, and Assange was no exception…As 2010 wound down…regular contact with our source, was coming to a close.
Likewise, Keller twice refers to Chelsea Manning as Assange’s “source” while her trial was ongoing: “the suspected source of the video [Collateral Murder], as well as the military dispatches and the diplomatic cables to come, was a disillusioned U.S. Army private first class named [Chelsea] Manning, who had been arrested and was being kept in solitary confinement…Another time [Assange] called to tell me how much he disliked our profile of [Chelsea] Manning, the Army private suspected of being the source of WikiLeaks’s most startling revelations.”
While Smith complains that The Intercept “published the document, complete with the identifying markings, on the internet,” making it easy to identify Reality Winner as the source of the leak, Keller openly named his “source”—and the source of his “source”—for all the world to see. Keller made no pretense to protect his source; instead, he willingly and unabashedly sacrificed his source to mollify the United States government. While the The Intercept may have made careless procedural mistakes in the Winner case, the Times cynically and unapologetically threw Assange under the imperial bus.
Keller’s reckless sacrifice of his “source” was no idiosyncratic decision, for the Times’ current editorial board has continued the tradition of Assange-sacrifice. On the day of Assange’s arrest, Donald Trump’s Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging Assange with one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, alleging that Assange attempted to help Chelsea Manning “hack” into a Pentagon computer. Notwithstanding its otherwise obsessive opposition to Trump, the New York Times editorial board cheered the arrest and indictment. “The case of Mr. Assange could help draw a sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime,” the board wrote, and the case would confirm “the distinction between a journalist exposing abuse of power through leaked materials—something traditional newspapers like the Times do all the time—and a foreign agent seeking to undermine the security of the United States through theft or subterfuge.”
Of course, once the Trump administration revealed that it was also charging Assange under the Espionage Act, the Times board selfishly backtracked, writing that “The new indictment is a marked escalation in the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, one that could have a chilling effect on American journalism as it has been practiced for generations. It is aimed straight at the heart of the First Amendment.”
Again, we see a marked distinction between the The Intercept’s response to the arrest of Reality Winner and the New York Times’ response to the arrest of Julian Assange. While The Intercept conducted an internal investigation, revised its policies, issued an apology, and funded Winner’s legal defense, the Times at best ignores Assange’s persecution and at worst celebrates and contributes to it. Whether The Intercept’s response to Winner’s arrest has been sufficient is a matter of debate, one that need not be taken up here. But that Smith has the audacity to now, at this moment, chastise The Intercept for its handling of the arrest of Reality Winner, is utterly laughable, and no one ought to take him seriously.
Towards an Ethical Reform of News Media
The influential communication scholar James Carey once argued that “The ethics of journalism often seems to be a cover, a means of avoiding the deeper questions of journalism as a practice in order to concentrate on a few problems in which there is general agreement.” But the issue is, Carey explained, that journalism faces deep problems which were not to be solved but dissolved, “dissolved into a new set of practices, a new way of conceiving what journalism is and how one ought to go about it.”
Assange shares Carey’s conviction: “The condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I don’t think it can be reformed. I don’t think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something that’s better.”
But for news media to be reformed, those who violate basic ethical standards must be held accountable. To be sure, Ben Smith agrees. In the case of Reality Winner, Smith says, “a key question was who to blame for this catastrophe and what consequences they should suffer.” Indeed. Yet when we recognize the New York Times‘ contribution to the ongoing going catastrophe of the decade-long persecution of Assange, which has now crescendoed in an extradition trail that places journalism as we know it in existential danger, we are forced to turn that question back upon Smith and ask: Who at the New York Times is to blame for this catastrophe and what consequences they should suffer?
“Newspaper fire orange” by NS Newsflash is licensed under CC BY 2.0