In an editorial that leaves many scratching their heads in confusion, The Washington Post’s editorialized on Saturday that not only should NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden not be pardoned, he should be prosecuted for espionage. The other three publications that published details of the documents provided by Mr. Snowden all called for him to be pardoned. After all, as one of their sources they followed the expected protocol of any news organization in seeking to protect him from future prosecution.
What makes the editorial incredibly bizarre is that it was The Washington Post itself that decided to publish details on the very programs that they are now claiming “disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering” and may have caused “tremendous” damage to national security.
Snowden, unsure of his own ability or wisdom to determine what secret NSA programs should be revealed to the public, left that choice to the four news organizations he provided the secret documents to. One of those news organizations was The Washington Post, which chose to publish stories which it now claims undermined legitimate and legal intelligence gathering.
One such program, called PRISM, a secret surveillance program that collects internet communications from nine major US internet companies, was revealed in a Washington Post article on June 7, 2013. The details revealed in the story would later be the basis of future Post pieces that would eventually land the paper a Pulitzer Prize.
While Snowden obviously is the one who leaked documents revealing the secret NSA programs, he was not the one who decided which programs and details were published for all the world to see. That decision was made by The Washington Post along with The New York Post, The Guardian, and The Intercept.
The irony of the editorial is that the one program The Washington Post believes was justifiably exposed–the vast collection of domestic metadata using telephone records–wasn’t even part of the Post’s coverage of the exposed NSA clandestine programs. The metadata program was exposed by The Guardian.
The editorial is likely to be remembered as a turning point in the tenets of American journalism. Never before has a US news organization called for the prosecution of one of their sources, especially when the information provided by that source resulted in winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps we can attribute fear or career advancement as the prime reason why so many news organizations colluded with the George W. Bush administration in helping to whip up support for the Iraqi invasion of 2003, but what could possibly explain why The Washington Post would turn its back on centuries of journalistic ethics and tradition and seek to have one of its own sources imprisoned?
If one were observing this from another country it might look as though the offices of The Washington Post were taken over by loyal government bureaucrats in the middle of the night and turned the newspaper into a US version of Pravda. When one considers the depth of their betrayal to one of their own sources, perhaps such an explanation is not too far from the truth.
