My Friday column begins like so:
For the last month or so, we’ve talked a lot about how sloppy, scattered reporting has served to mislead readers — perhaps deliberately — about the details of various bombshell National Security Agency (NSA) stories presented by Glenn Greenwald and others. Outrage-porn and link-bait has on more than one occasion miraculously transformed into factual reality. The following is a case study in how it happens.
On Thursday, I watched a video monologue by Cenk Uygur via the following tweet:
“Millions Of Gigabytes Collected Daily UNDERWATER By US, England http://bit.ly/1aToyme via @CenkUygur”
Millions of gigabytes? That’s a lot. So I watched the video on Cenk’s YouTube channel (posted on July 17). And sure enough, Cenk delivered a report about an article from The Atlantic, titled “The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping,” in which reporter Olga Khazan writes, among other things, that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is tapping into underwater fiber optic cables in order to intercept communication data. (Not to jump too far ahead, but this story should sound familiar to you.)
There’s one major problem with Cenk’s big screamer headline: it’s simply incorrect. [READ MORE]