There’s one positive thing I can write about The Guardian‘s handling of the NSA/Snowden saga. They know how to control the narrative. No sooner had a variety of mitigating details come to light about the airport detention and interrogation of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner and top secret document courier for The Guardian, when another article shifted the discussion to an entirely new “bombshell” story.
Alan Rusbridger, the publication’s editor-in-chief, wrote an opinion piece about Miranda’s brush with U.K. authorities and the government’s escalation of its so-called attack on journalists (he noted, however, that Miranda isn’t a journalist). The post went on-and-on for eight paragraphs with the usual hand-wringing about the airport incident and the general atmosphere surrounding the reporting of this ongoing NSA/Snowden story.
And then, nine paragraphs deep into this article, Rusbridger described a cloak-and-dagger event that would usually command a banner headline article — a top story in any other publication, but for some reason it was buried in this Miranda screed. Rusbridger wrote that a goon squad from the British government apparently forced Rusbridger to destroy the publication’s computers in the basement of The Guardian‘s offices.
Here’s how Rusbridger said it all went down… [CONTINUE READING]