Greenwald: Approve or Disapprove?

[grantcart]

34. lol that's pretty funny. You do realize that GG wasn't the 1st contact and he had already leaked

material that was widely distributed long before he "came out" publicly with GG. Greenwald did not "break" the story, only the identity.

Before that Snowden had already contacted Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman and was the main source of a series of WP stories.

NPR did a detailed story about the sequence of the original meetings:

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/11/221359323/reporter-had-to-decide-if-snowden-leaks-were-the-real-thing

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/11/221359323/reporter-had-to-decide-if-snowden-leaks-were-the-real-thing

Since the beginning of June, Barton Gellman has been reporting on classified intelligence documents given to him by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. As a result of the Snowden leaks, Gellman and reporter Laura Poitras broke the story of the PRISM program, which mines data from nine U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook.

Gellman, who has been writing for The Washington Post, also found that the NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress expanded the agency's powers in 2008. He revealed that the U.S. has conducted cyber-operations against computer networks in foreign countries — including Iran, Russia, China and North Korea — and reported on the "black budget" used to fund secret programs in America's 16 spy agencies.

"[Snowden] gave these documents, ultimately, to only three journalists. What he said he wanted was for us to use our own judgment and to make sure that his bias was kept out of it so that we could make our own judgment about what was newsworthy and important for the public to know. And he said we should also consider how to avoid harm.

So the facts are that Snowden picked three journalists and developed a repoire with them. Only after that when he made a strategic decision to go "full Monty did he publish via GG.

So yeah "hundreds". Not only are there dozens of qualified American journalists that would have loved to win a Pulitzer (which they will win) there are Australian, Canadian, British and so on.

When GG "published' the full monty he had no problems getting the Guardian to do so.

Your stream of consciousness paranoia about the corporate media notwithstanding there is no evidence that any major outlet wouldn't have loved to have gotten this story. They would have little legal concern as well. While it is against the law to take classified material there is no law against publishing it. The government would have had to try and get an injunction before publication to stop it, something that has only been tried with the Pentagon Papers and failed. As long as the Publisher wasn't involved in actually conspiring to take the material they are on solid first Amendment grounds.