Definitely
and officially pro-establishment
Three of the
four media outlets that received and published large numbers of
secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the
New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S.
government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with
no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which
owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of
accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them —
implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public
interest.
But not the
Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led
campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s
release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial
page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly
demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on
espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a
measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S.
government offers a measure of leniency.”
In doing so,
the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media
history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the
criminal prosecution of its own source — one on whose back the
paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery
against the paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.
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