Media Hypocrisy: When DC Insiders Leak Gov't Talking Points About NSA, No One Has A Cow

from the how-about-that... dept

If you haven't seen it yet, Glenn Greenwald gave a fantastic speech last week about all of the NSA surveillance leaks. The whole speech is about an hour long, but I wanted to highlight one key point, in which Greenwald discusses how the leaks haven't just outed the NSA surveillance, but the subservience of the DC press to the government they cover. The embed below should start right at the moment he discusses this, but if not, it's at 42:20:

Part of what he discusses (around 45:45) is about the conversation where David Gregory asked Greenwald why he shouldn't be arrested for "aiding and abetting" the leaks of confidential surveillance info. The ridiculousness wasn't just in the question, but that in that very same conversation, when Greenwald had brought up the secret FISA court order that supposedly called out the NSA for failing to abide by the 4th Amendment. Gregory insisted that his "government sources" had told him what was in that secret ruling, and he proceeded to lay out what he believed was in that ruling (which Greenwald insists was factually inaccurate). However, as he notes, here was David Gregory, effectively "leaking" a classified FISA Court ruling (wrongly) based on a "leak" from an administration official. And yet, no one seemed concerned about that -- just about whether or not Greenwald should go to jail.