Thread by @aaronjmate

This story repeats a problem w/ coverage of Reality Winner from the start: it focuses on the The Intercept's mishandling of the source, but ignores the derelict way it hyped & misreported her leak to pander to fashionable Russiagate mania. nytimes.com/2020/09/13/bus…

If you're going to be honest about the Reality Winner leak, you have to acknowledge that she probably would've been caught even if The Intercept hadn't massively screwed up. @benyt acknowledges that, but buries it deep in the story.

That's not say TI didn't make big errors, & they're detailed in this story. But while there is ample scrutiny of TI's handling of Reality Winner, there has been very little scrutiny of its reporting of her leak: massively misreporting it. I detailed here:

The Intercept alleged a scary Russian hacking effort that in reality amounted to spear-phishing emails. And they completely ignored that the leaked NSA doc disclaimed that attribution to Russian is not based on "Confirmed Information," but on an "Analyst Judgement."

So in short, they exaggerated significance of the Reality Winner leak by ignoring & distorting what it actually said. That to me is just as egregious journalist malpractice as their handling of Reality Winner. But that part is ignored because the story fed into Russiagate mania.

The only time an Intercept reporter has been challenged to explain why the Reality Winner leaks are significant, and what they actually prove, came when I interviewed James Risen in 2018. Watch his inability to do so (before he hangs up & runs away): therealnews.com/stories/what-d…

NYT story contains a clue about why The Intercept mishandled & misreported the story. The reporters on it "said they’d been pushed to rush the story to publication." That "push" could only have come from editors, likely EIC Betsy Reed. Why would Betsy want to rush the story?

I think Betsy Reed wanted to "rush the story to publication" because she's a Russiagater who wants to distance The Intercept from its reputation for Russiagate skepticism, due to Glenn Greenwald's vindicated columns on the topic. That imperative is a major part of the story here.

Here's The Intercept's editor Betsy Reed -- in the New Yorker -- mocking Russiagate skeptics who lack "nuance or intelligence"; believe "anything that the [IC] says can’t possibly be true"; & doubt Trump-Russia ties, which we know of "thanks to Mueller."

Fast forward to the Mueller probe, and here's Betsy Reed trying to rationalize the fact that Mueller found no collusion by explaining that what he really found was "plenty of evidence of this kind of soft loose type of collusion." Soft and loose indeed.

So that to me is The Intercept's issue here: a self-described "fearless and adversarial" website, founded in part to challenge national security state deceptions, is headed by an editor who 100% bought into one of the biggest national security state deceptions since the Iraq war.

That's what led to screw-ups like Reality Winner. And it's also meant TI promotes national security state narratives on key stories -- Assange, the Syrian proxy war,
other current Dirty Wars -- instead of challenging them. And they severely restrict space for dissenting views.

I don't want to minimize the crucial work TI does on other issues. On that note, it's pretty rich to see @benyt, in a passage about how TI has lost its "swagger," casually mention that Glenn & colleagues' reporting "reshaped [Brazil's] politics." That sounds swagger-worthy.

BTW, for a sober look at the actual evidence for claims of Russian hacking of US voting systems, @GarethPorter has a good new piece at @TheGrayzoneNews: thegrayzone.com/2020/09/13/dar…

"Russia hacked US voting systems" is a familiar Russiagate tale of media malpractice. DHS officials said in 2017 that "21 states were *potentially* targeted by Russian government cyber actors" & that attribution to Russia was not "definitive." All ignored. dhs.gov/news/2017/06/2…