The opening scene of House, M.D. S2E10, “Failure to Communicate”, takes place in a newsroom. Our soon-to-be patient, a famous journalist lauding his longtime editor for backing him up when pursued by the ravenous dogs of the state, sniffing out the name of one of his gun-running sources.
“Greta taught me there’s two things you never give up: one’s rock and roll,” he says, “the other’s a source.”
He goes on to collapse, whack his head on the desk, and inexplicably come down with verbal aphasia — he can speak, but the words his brain grasps at don’t make any sense, nor do written symbols.
The symptoms, ironic as they are, are less interesting to me than the ethical code that the writers perceived journalists to follow. I’m writing this at 3 AM after binging House for a few hours, so this probably won’t make as much sense to you as it does to me, but I enjoy stream of consciousness writing. This episode reminded me of the case of Daniel Hale, the Air Force analyst who leaked revelatory and embarrassing documents on drone warfare to The Intercept. He is currently incarcerated in a Communications Management Unit in federal prison.
How the Air Force identified Hale is not exactly public information. I could probably find it by digging through court records, but this is a blog post, not an article, so I’ll leave it at that. I didn’t find any flack accusing The Intercept of ratting him out either. I saw someone accuse them of doing so on Twitter though, so obviously that’s what happened.
Anyway, that brings me (circuitously) to Jack Teixeira, another Air Force document leaker. He didn’t communicate with a reporter, like Hale, nor did he use Tor to cover his tracks, also like Hale. Instead, he posted the digital files to a Discord server with his gaming friends. And despite that, it was the New York Times that tracked him down first — their reporting led the feds to Teixeira’s house. The documents he leaked had numbers for Ukrainian casualties; even if they were unreliable, that’s a huge secret, and has massive implications on the U.S. involvement in Ukraine.
Instead of trying to get a hold of all the documents Teixeira had, the NYT did the feds’ jobs for them. Now, I know Teixeira was not a source, but what does that say about the self-perceived role of the Times in regards to classified information about the Ukrainian war effort?
I don’t have the energy to go through the whole explanation, so I’ll just skip to the good part: the New York Times is an imperial lapdog, the propaganda and investigative arm of the Pentagon, not just a conscious supporter of U.S. foreign policy but an active participant in its execution. Their absurdly irresponsible coverage of Nazism in the Ukrainian army (which they just barely acknowledge) is more evidence of this, blah blah blah, I’m tired and it’s bedtime. Maybe I’ll write more (and perhaps even higher quality) posts about this, but for now:
The Times of today is a lifeless husk of the institution that published the Pentagon Papers in the 70s. Journalism is dead and the Times killed it.
Irony Poison 