On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015

Glenn Greenwald vs. Walter Pincus

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who published Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, has written an open letter to the Washington Post's Walter Pincus calling on him to correct a column that he says is riddled with factual errors and "grounded solely in baseless innuendo."

Pincus's column, published online Monday, questioned whether Snowden had taken a job at Booz Allen Hamilton in order to gather classified documents about the NSA's surveillance, and whether or not he had been encouraged to do so by WikiLeaks.

Today, Greenwald argues that Pincus misled his readers by ignoring the facts. Pincus argues that Snowden had been with Booz Allen for less than three months; Greenwald points out that Snowden "has worked more or less continuously at the NSA for various contractors since 2009."

(WATCH: POLITICO series ‘On Media’ with Dylan Byers)

"By the time he contacted us, he had already been working at the NSA with extensive top secret authorization for almost four years," Greenwald writes. "To conceal this vital fact from your readers - in order to leave them with the false impression that he only began working at the NSA after he spoke with me, Laura Poitras and your Washington Post colleague Bart Gellman - is deceitful and reckless."

Greenwald also criticizes Pincus for small factual errors: Pincus seems to have inaccurately stated that Greenwald wrote a column for the WikiLeaks Press’s blog (he wrote the column for Salon) and stated that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had discussed the new NSA surveillance program ahead of Greenwald's first story (Assange, Greenwald argues, was referring to a previous spying program.)

Pincus did not immediately respond to POLITICO's request for comment, but the truth is that the factual errors Greenwald takes issue with here are sort of negligible. The larger issue, the real issue, Greenwald only addresses at the end:

Our NSA stories have been published and discussed in countless countries around the world, where they have sparked shock, indignation and demands for investigation. So revealingly, it is only American journalists - and them alone - who have decided to focus their intrepid journalistic attention not on the extremist and legally dubious surveillance behavior of the US government and serial deceit by its top officials, but on those who revealed all of that to the world.

News about Snowden has been eclipsing news about the substance of his leaks for weeks*, but Pincus is particularly suited to the task of grand inquisitor. Remember, it was Pincus who went against the entire press corps for what he believed was an overheated and sanctimonious response to the Justice Department’s subpoenas of Associated Press reporters’ phone records.

Pincus did get some things wrong in his column -- embarassingly so, according to Greenwald. Nevertheless, Greenwald is fighting the uphill battle. Despite how troubling the NSA's surveillance practices are, the American people seem content to live with them. Moreover, the news cycle has moved on, dominated now by The Zimmerman trial, Egypt, et al. Finally, Greenwald doesn't seem to have any more big revelations up his sleeve.

Maybe that's not the way it should be, but that's the way it is.

UPDATE (10:10 a.m.): Greenwald emails POLITICO: "There are many more domestic stories coming, and big ones, and soon."

*Accidentally wrote "months" in an earlier version of this post. Meant "weeks."