



Depending on which news organization’s reports you happen to be consuming about the airstrike that left 22 people dead at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan over the weekend, you might not know who exactly is responsible. And journalists like Glenn Greenwald think this is a problem.

On his Twitter account and in a piece for The Intercept, Greenwald has taken particular aim at CNN and The New York Times for what he sees as misleading coverage that obscures the now undeniable fact that a U.S. airstrike was responsible for the attack:

We now have an active agent identified in the headline, rather than the passive "Hospital Hit by an Airstrike" https://t.co/oAlj7pd0lS — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 3, 2015

Astonishing that this continues to be the CNN lede on the hospital attack in Afghanistan http://t.co/1Def6ZJkvN pic.twitter.com/ii2q9lP2DA — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 4, 2015

And on Monday, he challenged those news organizations to correct the record:

Now that US has officially admitted carrying out the airstrike, might @nytimes & @CNN find the courage to say this? https://t.co/EK3eqppvGI — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 5, 2015

But so far, he is not liking what he is seeing:

Why would this "group" do something like this to our military? pic.twitter.com/Znxhk71Q1C — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 5, 2015

US media is really outdoing itself on the hospital airstrike — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 5, 2015

Greenwald contrasted CNN and The New York Times’ approaches to that of The Wall Street Journal, which was unequivocal in its headline and lede:

Kudos to @WSJ for writing a straightforward headline & lede – sadly very rare for this incident http://t.co/mbxQXeNYZS — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 4, 2015

“From the start, not even the U.S. military had the audacity to try to obscure that they did this,” Greenwald concludes in his piece. “They left that dirty work to their leading media outlets, which, as usual, are more than eager and happy to comply.”

Read Greenwald’s full report at theintercept.com.

UPDATE — 5:00 p.m. ET: During an appearance on HuffPost Live Monday afternoon, Greenwald called reporting by The New York Times and CNN “even more disgraceful than usual,” adding, “It’s really absolutely shameful how they’ve behaved when it comes to reporting on this story.”

“What it shows is that so many U.S. media outlets, and so many journalists and editors in these outlets, have as their predominant attribute when they do journalism not truth-telling, not objectivity, as they claim, but jingoism, this kind of uber-nationalism, this allegiance to their own government. Either in part because that’s just how they see the world, or in part because they don’t want to alienate the sources they rely [on] inside the government to feed them information,” he said. “But whatever the reason, the reporting from The New York Times has been so atrocious that if you’re a New York Times reader relying exclusively on that paper, you would literally have no idea that the United States is actually the country that perpetrated this attack.”

Watch video below, via HuffPost Live:





[Photo via screengrab]

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