NY Times and Ben Smith Went After The Intercept for Source Protection. They Didn't Examine Their Own Source Prosecutions.

On Sunday night, star New York Times media reporter Ben Smith published a story about how Reality Winner, an NSA source for The Intercept, was sentenced to over five years in prison after leaking a confidential report to the investigative outlet. Smith argued convincingly that The Intercept failed to take proper safeguards to protect their source, and the site acknowledges institutional errors were made. Where the story missed the mark was in neglecting to mention the fact that in recent years sources for both the New York Times and Buzzfeed have also been prosecuted for leaking; Smith was editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News from 2011 until earlier this year.

In 2015, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was convicted of leaking to the New York Times "about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program." Sterling was sentenced to 42 months in prison and served over two years before he was released in early 2018.

Earlier this year, former U.S. treasury official Natalie Edwards pled guilty to one count of conspiracy after "leaking confidential financial reports disclosing information related to Russia and President Donald Trump’s associates" to Buzzfeed in 2018. Edwards faces between zero and six months in prison as part of her plea.

In 2018, former head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee James Wolfe was convicted of lying to the FBI about communications with reporters. One of the reporters was Ali Watkins, who covered the Senate Intelligence Committee for Buzzfeed among other stops. Wolfe and Watkins had an affair that was covered in-depth by the Times. Ultimately, Wolfe was sentenced to two months in prison.

Maybe Smith and the New York Times believe that their reporting processes in these three collective instances played no role in their sources getting prosecuted. However, even if that's the case they should not have omitted these stories, which are a matter of public record and not ancient history. If they're going to go after a competing media outlet, they owe it to readers to grapple with their own experiences of government sources getting busted.

Smith did not respond to a request for comment from Outkick asking why these facts were not included in his story, and if there was a clarification for whether he believed they were not relevant context.




Ben Smith’s column dramatically understates the impact of The Intercept’s aggressive journalism and independent reporting in a range of areas, from the elimination of environmental regulations, police abuses, and the Trump administration’s war on undocumented immigrants and its catastrophic response to a global pandemic, to national politics, technology and surveillance, and the ongoing wars fought by United States and its allies. Notably, last fall, we published a major, highly sensitive investigative project based on anonymously sourced materials — The Iran Cables — in partnership with the Times. And the Times itself earlier this year heralded our yearlong exposés from 2019 into 2020 about the Bolsonaro government as “what a free press is supposed to do: They revealed a painful truth about those in power.”