Tea at Trianon: Snowden and the British Press

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Snowden and the British Press

From The Atlantic:

Of the three English-language newspaper websites with the highest readerships, two are British.
The number one spot has been occupied since last January by the Mail Online, an industrial-sized feedbag of celebrity titillation and gossip, with a ComScore rating of 50.2 million monthly unique visitors worldwide for May. Currently in at number two is The New York Times, with 46.2 million. Then comes The Guardian, which had 40.9 million last month.

That was before Edward Snowden arrived on the scene. According to internal analytics The Guardian provided to me -- June 10, the day after Snowden revealed his identity on The Guardian's website, was the biggest traffic day in their history, with an astonishing 6.97 million unique browsers. Within a week of publishing the NSA files, The Guardian website has seen a 41-percent increase in U.S. desktop unique visitors (IP addresses loading the desktop site) and a 66-percent rise in mobile traffic. On June 10, for the first time in the paper's history, their U.S. traffic was higher than their UK traffic.

The publication of the NSA documents represented the first time since the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 that "top secret" classified documents were made public - nothing in the files leaked by Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks in 2010 rated higher than "secret." They were leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, and a veteran team of reporters led by Editor-in-Chief of Guardian US Janine Gibson was convened to shape the raw data into the story. I met Gibson for an interview in The Guardian's airy SoHo loft office on Wednesday. It is furnished identically to the paper's London headquarters in Kings Cross, where I worked during 2009-11; white walls, shiny new iMacs and orthopaedic chairs. The staff is comparatively small -- Guardian US employs just 57 people, 29 of them journalists.

Gibson offers me a cup of Yorkshire Gold tea brought over from England. "Glenn got [the story] first, and called me up," she tells me. "But a lot of this is difficult to talk about over open communications. You're like, 'hang on a minute. ... I'm not sure that Skype is a very very good idea.' So we talked in broad terms, and then very quickly got to the next stage where a certain amount of bona fides were being established, and then to: 'Right. I think you just -- get on a plane. Get on a plane.' So he came up here and we talked, and he showed me a very small amount of establishing material, and [we] got very very excited very fast."

Gibson sent Greenwald, along with Ewan McAskill, The Guardian's former diplomatic editor and D.C. bureau chief and a reporter of some 30 years standing, on a plane to Hong Kong to meet Snowden the following morning, at the same time bringing some investigative reporters out to New York from the London office to help process the story. By June 5 they were ready to publish the first story: the FISA order requisitioning Verizon phone data. From Wednesday to Saturday The Guardian published a new scoop each day, and on Sunday June 10 Snowden revealed himself as the whistleblower, explaining his rationale for the leak in a video interview with Greenwald hosted on the Guardian US site.

Greenwald had been working for The Guardian for less than a year, coming from Salon.com in August 2012, but he was already a well-known figure; a trained lawyer, a strident campaigner against the Patriot Act, and an award-winning journalist and author with three books in The New York Times bestseller list. The pedigree, however, does not appear to have impressed The New York Times, which in its coverage of the leak uncharitably referred to The Guardian as a "British news-site" and Greenwald as a "blogger." (Read entire article.)