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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

Few people were aware that a sale was in the works for the paper, whose reporters have broken such stories as the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandals and disclosures about the National Security Administration’s surveillance program in May.

Claiming credit for the NSA story seems disingenuous at best, especially given their antagonism towards Snowden:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/06/how-washingt...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130702/11474423694/washin...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/10/washing...

EDIT: While acknowledging the WaPo's significant contributions in the early 70s, it seems like they lost their way somewhere along the line:

Washington Post Kills Account of Its Failures in Iraq Reporting and Runs a Defense Instead http://gawker.com/5992158/washington-post-kills-account-of-i...

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It's worthwhile to point out that the people who write editorials and opinion columns for the paper are often firewalled somewhat from the actual journalists, so you can't really reduce it to a single belief that the entire organization has.

Especially a paper like the Washington Post which has a ridiculous number of opinion writers on staff.

I think the WaPo should start a section that's full of Hustler style porn. When people complain about porn in their Washington Post, they can just say "That's a separate department!". TLDR: if you disgrace your sub-organization, you disgrace the entire organization.

Can we have just one thread in HN that doesn't mention Snowden?

Bradley Manning!

I'd settle for a top comment that doesn't mention Snowden.

Yes, it's best we forget the whole affair and move on.

It's actually probably best, from the point of view of dealing with the NSA wiretapping, that we forget about Snowden and focus on what the NSA is still doing.

So the comment was both off topic and toxic towards what it wanted to advance.

Snowden: only thing in the world that matters.

There you go! I just used the "up" and "down" arrows, and lo, it came to pass.

Can't have a 2013 HN discussion thread without "Snowden" or "Google Reader". It's a machine-verifiable stamp of authenticity.

I am only upvoting you because I find your comment actually funny!

(Please do not get rid of any Snowden comments/posts on HN until the Police State is dismantled, hopefully by mid-next week.

Please redirect your shock toward the US government.

And by the way, at the time of writing 27 of the top 30 articles don't mention Snowden in the comments, so...

I miss when people would submit articles about Erlang to flood out the politics.

Just like we cannot have Bootstrap threads without mentioning Foundation.

It's a relevant point.

Feel free to bury your head in the sand.

Isn't this sort of Godwinning the thread? He didn't mention Snowden just for the sake of it, he was making a valid point.

Well if Snowden had given WaPo something other than a "publish in 48 hours" ultimatum there may have been less 'antagonism'. I'll say that the Washington Post Express I've been reading on the Metro was certainly not antagonistic to Snowden.

Sorry but did you even bother to read the links you posted ? Because the behaviour of Washington Post is completely legitimate and common sense. Of course they aren't just got to post the PRISM presentation verbatim without redaction.

From reading this I can understand the antagonism towards Snowden. He deserves it.

Why would something that's plainly true be "disingenuous at best". The WP broke the story.

The Guardian broke most of the leaks.

Nope. Snowden gave the Post some of his info (the infamous slides), they refused to publish it, he gave it to the Guardian, who did publish it, and the Washington Post followed with their story one day later.

Glenn Greenwald broke the story in the Guardian.

Prism was not a day later. From the very article linked to above:

Although the Guardian and the Post published nearly simultaneously on the PRISM story, it looks like the Post may have beaten the Guardian, only just, in getting the story live.

I believe what you are referring to is the initial Verizon FISA story that started the whole thing.

Didn't Snowden talk to The Guardian?

They deserve credit, they DID publish one of the first stories about it. The editorials page has been really shitty about the whole subject but in their defense it was already a cesspool before Snowden's NSA leaks.

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