News/Commentary

‘Holy sh*t!’ Glenn Greenwald calls out NYT for ‘glaring factual errors’ in Snowden ‘spying’ story

April 14, 2023 | | Print Article

Glenn Greenwald blasted diplomatic correspondent Michael Crowley and The New York Times for the “gigantic” errors he found contained in the “first 3 paragraphs” of an article that referenced former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

Greenwald was one of the three journalists who had the courage to break Snowden’s stunning leak of classified documents which proved the NSA was spying on Americans and collecting enormous amounts of data from internet tech giants, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

For their efforts, Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and filmmaker Laura Poitras were awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

In his latest article for The Times, titled, “Once Shocking, U.S. Spying on Its Allies Draws a Global Shrug,” journalist Michael Crowley compares the reaction abroad to the recent online leaks of documents related to the United States’ involvement in Ukraine’s war with Russia to the Snowden leak and concludes there has been “limited outrage abroad.”

Unfortunately, it appears Crowley, who “was a Pulitzer Price [sic] finalist for coverage of the Trump administration’s failure to adequately respond to the coronavirus,” according to his Times’ bio, played fast and loose with the facts.

“Holy sh*t,” Greenwald exclaimed on Twitter, “this NYT news article by @michaelcrowley has 2 gigantic, glaring factual errors in the first 3 paragraphs: 1) Snowden didn’t give the archive to WikiLeaks for publication, but rather to me and Laura Poitras. 2) The Merkel story didn’t come from the Snowden archive.”

He noted that The Times was made aware of the errors by “numerous top editors” but failed to correct them a full twelve hours after the story was published.

“This story was published by the NYT 12 hours ago. Numerous top editors who oversaw publication of our reporting — then-Guardian-editor-in-chief
@janinegibson and Intercept’s @MargotWilliams — quickly corrected them, but the paper ignored it, still has these errors up,” Greenwald wrote.


“Of course all journalists and outlets make minor errors but these are major,” Greenwald continued. “No journalist has any business writing about the Snowden reporting if they believe WikiLeaks published it. That’s just massive ignorance that made it through all their editors.”

He noted the “debunking” of the explosive Twitter Files “based on 2 minor errors with acronyms (which, as [investigative journalist Lee Fang] proved, were not, in fact, errors)” and said the “NYT errors are in a different universe.”


Nearly an hour later, Greenwald reported that The Times executed a “stealth edit” and quietly fixed the “false statements.”

“Just now, the NYT silently deleted its false statements from the article, without bothering to add a correction, an editor’s note or any other indication that this happened,” he tweeted. “Just a stealth edit after these errors were up for more than 12 hours, as if it never happened.”


Readers of Greenwald’s thread may have been disgusted with The Times, but they weren’t a bit surprised by it.

“I really don’t think they care about accuracy anymore, just temporary optics,” replied one Twitter user. “And everyone is so worn out with it, they just let it go. Thanks for the perseverance.”

“They’re like toddlers, Glenn,” wrote another. “You have to encourage them for any step taken in the right direction. You can’t expect them to act like responsible adults and actually to do their jobs. That would be expecting WAY too much. Especially given their ties to the clandestine agencies.”

“That’s why I quit reading NYT 20 years ago!” stated a third.

Others pointed to the downfalls of digital publishing.

“This is the problem with digital, it’s super easy to just chuck it in the memory hole or remove words that someone finds offensive,” wrote one user. “The neutering/weakening of society.”

Melissa Fine
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