Anonymous official sources go after Edward Snowden in the UK's media; plus, 30 years of covering Cuba from Miami.
Last week, the front page of Britain's Sunday Times bore the headline: British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.
For the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper's largely conservative audience, the implied breach of security perpetrated by former US National Surveillance Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden could not have been more alarming.
However, standing behind that headline was not a shred of evidence, not one provable fact. Rather, the Sunday Times' bold statement was founded on unnamed government sources making unsubstantiated claims which the journalists involved apparently left unquestioned. Critics panned the piece for swallowing the official line whole - something that Tom Harper of the Sunday Times saw no reason to deny.
"We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment," Harper told CNN in an interview.
The idea that a whistleblower may have put national security at risk is a useful one for governments facing ever more scrutiny over the legal and moral basis for mass surveillance and other repressive domestic policies. Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning will know how Edward Snowden feels.
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