Ray Suarez (cc photo: Kevin Griffin Moreno)
On Monday night’s PBS NewsHour (7/22/13), anchor Ray Suarez signed off with this:
On Tuesday, we talk with two former National Security Agency analysts who blew the whistle on what they say were abuses and mismanagement at the agency.
Sounds intriguing! But there was nothing like that on the Tuesday show. Or the Wednesday show, either.
Now, plans change all the time in broadcast news, for all sorts of reasons. But given that government whistleblowers are by definition people whom the government doesn’t want to tell their story–well, it would be good to hear what the reason was in this case.
And it would be even better to see the whistleblowers on the NewsHour and hear what they have to say.
UPDATE: On August 1 the NewsHour aired this segment, about half of which was an interview with NSA whistleblowers (and former NSA employees) William Binney and Russell Tice.
The second part was a rebuttal of sorts. First came comments from Robert Litt, general counsel with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And then PBS aired parts of an interview with Joel Brenner, formerly the NSA’s inspector general. Brenner dismissed Tice and Binney, saying that “they don’t know what’s going on inside the agency.”
He was especially dismissive of Tice:
JUDY WOODRUFF: Another allegation we heard from them, from Mr. Tice, is that back as of the time before he left the NSA in the early 2000s, that there was spying going on, on news organizations, on Supreme Court justices, on presidential candidates, then Senator Barack Obama, on military leaders, top generals in the army.
JOEL BRENNER: Mr. Tice made the allegations you have just indicated having to do with the period before 2005, eight years ago. They’re just coming out now. I wonder why. The farther he gets from the period when he could have known what he was talking about, the more fanciful his allegations have become.
Actually Tice spoke out right after he left the NSA– he was on Democracy Now! on January 3, 2006. As for Brenner, his new job went unmentioned by PBS; as blogger and media critic Jon Schwartz noted, he’s currently a senor adviser at the Chertoff Group, which is led by former Bush Homeland Security official Michael Chertoff:
PBS had on former NSA lawyer to tell us to trust them http://t.co/SSbm5cK9ix They left out he now works for Chertoff http://t.co/0aMSNO0o6k
— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) August 5, 2013
Maybe they should have included a segment on how this would affect the Royal Baby…
In St. Louis the Riverfront Times weekly magazine did a great article on the “Monsanto Menace” and GM foods. They cover many difficulties with contamination and litigation against farmers, but I would like to see an article actually investigating actual consequences of ever-increasing amounts of poisons in soils and underground water, and whether people think it’s a good idea to allow chemical companies to have control of our basic food supply contingent on herbicide use that could have profound ecological effects of life.
Hi Gerald, your answers are in an old book, SILENT SPING, by Rachel Carson. What was amazing and so true that long ago is even more true today. While the pesticide people talk about how their poison will kill one thing, they neglected to even think that it could kill ALL things. Also what Rachel Carson brought up was what happened when one chemical comes in contact with another chemical, and what a killer duo these new ones can make. Read this old book amd weep even more because even more chemicals are living among us. They will have to change that chemical motto to
“Bitter Living Through Hypocrisy.”
I watched this show for decades until it and PBS went into the establishment toilet.
Maybe the whistleblowers needed to have tickets ready to go to Equador or Venezuela? Or, PBS needed to find an undisclosed location to conduct the interview to protect the whistleblowers. Or…..PBS did not have permission from the Propaganda Ministry to air the interview.
I stopped watching and/listening to PBS and NPR years ago, once I realized that the “public” donations were just enough pay their yearly running expenses and utility bills. The big corporate $$ pays for the programs. I discovered Link TV 3 years ago and that is where I go for serious news programing along with some excellent online sites…as long as a free and open internet lasts.
Maybe they were afraid. It seems even our highest elected representers fear to control the secret information state, public and private, a tangled web.
Why does it say disconnect?
Watching Amy Goodman on Democracy Now recently show previous Edward Snowden interview, half of his talk was muted and one had to lip read to understand what he was saying. Hard to believe this was an accident.
Would love to have heard those whistles blowing! An opportunity to educate the public was sadly missed,
SSSSh I heard they were gonna talk for two hours about all the lies Obama has told.but then they heard Glen Beck had a special with 5 hours worth so they canned it
I wish they would fire Ray and hire a Liberal to host the program. They are now down to the level of Corporate Media, on the way to being taken over by Koch.
John whenever libs host a program it dies.It is hard to keep saying- give me more ,more please more to the” producers”in our society so we can distribute to our one creation….People TAKING from the government.It so quickly becomes obvious and depressing what their game is.
Just follow the money, like Paula says. Since PBS and NPR have been effectively privatized, the corporations, think tanks, and other RW fronts determine the agenda for these shows. This is why Bill Moyers is not on PBS anymore, and why shows that are supposed to inform sound more like cheerleading squads (aka propogandists) for the various industrial sectors that advertise to pay for the programming.
Are you going to report that PBS NewsHour ran the following story and posted the raw interviews?
NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html
Did you even bother contacting NewsHour about why the story didn’t run in the advertised slot or might be delayed? If you didn’t, what would say about a half-ass blog post from a major news organization that publishes an item purely on speculation without investigation.
It’s good to be critical, skeptical etc… but please hold yourself to the same standards that you are holding others.
PBS sells out public pensioners at http://pando.com/2014/02/12/the-wolf-of-sesame-street-revealing-the-secret-corruption-inside-pbss-news-division/