Ethics in Journalism

Dissecting Contradictions & Sensationalism in the NSA-Snowden Scandal
In August 2013 Glenn Greenwald’s husband, David Miranda, was detained and questioned by authorities at London’s Heathrow airport. Miranda was coming from Berlin, where he had met with Laura Poitras and was given thousands of top-secret Snowden-NSA documents. He had arrived at London’s Heathrow airport while carrying in his laptop a large cache of the highly-publicized NSA documents. He was stopped and interrogated by British authorities for nearly nine hours.

Patterns play a major role in identifying entities. We get to know people, organizations and governments based on their record and their pattern of behavior and actions. This is a fact. What happens when an entity identified by a consistent set of patterns suddenly deviates and engages in actions and behavior that completely differ from all its previous ones? We question the sudden deviation. We question the reasons behind the differentiation. Because we must. Because we have to-especially when the entity in question is our government and the current ruler of our lives.