21st Century Wire says…
This week Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has come under fire from the British Establishment again over the paper’s Ed Snowden-NSA coverage, and is scheduled appear and testify before Parliament’s home affairs select committee in December.
At the time of the incident, 21st Century Wire was highly critical of the Guardian’s decision to cave in to government intimidation, and saw Rusbridger’s decision as a dangerous precedent in the history of free press and media in the UK. At the time, Rusbriger said, “I was happy to destroy it, because it wasn’t going to inhibit our reporting.”
Was this hasty act actually in the public’s interest?
There is little doubt that both Rusbridger and the Guardian were bullied by the government into destroying investigation material – what other conclusion can be made? Nonetheless, it set a very dangerous precedent for increasing state control over all media in the UK.
Is this a step backwards for a modern society? We say: yes.
Watch this report from RT’s Going Underground…
The Snowden scandal has made waves around the world, but hit both sides of the pond particularly hard following revelations of the scope and scale of NSA-GCHQ collaboration.
Below, the Observer’s Henry Porter tells us how a few ground- down computers in the Guardian’s basement have come to represent the moment the British press was really threatened and oppressed by the government…
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READ MORE ON NSA AND SNOWDEN AT: 21st Century Wire Snowden Files
