Last weekend Ted Rall was fired from PandoDaily right before he was to publish the name of a CIA officer. David Sirota was also canned for BS reasons. Rall wrote a column on what happened. Some quotes:
I know the identity of the man who was CIA chief of station in Kabul — up until just a month ago.
Turns out the exact name of the top spook in Afghanistan was circulated in an email to 6000-plus reporters. It showed up on an attendance list of senior U.S. officials participating in a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama during his surprise visit with U.S. troops.
The government spotted the error and asked journalists not to post it.
The journalists agreed! Yet it’s still all over the Internet.
Where I found out about this:....We intended to publish the name. This was not to endanger him — impossible in any case because Langley already has yanked him off his spook post. We intended to publish it as a way of taking a stand for brave reporting and adversarial media.
Journalists ought to publish news wherever they find it, whatever it is, damn the consequences.
Credible media organizations don’t protect government secrets. They don’t obey spy agencies and take their requests like waiters.
Real journalists don’t cooperate with government — any government, any time, for any reason.
My editor and I believed that, by demonstrating a little fearlessness, we might inspire other media outfits to grow a pair and stop sucking up to the government.
Only problem is, now there is no longer a “we.” Pando fired me over the weekend, along with the investigative journalist David Sirota.
And that was from here. Thank you, Bill Blunden.The White House asked reporters to dutifully “zip it” and that’s exactly what they did. The one reporter who dared to cross the line and mention the station chief’s name and in print, Ted Rall, was summarily fired before he got the chance.
