‘New York Times’ Editor: Losing Snowden Scoop ‘Really Painful’

hide captionEdward Snowden didn't trust The New York Times with his revelations about the National Security Agency because the newspaper had delayed publishing a story about NSA secrets a decade earlier.

Edward Snowden didn't trust The New York Times with his revelations about the National Security Agency because the newspaper had delayed publishing a story about NSA secrets a decade earlier.

When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made the fateful decision to share sensitive documents with reporters revealing secret and mass gathering of the metadata associated with the phone calls made by tens of millions of Americans, he had to figure out which news outfit to trust.

But Snowden already knew the one place he didn't trust: The New York Times. He went instead to reporters working for The Guardian and The Washington Post, each of which posted the first in a series of breathtaking revelations one year ago. In April, the two news organizations shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service.

The episode represents both a sore point and a signal lesson for the new executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet.

"It was really painful," Baquet told me just a few hours after the Pulitzer ceremony. "There is nothing harder than, if you are the New York Times, getting beat on a big national security story and to get beat by your biggest overseas competitor and your biggest national competitor, at the same time. It was just painful."

He says the experience has proved that news executives are often unduly deferential to seemingly authoritative warnings unaccompanied by hard evidence.

"I am much, much, much more skeptical of the government's entreaties not to publish today than I was ever before," Baquet said in a wide-ranging interview.

Snowden's choice was the bitter harvest of seeds sown by the Times almost a decade ago. In the fall of 2004, just ahead of the November general elections, the Times' news leadership spiked an exclusive from Washington correspondents James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, disclosing massive warrantless domestic eavesdropping by the NSA.

White House officials had warned that the results of such a story could be catastrophic.

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'New York Times' Editor: Losing Snowden Scoop 'Really Painful'