Wired Journalists Say Chat Transcripts Contain ‘Nothing Newsworthy’
In the latest news on the Glenn Greenwald-Wired Magazine slapfight, the Guardian has an article today in which Wired’s Evan Hansen and Kevin Poulsen say they have once again reviewed the unpublished chats over which Greenwald is hyperventilating, and there’s nothing newsworthy in them.
I don’t expect this to prevent Greenwald from posting another 3000-word essay on why he’s right and everyone else is wrong, though.
“The chats Wired has but is withholding – and about which they are refusing to comment – are newsworthy in the extreme,” Glenn Greenwald, one of Wired’s fiercest critics, wrote on Monday.
The following day Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief of wired.com, and Kevin Poulsen, the journalist who obtained the web chats, published a response to what they said were Greenwald’s personal and unfounded attacks. Today both told the Guardian they had reviewed the unpublished transcripts in the last 24 hours. They concluded there was no discussion shedding new light on the relationship between Manning and Assange.
“If I were a prosecutor, everything I would be looking at [in seeking to mount a case against Manning or Assange] would be in the published record,” Hansen said. “We’re trying to get the news out there that is relevant to the public. If there was something like that in the unpublished [chat logs] we would have made that public six months ago.”
Poulsen also said that there was nothing “newsworthy” in the parts of the transcript they had decided to hold back, adding that nothing “of substance” about Manning’s relationship with Assange had been kept secret.
“We have discussions in the newsroom, at every major turn in the Manning case, about whether it is now appropriate to publish the complete logs,” he said. “And so far we have concluded it isn’t.”