This was such a pure and indisputable case of journalistic malpractice and deceit. I mean, NPR radically misled millions of people with this report. To sit there and present this firm as though it’s some independent big data company, as she called it, that just listened to news reports, heard this claim that Snowden had helped the terrorists and then set out earnestly to investigated it, without telling their listeners what they—Dina Temple-Raston herself knew, because she had reported two years earlier that the CIA itself had invested millions of dollars in this company, that the investment arm of the CIA, In-Q-Tel, sits on the board of this company and that the researcher on whom they relied himself is the head of a company in a strategic partnership with the CIA, that is about as journalistically indefensible as it gets. She misled NPR’s listeners into believing that this was some independent, credible source, rather than what it is, which is a government-loyal firm. And that’s to say nothing of the huge numbers of fallacies in the report itself. They gave Bruce Schneier 42 seconds at the end of the story, in two sentences, more or less, to say, "Here are a couple questions I’d have about this report," but the first three-and-a-half minutes were as Dina Temple-Raston uncritically and mindlessly summarizing the report. It’s press release journalism on behalf of the Pentagon that she covers. And it’s the reason that the U.S. media has collapsed in terms of the trust and esteem with which the American public holds them.
Source: democracynow.org