Before getting into the “inside media baseball” aspect of this story,
let’s get one thing out of the way first: The real newsworthy item here
is that the US National Counterterrorism Center’s list of known or
suspected terrorists doubled between March 2010 and the end of 2013 from
about 550,000 people to 1.1 million people.
According to the Intercept,
680,000 of these people are on a Terrorist Screening Database that is
shared with “local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and
foreign governments.” And out of those, 40 percent have “no recognized
terrorist group affiliation.”
It’s a huge story and a major scoop for the Intercept, the subsidiary
of Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media organization which, with respect,
has seen its share of growing pains. Or at least it would
have been a major scoop had the Associated Press not published the
story a few minutes earlier. Was the Intercept simply too slow on the
uptake? Did they get bested fair and square by a rival publication?http://pando.com/2014/08/05/that-was-our-bad-us-government-spoils-the-intercepts-scoop-tips-off-rival-outlet/