[walshemj]

That's what I thought why not talk to a more experienced Journalist such as Duncan Campbell that covers the security area.

Does sound like Snowden was shopping for a journalist who "wanted to believe" to borrow a line.

[jgrahamc]

To be fair to Snowden, he may not have been aware of Duncan Campbell who is well known in the UK and Greenwald being a US citizen who is very critical of the US administration probably looked like a good choice.

[walshemj]

If Snowden was a "patriot" who wanted to expose wrong doing surly a more experianced neutral journalist would be better.

Greenwald has only worked as a Journalist for a couple of years.

[eightyone]

Greenwald has written for years about abusive government by both the Republicans and Democrats. He was the best person to pick, in my opinion. Lest us not forget that the Washington Post sat on the documents. So perhaps Snowden did contact other journalists and they weren't interested or just strung him along.

[mpyne]

> Lest us not forget that the Washington Post sat on the documents

I think 72 hours is hardly a reasonable deadline demand for fact-checking from a reputable publication.

[jessaustin]

Is the 72 hours counted from when Snowden submitted material, or from when The Guardian published?

Anyway, it's fairly common for WP to publish articles describing events of the last several hours. Presumably a shorter fact-checking interim is required in such cases.

[mpyne]

> Presumably a shorter fact-checking interim is required in such cases.

This isn't talking about news reporting about a current event, this is talking about a major scoop of highly secret government programs.

In the event both Guardian and WaPo had to backtrack to various degrees on what they claimed of PRISM, so obviously there was more "fact-checking" yet to do.