NSA Scandal

A Scandal of Bias and Fact Over the past few years the NSA (National Security Agency) has been collecting massive amounts of phone call data from Verizon without the public’s knowledge. This information has just come to the public’s attention earlier this year, and has been covered by many news sources. Some sources stick strictly to the facts of the story and nothing more. However, other sources tend to focus more on their own bias rather than talking about the actual events that happened. There are many ways that reporters can cover a story, two of the more influential factors are the bias, or lack thereof, and the accuracy of the factual information. Therefore, two of the most significant ways to critic articles are by the bias shown and how impactful and truthful the factual information is.
In the article, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily,” there is a lot of fact with a slight amount of bias. Throughout the entire article, from the British news source The Guardian, there are many quotes of professionals and politicians to support the claims of the actions that resulted in the NSA scandal. For example, there is a point in the article where the author claims that there was a wide scope data gathered by the NSA. This assertion was immediately followed by a quote from a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez, who said, “We’ve certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of ‘relevance’ to collect large numbers of records at once” (Greenwald). This exemplifies how the author uses actual support from credible people to back up his claims. Each author has his/her own opinion which cannot be helped from leaking into their articles, therefore, a good criteria to judge an article by is the extent the author’s view shows through or not. This bias is often connected with the factual information of an article because the author has the ability to only present the facts of his/her side of the