UK's The Guardian newspaper has published a new nugget of information from Edward Snowden:
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in an interview on Saturday and then again Tuesday afternoon, vehemently denied media claims that he gave classified information to the governments of China or Russia. He also denied assertions that one or both governments had succeeded in "draining the contents of his laptops". "I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops," he said.
The extraordinary claim that China had drained the contents of Snowden's laptops first appeared in the New York Times in a June 24 article. The paper published the claim with no evidence and without any attribution to any identified sources.
Unless there is a good reason to believe Snowden is a liar, this puts the often-wrong NYT in an interesting position, but as we remember from Judy Miller, this will probably do their credibility no harm whatsoever.
If the media is going to make a claim that information was transferred from Snowden to other governments, they are going to have to provide evidence for that claim. The burden of proof is on the claimant.