If we're to criticise journalists, we should hold ourselves to the standards we expect of the them. The article said:

'In a statement, Google said'

You paraphrase this as the article saying:

'Here's a denial of what we are alleging'

The article said or implied no such thing, as your direct quote shows, it merely attributed the quote, without comment. It didn't talk about back doors or denials, Google did, probably in response to more fantastic speculation around the Internet prior to this.

> If we're to criticise journalists, we should hold ourselves to the standards we expect of the them.

In the interests of precision, let me first amend the Guardian non-paraphrase and paraphrase above to 'here's a weaselly statement that doesn't deny what the NSA document claims' and 'here's a denial of what the NSA document claims'. This matters because the article deliberately sets out to report the NSA slides instead of setting out to explicitly report the NSA slides as accurate, and Greenwald later made much of this.

> The article said or implied no such thing, as your direct quote shows, it merely attributed the quote, without comment.

The immediately preceding paragraph is:

> Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

This makes it clear that the next paragraph is, to the Guardian's understanding, Google denying knowledge of any such program.

I see what you mean now from this context, thanks for the clarification, however it is just restating that they are denying that they knew of prism, not all allegations. Part of the confusion here is that the slides say one thing, the article summarises it (perhaps loosely) and google denied something else altogether (back door etc). I would note though that the article did not say they had unfettered access via a back door, or root access or any such detail, those are things implied in the google statement, which curiously denied things the article did not allege.

Personally I thought the article did an OK (though far from perfect) job of summarising the puzzling gaps between the slides and the company statements, and didn't imply all the things people have read between the lines, but wish it had gone into more detail, however I don't feel that's a hugely important part of this story. It sounds like we might hear a bit more detail over the coming weeks.