In the Observer, John Naughton makes a few corrections to the way the media is reporting the saga of Edward Snowden and his revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance operations:
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data.
Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn’t have it. Nor would there be — finally — a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
These are pretty significant outcomes and they’re just the first-order consequences of Snowden’s activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap — speculation about Snowden’s travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The “human interest” angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.
The reason the “mainstream” media is ignoring this is because it’s happening on Obama’s watch. If it was George Bush (either one) they’d be all over it.
Comment by Bill — July 28, 2013 @ 14:42
Well, we’d be hearing more about the case in the context of “look how Bushitler is evil”, but I’m not certain we’d be getting more in-depth coverage of the implications of the story. Most journalists are statists to one degree or another, so they’d have concerns about government snooping on their communications, but would be much less worried about the government snooping on the rest of us. Most of them think the “freedom of the press” should only apply to professional journalists, not to bloggers, YouTubers, or employees of certain companies (Fox News, Sun News, etc.).
Comment by Nicholas — July 29, 2013 @ 07:49