Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Reporting on Snowden

Mainstream American media sucks. I've come to terms with that. But, it's frustrating when even the usually-non-sucky media sucks. For instance, Dana Milbank, who usually doesn't suck (even though he works for The Washington Post, which does), writes this about Edward Snowden.
Snowden undermines his own cause in the U.S. At the start, Snowden's revelations to the Guardian and The Post promised to put him in the distinguished company of Daniel Ellsberg and others who exposed government wrongdoing. But rather than come home and face trial -- giving the nation the debate he claimed to seek about assaults on Americans' privacy -- he has allowed the story to become all about his life as a fugitive.” [all bold mine :c]
Get that? Snowden has "undermined his own cause" and "allowed" the story to become all about him. Yes, clearly that's what's happening here because Snowden has the power to control the story now that he has replaced Dana Milbank as a columnist at The Washington Post. Oh, wait, that hasn't happened? Then, I have no idea what the hell Milbank is talking about.

If anyone is undermining Snowden's cause, it's people like Milbank, who write things like this:
I still believe that Snowden was justified in leaking information about the NSA’s snooping. The administration’s collusion with the congressional intelligence committees had denied Americans the public debate they deserved about the trade-offs between security and privacy.
Milbank says this, yet he chooses to write about Snowden undermining his cause instead of digging into "the administration’s collusion with the congressional intelligence committees." By doing so, Milbank himself continues to deny "Americans the public debate they deserved about the trade-offs between security and privacy."

It's a well worn path. McClatchy, which usually doesn't suck too much -- they did some great reporting on Iraq -- also chooses to write about Snowden the cartoon character, rather than the secrets he revealed, because keeping up with "many thousands of words" would be "difficult". Seriously.
With many thousands of words written about Snowden from all over the world, it’s difficult to keep up with his own ever-changing story, much less keep track of his piecemeal disclosures of a sweeping U.S. surveillance program.
Wow. This is a major American newspaper admitting that it's just too difficult to wade through all the documents, so they're just going to cover Snowden's travel plans. If McClatchy really wants to "keep track of his piecemeal disclosures of a sweeping U.S. surveillance program," they might want to hire, or at least read Marcy Wheeler. She is single handedly doing the difficult work that The Washington Post, McClatchy, and the rest of the mainstream media can't or won't.