Media Monitor: Will the Snowden affair force us to face facts?

Purely as political theater, the Snowden affair is quickly descending into opera buffa. For once we have an issue that finds both Glenn Beck and Michael Moore equally outraged. But without that easy red/blue frame, TV news commentators find themselves struggling to invent a narrative that allows them to avoid reporting the simple fact that our government is spending billions of our tax dollars so that it can secretly spy on us.

So much for austerity, accountability and transparency.

In the rolling revelations from The Guardian about the dramatic expansion of the U.S. surveillance state, Glenn (The Avenger) Greenwald takes no quarter in his sparring matches with mainstream media. After slicing and dicing George Stephanopoulos on ABC and Howie Kurtz on CNN on Sunday, Greenwald slayed breathless maiden Mika Brzezinski on Monday’s ‘Morning Joe’ as she trotted our her tiresome “I am just asking questions” routine.

Greenwald makes no attempt to hide his contempt for the mainstream media’s shilling for the proposition that Obama’s tortured interpretation of the PATRIOT Act and the NDAA makes everything our security apparatus does legal, as if moral and ethical don’t matter.

Meanwhile Barack (The Aloof) Obama pulls strings from behind the curtain, sending forth James (The Untruthy) Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, to argue that the revelations are both (1) benign and nothing new and (2) so damaging to our intelligence capabilities that he finds them personally “literally gut-wrenching.”

I suspect Clapper did indeed poop his patrician panties when he discovered that one of the underlings in the bowels of his empire had gone rogue. After all, there is that tape of Clapper testifying (under oath, I assume) before Congress that the federal government would never stoop to vacuuming up and mining data on our phone calls. Sen. Ron Wyden sits on the Intelligence Committee, so he knows the truth but cannot say so because the information is classified. His attempts to force Clapper to admit what the government is doing were met with outright lies, or what Clapper now characterizes as the least untruthful untruths.

But, again, if these programs are so unworthy of sustained public scrutiny, why are we paying a fortune for them - merely another example of crony capitalism gone amok? Or does Clapper think that docile citizens should happily ignore the intelligence service’s repeated and apparently unlimited anal probing of their phone calls, email and Facebook musings in the name of fighting terrorism?

The central player in all this is Edward (The Unlettered) Snowden. Without him, there’s no story.

Yet the mainstream media that has long pretended to view Daniel Ellsberg as a hero now find themselves befuddled when confronted with today’s real deal. On the one hand, they want to clasp the First Amendment to their collective breasts and portray themselves as relentless watchdogs, eager to bring us Snowden’s revelations about abuses of power. On the other hand, however, maintaining access to the corridors of power requires them to portay Snowden as an uneducated scumbag criminal.

Hero whistleblower or traitor? The headline fairly writes itself, doesn’t it? Far be it for a major news outlet to call it as they see it, all in the name of objectivity.

In an effort to pretend that Snowden is not today’s Ellsberg, a CNN commentator on Sunday noted that he’s younger than Ellsberg was when he gave us the Pentagon Papers. (Why not mention that Snowden also wears glasses and Ellsberg doesn’t? Or that their hair isn’t quite the same shade?)

The NBC home page currently attempts to marginalize the young man by opening their account with “[h]igh school dropout” Edward Snowden. Is that really the most important thing about him?

In an apparent attempt to save himself from suffering the same kind of torture currently being inflicted on Bradley Manning, Snowden came forward so he cannot simply be disappeared. Doing so gives the lapdog press an alternative story that deflects attention from the real issue about how much surveillance we want and need - and pay for. Already we see CNN CIA analyst Bob Baer speculate that heading to Hong Kong at a time when Obama and Xi Jinping are meeting means China must be behind Snowden’s actions. Let’s make Snowden the issue.

The American press has a long history of helping us look away from the ball. For example, I know more about the sexual misadventures attributed to Julian Assange than I do about the government excesses that Wikileaks reported. (Yes, that may be my fault, but what is reported is what gets read.) Even the news outlets that feasted on the Wikileaks’ data dump seem unwilling to defend him, and Snowden has every reason to believe the same fate awaits him, First Amendment be damned.

Snowden makes an easy target for marginalization because he possesses only that lowly GED. (How was he able to land a job making $200,000 a year? How was someone without a degree allowed ‘top secret’ clearance?) After all, part of what a college education does is teach you the conventional wisdom that acts like this are rash and ill-considered.

CIA officials and their Ivy League press peers have closed ranks in asserting that Snowden is either a dupe or a dimwit, even though he clearly sounds intelligent and thoughtful in his YouTube interview with Greenwald. (Don’t believe your lying eyes.)

The bottom line is that we are now a high-tech police/surveillance state, one that also claims the right to use drones to kill people, including a 16-year-old American citizen, all without due process.

Do we have a commercial press brave enough to tell that story? Can they resist switching away from an interview with Greenwald to clips of “Kinky Boots” winning six Tony awards as they did on ‘Morning Joe,’ especially if the latter generate more eyeballs?

The irony, of course, is that the press is not safe from the government’s wrath and intrusion. Not only are these high-tech tools being used to identify leakers, but reporters such as Fox News’ James Rosen now find themselves the target of a federal criminal investigation, the first time the government has pursued charges against a reporter purveying leaks.

Will the Internet save us? How long will it remain free and open (think SOPA and PIPA)?

Will hackers trying to liberate information suffer the same fate as Aaron Schwartz, who faced felony charges for download free information? What is wrong with a society where the hacker who revealed the rape in Steubenville faces more years in prison than that young woman’s attackers did? And what is the appropriate role for the press in bringing us that story in a way that leads to action?

Snowden said that the worst outcome for him would be to find he’s literally put his life on the line but people turn away and nothing changes. Ignorance and apathy or an American spring? Is there any energy for another Occupy?

All too often, even when the press musters the courage to tell us what we need to know, the public response is often “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Inevitably we get both the press and the government we deserve. And that may be the biggest scandal of all.
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The Brzezinki-Greenwald contretemps

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