Big
Brother, not Snowden and Greenwald, Is the Story
By Sheldon Richman
"fff" - “Instead of being adversaries to government power … [the media of Washington, D.C., are] … servants to it and mouthpieces for it.”
By Sheldon Richman
"fff" - “Instead of being adversaries to government power … [the media of Washington, D.C., are] … servants to it and mouthpieces for it.”
So said
the
Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who broke the
story of Edward Snowden’s disclosure of NSA spying on the
American people, after Greenwald’s confrontation with Meet
the Press’s David Gregory. Greenwald needn’t have
limited his observation to the D.C. media. Plenty of reporters
and cable-news talking heads are playing the same role in the
NSA drama.
Indeed, if
they spent half the time investigating Obama’s Big Brother
operations that they spend sneering at Snowden and Greenwald,
Americans might demand that the government stop spying on them.
But to
much of the mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) media, Snowden
and Greenwald — not the NSA, the Obama administration, and the
supine Congress — are the story — a story of villainy.
The
examples are endless. The day after Snowden revealed himself as
the whistleblower, Joe Scarborough, the former Republican
congressman and host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, ordered
his director to take the image of “that weasel” off the screen.
The other day, his sidekick, Mika Brzezinski, asked, “Is there
anything we can do to track him down?” (Emphasis
added.) She meant the government.
Brzezinski
went on to accuse Snowden of
taking the job with NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton “to
screw over our government.” That’s how one who speaks power to
truth spins it. Snowden’s service to the American people is
hardly undercut by his having taken the job intending to
expose government violations of the Fourth Amendment.
MSNBC’s
self-identification as a progressive network is hard to square
with its unrelenting assaults on Snowden and Greenwald, and its
de-emphasis of NSA surveillance. Andrea Mitchell, who functions
as the network’s chief diplomatic stenographer, wondered why the
NSA was hiring contractors when it could be recruiting people
with the “right value system” from the military. (She’s
forgotten that whistleblower Bradley Manning is in the
military.) Chris Matthews of Hardball says that any
foreign government that won’t turn Snowden over to the U.S.
government is “no buddy of ours.”
MSNBC
personnel routinely describe Greenwald as “defensive,” which
apparently is their code word for people who push back at stupid
questions. For example, when Gregory asked Greenwald if he could
be indicted for “aiding and abetting” Snowden, and Greenwald
asked in return how a journalist could equate reporting with
criminal activity, he was treated with disdain. Gregory even
questioned Greenwald’s journalistic credentials, as did
Paul Farhi of the Washington Post.
I’ve
focused on MSNBC because it has so egregiously and persistently
circled the wagons around the government. It’s an old story: TV
hosts and reporters need access to government officials, but
access is jeopardized if they antagonize those officials. Better
to play it safe and sneer at Snowden and Greenwald.
You don’t
have to work for MSNBC to suck up to power. Op-ed writers from
conservative David Brooks to progressive Richard Cohen have
tried to portray Snowden as an alienated oddball, as though no
one could have a legitimate purpose in unmasking government
surveillance. (Brooks
thought it relevant to write that Snowden “has not been a
regular presence around his mother’s house for years.” Really!)
Pundits repeatedly refer to Snowden’s having dropped out of high
school, which apparently signals some serious moral or mental
defect in the young man. More likely he was bored with the dull
and regimented curriculum so typical of government high schools.
Others
have tried to read much into Snowden’s stops in Hong Kong and
Moscow. He might be a spy, they suggest. But wouldn’t a spy have
kept his identity secret while selling his information to “the
enemy”? It doesn’t occur to the pundits that Snowden’s priority
right now is to stay out of the clutches of the U.S. government.
Snowden has no moral obligation to be a martyr. Let’s not forget
how Bradley Manning has been treated for his disclosures of
government wrongdoing. He faces life imprisonment.
Snowden
and Greenwald have not “aided the enemy” — unless the American
people are the government’s enemy. What they have done is
embarrass the Obama administration by exposing criminal
activity.
For the
media’s defenders of power against truth, that’s inexcusable.
Sheldon
Richman is vice president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
and editor of FFF's monthly journal, Future of Freedom. For 15
years he was editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation
for Economic Education in Irvington, New York.
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