The Vain Media Cynics of the NSA Story
The Vain Media Cynics of the NSA Story
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Oddly enough, the cynics on this story reside in the ultra-establishment. They are the journalists and pundits who feel compelled to demonstrate their own sophistication by dismissing these revelations as old hat (though documented proof of these programs has never been seen before). They are those who have grown so inured to the gross overreach of government power that they can no longer conceive of it as scandalous. They prefer to comfort the NSA, and afflict the leaker. They are people like Jeffrey Toobin, at The New Yorker, who calls Snowden "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,"
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Or David Brooks, of The New York Times, who says that Snowden "betrayed" both honor and the Constitution, and engages in a bit of thinly sourced psychoanalysis...
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A secret, unaccountable spying program vaster than the world has ever seen? Neat-o! (This is the same school of journalistic thought responsible for cranking out gee-whiz stories about the awesome technological capabilities of each new military weapon, without ever wondering about the morality of what those weapons are used for.)
But for sheer yawning dismissal of this story, no one can beat the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, a longtime fan of government secrecy... Cohen snidely calls Edward Snowden a "cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood" who will be forgotten by history. Snowden lacks the natural manliness of Richard Cohen.
You'll notice a few commonalities between all of these dismissive positions. All of these members of the media, who ostensibly work on the public's behalf, would prefer to take the completely unverifiable word of a top secret government agency that nothing is amiss, rather than to see any classified materials leak into the public realm. They fancy themselves able to deduce the motivations and mindset of Edward Snowden based on the thinnest of anecdotes. They all express contempt for the idea that the public has a right to know what its government is up to, unless that knowledge has been specifically approved by government censors.
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http://gawker.com/the-vain-media-cynics-of-the-nsa-story-512575457
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