I would say 1) this revelation is too shocking to be parroted without smoking gun evidence to support it (eg copies of the top secret documents themselves) and 2) journalists these days are too much in bed with the establishment to stir the waters that much and ask these kinds of hard questions posed by "fringe elements".
I don't believe (2) at all. Journalists are careerist and media outlets are bottom-line focused. It would be one thing to argue that some specific venue, like the NYT, is captured somehow (that would be an extraordinary claim but let's stipulate it). But to say that every major media outlet is somehow blinded to its own incentives on a story like this? That's flatly implausible.
I don't believe (2) at all. Journalists are careerist and media outlets are bottom-line focused.
Name three.
Seymour Hersh, Greg Palast, the crew at Democracy Now! (Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzales). Who else? It's a pretty short list.
I can't think of any remaining "mainstream" (corporate) journalists. They've all gotten the Dan Rather treatment.
Some bloggers have managed to swim upstream, eg Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias. But most muckraking work (eg Fire Dog Lake) is not corporate funded. Thom Hartmann is kinda unique. And lefties like Rachel Maddow are commentators, not doing original reporting.
The Guardian is, by their own admission, a center-left paper. That's in Britain, which means they are somewhere between "radical" and "terrorist mooslim communisocialifascist" here in the US. The person who broke the stuff for them is very strongly political. [2]
US corporate media, on the other hand, subscribes to the "view from nowhere" style [3], which they mistake for objectivity. It makes them easily manipulated; when you create a controversy, they are obliged to move away from it. That gets you the classic, "Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ: Round or Flat?" journalism. [4]
This is compounded by the way newspaper journalism has been in decline for years, and was even before the Internet drank their milkshake. [5] Now, major newspapers feel very vulnerable, and one of their few remaining assets is that people in power will talk to them. That makes them basically stenographers to power. [6]
So yes, US journalism's objectivity is often horrible, but the owners of The Guardian are overseeing an enterprise with revenues of £254.4 million a year, according to Wikipedia. That still seems like a corporate enterprise the owners of whom would want to protect. I believe it is still be possible to be a muckraker (or employ those who are like Greenwald) and have a sizable "corporate"-ness.
The Guardian is entirely owned by the Scott Trust, which is a trust set up specifically to safeguard their editorial independence. It doesn't have owners in the usual corporate sense of the word.
The difference is editorial independence. You know this.
The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, a few others, are in no way comparable to properties owned by media conglomerates. You know this.
If not "corporate", how would you refer to likes of News Corp, Clear Channel, Time Warner, Disney, etc? "Purveyors of propaganda for the power elite?" "Anti-democratic radical right wing noise echo chambers?"
"Corporate media" is a term which refers to a system of mass media production, distribution, ownership, and funding which is dominated by corporations and their CEOs. It is sometimes used as a term of derision to indicate a media system which does not serve the public interest in place of the mainstream media or "MSM," which tends to be used by both the political left and the right as a derisive term.
Note that the Washington Post went to the government to cooperate with them. It is not clear if WaPo would have published the same story if there wasn't a competitor (the Guardian) who had access to the same material. Snowden may have shared material with the Guardian purposefully either before or after he found out the WaPo was working the government in order to ensure this.
Note also that Greenwald has special circumstances which reduce his influence from corporate and US interests. First he works for a subsidiary of a UK corporation and does not report on UK issues. I also don't think he reports on corporate issues that would affect Guardian advertising. Finally, he lives in Brazil which may reduce US influence on him.
All that said no one is saying that corporate journalists never break stories that are critical to government or corporations, only that they are under strong influence not to and the effect is that few such stories are produced.
If the US media is inhibited from running stories about sensational overreaches by NSA, how did James Risen and Eric Lichtblau manage to get the SOLARWIND story published?
The NYT had the SOLARWIND story in 2004, and were going to publish it right before the 04 election (October) but sat on it under pressure from the administration. It was over a year before they decided to publish.
> AMY GOODMAN: Is it right, Eric, you were still — the Times wasn’t going to run this story until to your colleague Jim at the New York Times was going to publish his book, and that put the Times in a tremendously awkward position? It’s going to come out anyway, and their reporters are not the ones who are going to reveal it.
> ERIC LICHTBLAU: Yeah, that’s true, for the most part.
I don't know if this is the right example to support your argument.
They are not inhibited, they are positively and negatively incentivized. To say that the government and high-level government officials are a powerful influence is hardly contentious.
If you talk shit about your boss (even if it is true and done politely) it will probably negatively affect you. If you support your boss you will probably reap rewards. The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does.
I'm not sure this is really responsive to my point: I gave a specific example of a bombshell story the NYT ran that was arguably more harmful to "national security" than any revelation about spying on Barack Obama.
In that case you are going to have to make your point explicit. My understanding is that you are trying to say that the media outlets are not influenced by the government because there exist significant critical stories of the government.
But as I said "The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does."
I guess I'm just asking why today's story, about NSA spying on Obama, which is viscerally more interesting than the Risen story but less impactful to national security, would be "frozen out" of the mainstream media where Risen's story clearly wasn't.
You could say the same thing about the suppressed NYT NSA story a few years back. Incentives are more complicated than short term profits of the firm. Being in the good graces of powerful government actors is certainly a strong incentive in terms of personal benefits and long term profits.
Given the above, and not making any judgment as to the veracity of the claim, there isn't enough evidence for mainstream media to publish. Compare with allegation of the Syrian government's use of Sarin for which there is equally little evidence but media outlets are quick to publish because it is inline with government interests.
Is there a single major media outlet --- The New York Times, The Washington Post (which is already out in front of this story), The Wall Street Journal (a Murdoch paper), The Washington Times (a strongly partisan anti-Obama paper), Bloomberg News, heck, Le Monde --- a single one that appears to be taking this story seriously? Why not? Is your argument that every reputable major media outlet in the world is somehow cowed by the administration?
There is systemic influence by the US government on US institutions. To be clear I am only speaking to media influence and bias, not the veracity of the claim in question. Again look at the sarin example or consider how readily this would have been reported if it were about an enemy of the United States.
Your point about international media outlets is taken and it is the best evidence of how less-biased outlets feel about the story. I can't find the story on Russia Today or Al-Jazeera for example.
I have a pretty high opinion of Al Jazeera, which has not run a story about how the NSA might have spied on pre-candidate Barack Obama, and a very very low opinion of Russia Today, which is likely to have at some point in the past run a story about how Obama is actually a space alien.
My point had nothing to do with the credibility of either of those outlets only that they both routinely publish stories critical of the United States and since they didn't publish this story then they must not have faith in it.
In short, I agree with you that lack of reporting from foreign outlets is indicative that they think there isn't enough evidence to report it.
Just to be clear we are talking about different things: You are talking about whether the claims are true, or more sensibly, whether they are supported by credible evidence. I am making a more narrow point about the fact that media institutions are strongly influenced^ by government and corporate interests. That is true independent of whether Tice's claims are.
^ Obviously foreign institutions are far less influenced by other foreign governments and are therefore more reliable when reporting on those foreign governments, though not always (e.g. Iraq WMD claims).
It is not reasonable to think that corporate journalists advance their careers, using money and social benefits as proxies for career advancement, by speaking truth to power any more than it would be for other careers. In nearly all cases you advance your career by being conformist and supporting powerful people. There isn't any reason for corporate journalism to be different.
You mean except for every journalist who has raised the ire of a Presidential administration in the US by going public with some detail or another of overreaching surveillance, malfeasance within the administration, abuse of prisoners, waste in defense spending (added bonus here of pissing off multibillion dollar corporations with deep ties to media outlets), foreign relations blunders, or leaks of one form or another?
Why is this story off limits but those stories not?
If there are still substantial disparities between what Snowden alleges and what major tech firms admit to, would you bet against news outlets getting "D-notices" they are not allowed to discuss?
What do you think?