By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
The very thing that Edward Snowden — NSA whistleblower, or traitor, malcontent and narcissist, depending on whom and what you believe — said he didn’t want to happen, did: the press turned its collective head to scan the details of his life, scouring for tweets and Facebook posts and pictures of his way-hot girlfriend, turning away from the vastly more significant Prism program he exposed.
One might conclude that it went after the salacious, looking for the titillating rather than providing the public what it needs. Ah, but it gave us what we want, given our interest in Snowden’s lifestyle and his girlfriend’s skill as a acrobat.
With the sure instincts of carney pitch-men, the press spends little effort in analyzing current problems or taking a stand against governmental excess. If you wonder whose side they’re on, they’re on their own. Let the Internet(s) worry about facts and figures, they’ve got suckers to lure into the tent to see the two-headed calf; in short, tickets to collect. Nothing’s for free, you see. Everything costs the price of admission. I see that PBS, one of our last remaining bastions for unbiased news in this country, has cut back their funding, closing field offices in San Francisco and Denver. A very bad indicator for the fourth estate, which should have little truck with profit, and just grist in the mill of the corporate estate that eats truth for lunch and passes you the bill.
Sure that what we really want is a bewildering array of responses from others about what the crisis du jour means, giving us a heads up about how upset we should be and how we should think about things, the press scrambles to offer a point of view acceptable to the Establishment without seeming complicit. They always back up just short of candid, leaving us to channel our inner sleuth in order to figure out which dots to connect. We’re not too good at that yet, but we’re getting better.