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The Free Press, Post 9/11 edition

A few weeks ago I commented on the fact that the mainstream press has a very limited attention span, and that the recent re-revelations about the extent to which Washington is spying on us all had effectively driven a number of faux scandals off the front page and out of the mass media mind.

Now, you can take the position that there’s nothing new in this story, as I did and to some extent still do. That’s not a defense of the Obama administration, which has managed to out-do Bush in its rush to institute an Orwellian state. The Obamaites have an advantage. No one expects it from a Democrat, and they do it while they smile, which Cheney, et. al., could never pull off.

Even if you argue that there’s nothing new here, that doesn’t mean it’s not an issue, nor that Greenwald and Snowden, for whatever reason, have done anything but a public service in putting the issue front and center again. Except, of course, they didn’t, and this is perhaps a corollary of my theory of the Attention Deficit infected media.

Nowadays, it’s not the message, it’s the messenger. Anyone with half a brain should realize that while what Snowden is currently doing, or how he came to do what he did, is marginally interesting, the real issue is the government spying. But that’s not what we’re seeing. The press can’t get enough of Snowden watching, and though there was some initial follow up regarding the real issue, there’s been precious little lately.

And no wonder. The press, or at least the “journalists” that dominates our discourse, no longer pretend to be anything but the tools of the corporations that pay their salaries and the powerful “sources” they cultivate. How else do you explain David Gregory’s suggestion to Glenn Greenwald that he should be prosecuted criminally for breaking this story? (Fun and games with Gregory here) It’s a risk, of course, that Gregory’s never run; the people that leak to him do so from a position of power with the express or implied consent of the people for whom they work.

This plays wonderfully into the interests of the security state. Rather than debating the acts of a government which will ineluctably destroy freedom of the press, along with a raft of other freedoms (second amendment “rights” always excluded of course), our mainstream press corps can talk of nothing other than how and whether the government will be able to properly punish the guys who revealed its criminal behavior.

So the Obama Administration is a double winner in this case. The NSA leaks have effectively killed the non-scandals (and the AP perhaps scandal), and they have successfully diverted attention from the real NSA scandal to the fate of a 30 year old computer geek and the guy to whom he spilled the beans. It’s win-win for the forces of totalitarianism, enabled by the comfortable Washington press corps.

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