The view that NSA “whistle blower”-in-exile Edward Snowden is a hero has gained less traction to date than the view that he is a traitor. Nevertheless, the debate rages on. So writes John Avlon in a column in Saturday’s Telegraph (UK), in which he notes that no less a leaker than Daniel (Pentagon Papers) Ellsberg has come out in support of Snowden’s actions, telling The Daily Beast:
There has not been a more significant or helpful leak or unauthorized disclosure in American history ever than what Edward Snowden shared with the Guardian about the NSA.
Offering up the same viewpoint but with a sizeable if predictable undercurrent of ridicule aimed at anyone dumb enough to think otherwise is Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher:
In case you hadn’t heard, the National Security Agency is Red-Wedding-ing Americans’ freedom by backing up phone records and collecting internet data from overseas (some of which involves communications with Americans), all with warrants, and all of which they need to get extra warrants if they want to look at Americans’ stuff. The horror….
[W]hat has been revealed so far is about as alarming as an epidemic of Pac Man Fever, which is a far more recent threat than that presented by these revelations.
Christopher backs up his assertion with the observation, made elsewhere, that the phone records the NSA has been gathering consist of numbers and times, not names, and were obtained via warrants — and so what’s the big deal?
But then, to drive home his case, he contrasts the NSA spying program with something that in his opinion is a big deal. That is the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program, which, Christopher asserts, “overwhelmingly affects the privacy of innocent black and Latino people.” What he concludes, however, from the “mainstream media’s disproportionate interest in the NSA scandal over other, far more alarming injustices” is worthy of MNBC’s Touré, who sees racism in the clouds when he gazes up at the sky.
Christopher writes:
If the last several weeks have made one thing clear about the media, it’s that the best way to get them to care about government abuse, or anything, is to do it to white people.
What a revelation! The entirety of the Fourth Estate — and not just its conservative wing — is racist. Christopher even dredges us some anecdotal evidence of this pernicious bias:
While MSNBC (including Chris Hayes, whom I am not trying to pick on) has covered Stop and Frisk much more than its competitors (about 50% more than Fox News, and 900% more than CNN!), the overall discrepancy is indicative of a lack of diverse viewpoints in journalism.
It seems that Christopher is short-changing Hayes, who also said, “I think we need more leaks and not less [sic]” leaks of classified information, but then again maybe racists don’t deserve any consideration.
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