Mainstream Reporters

Even at this late date, with a record number of at least eight individuals charged by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act (compared to three such prosecutions for all of Obama’s predecessors combined), many prominent journalists can’t see, or won’t admit, or don’t believe, that an attack on whistleblowers is also an attack on the press and on the First Amendment.

They appear either not to care or to have scant awareness of the chilling effect on the symbiotic relationship between investigative reporters and their sources every time whistleblowers are charged or convicted for crimes that could land them in prison for decades, if not a lifetime.

They also appear to accept at face value the stories spun by the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon or other members of the vast U.S. national security state apparatus. It matters not to them the number of times those agencies have been shown to be liars, whether it be over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the extent of the vast surveillance operations directed at American citizens and people worldwide.

Why do these stars of the news media so readily brush off concerns about our dangerous warfare/surveillance state revealed by Snowden, Manning and the others? Why do they cheer on the government’s crackdown on unauthorized leaks and tell us surveillance and the diminishment of our civil liberties is really for our own good in a scary world – rather than side with the Bill of Rights and the handful of other journalists and whistleblowers who expose secrets that people in a free society should have the right to know? Why do they sound as if they are angling for a position on the National Security Council or membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, rather than aspiring to be another I.F. Stone (who lived by the tenet, “all governments lie”) or Edward R. Murrow or Seymour Hersh?

  AntiWar

Money? Prestige in D.C.? Access to government officials? Well, the latter would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Access to more lies isn’t much of a prize.

I'll have to guess it's money and career maintenance that turns reporters into government shills.  Corporate news organizations which are a part of the massive money machine controlling Washington are probably not going to keep independent reporters on the payroll.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And, by the way, whatever happened to the "second leaker" from the Snowden documentary?  The last I can find anything about that person is reports from October 2014 which said the FBI raided his/her home.  The person has gone unnamed and, as far as I can tell, unreported, since then.  Where's Jeremy Scahill, to whom the leaks were made, and his supposedly independent and corporate-free news organization, The Intercept, (also Glenn Greenwald's employer) on this?  Silent.  Why?