Edward Snowden, the now famous/infamous NSA whistleblower, made an interesting comment during a brief online Q&A hosted by The Guardian on Monday.
“Unfortunately,” he wrote from Hong Kong, “The mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”
Of all the many contentious things Snowden may have claimed since outing himself as the NSA leaker, this comment was instructive about how sections of the media have played his revelations. Rather than the issue, Snowden's personality and background became the target.
It's an old tactic, straight from the crisis management playbook, but what's fascinating is that mainstream journalists are signing up to discredit Snowden in ways that go way beyond providing the public with information about his background.
Snowden was a high school “dropout”, they write, as if high school dropouts are incapable of, well, anything much. Those snarking on that angle may want to talk to David Karp, the high school dropout who recently sold Tumblr to Yahoo! for USD$1.1 billion.
Jeffrey Toobin, writing in The New Yorker, claimed Snowden “is rather a grandiose narcissist”, who apparently perpetrated “an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience”.
OK, but what about what Snowden actually revealed? What about the head of the NSA lying to a Senate committee about what information the agency collects from the public?
Apparently, that is also the messenger's fault, with one crazy congressman, Peter King, calling Snowden a “defector” and claiming Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the NSA story, should be prosecuted.
“I think it should be very targeted, very selective and certainly a very rare exception, but in this case when you have someone who has disclosed secrets like this and threatens to release more … that to me is a direct attack against Americans,” said King, who is a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee.
It's not just in the U.S. where the media is playing the man. In Australia, Gerard Henderson, writing for Fairfax, claimed “[Julian] Assange and Snowden are openly proud of their alienation and do not seem to regard any nation or any leader as better than any alternative. Moreover, both show evident signs of narcissism.”
Really? So Assange and Snowden like what they see in the mirror. Superficially judging Henderson's photo accompanying his own column could suggest the same trait. But who cares? My postman's psychological makeup does not influence the content of the mail I receive in my letterbox.
Is Snowden (and Assange) a traitor or a hero? Well, of course, that depends and has yet to play out in full. But it does not depend upon whether someone was a high school dropout or is a control freak.
That discussion is a distraction from the real issues, one of which Snowden reminded us is that “bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”
That, though, seems to be a more difficult subject to address than Snowden's possible character flaws.
