Kevin Drum is not a person I tend to agree with on… well, most things. That being said, I think he’s sustaining a lot of unfair criticism for his most recent blog post at Mother Jones, unfortunately titled “Why the Story on Snowden and the NSA Doesn’t Add Up” — as if to suggest that the myriad stories about Edward Snowden have been misleading the public in their portrayal of him, and that the truth is much worse.
Drum bases his post around the New York Times’ latest article about Snowden, which describes his job as an “infrastructure analyst” for the NSA:
…an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.
In so many words, Snowden was a hacker for the State. I think that makes things significantly more interesting than the way he’s been portrayed previously.
“I’d certainly like to know more about what Snowden did for the NSA,” Drum said, and I echo that desire.
Alas, people seem to think that the question Drum raises here is another missile in the seemingly relentless salvo against Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. One commenter on the Mother Jones article remarked, “Oh Kevin, when will you and your embarrassment of an editor take an interest in the NSA leaks themselves?”
He has. Many times, in fact. There’s also this post where he says some pretty reasonable things about several key points in this whole debacle. So maybe it isn’t a good idea to simply paint Drum (who, like I said, has said some things in the past that I’ve thought were flat-out incredible — and not in a good way) into the same corner as David Gregory, who now has his own “unwanted” poster at this excellent Tumblr.
Journalism is currently a profession at war — both with itself and the State. The petty disagreements about what constitutes journalism, who counts as a journalist, whether objectivity can be attained and whether “advocacy” is in itself a bad thing — these have turned into fronts at which people are currently bitterly fighting. The character assassinations from the “impartial” mainstream against both Snowden and Greenwald have made it impossible to ask questions that actually flesh out the story at hand in a meaningful way. Whether Snowden was indeed a hacker or not adds context that could potentially prevent hit pieces and bloodthirsty pundits going after his intellect jugular.
I understand the desire to be immediately skeptical any time a website publishes an article with a title like “The REAL story behind Snowden” or something like that. But that visceral reaction is why those headlines get published. We can’t kneejerk about this. Just this once, let’s not.