On the second anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the Los Angeles Times has published an extraordinary editorial trying to have it both ways: acknowledging that it was thanks to Edward Snowden that there have been any reforms at all in the way that the government has been sweeping up the private information of people all over the world, and then objecting to him being given a pardon and calling for him to return to the US and ‘accept the consequences’.
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Now that David Cameron and the Conservative Party achieved a convincing victory in the UK elections, they have set about clamping down on any speech that the government thinks is ‘extremist’, despite their recent loud claims to champion free speech.
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When I think of great American journalists, I do not think of people like Edward R. Murrow that the media establishment reveres. I think of I. F. Stone. His basic working principle was that you had to assume that governments lie and work from there. He later extended that principle to corporations too.
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When Bernie Sanders appeared on ABC News yesterday, it became clear that the interviewer wanted to goad him into attacking Hillary Clinton directly and then get her to respond in kind because that will enable them to create the kind of narrative they are most familiar with, that of a mud-slinging race and the effect of those attacks on poll numbers. But Sanders is smart enough not to fall for that. Instead, by focusing his attacks on the billionaire class that dominates US politics, Clinton is affected only to the extent that she is part of that class. It will be interesting to see how she reacts.
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