Jumping the Shark on Edward Snowden

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Some random thoughts on the latest Edward Snowden news:

Do I blame the Obama administration for charging him with a crime and seeking his extradition? Of course not. Snowden broke the law in spectacular fashion and then went as public as he possibly could about it. There’s no way that any government in any country in the world wouldn’t prosecute someone who did that. To leave him alone would be to tacitly give permission for any low-level intelligence worker to release anything they wanted anytime they wanted. No intelligence service can work like that.

Should Snowden have been charged with espionage? Of course not. Maybe unauthorized distribution of government property, or something along those lines. But based on what we know so far, he’s plainly not a spy and plainly not working in the service of a foreign power. He’s an American citizen who thinks the American surveillance state has gotten out of control.

Do I blame Snowden for leaving the country instead of sticking around to pay the price for his civil disobedience? Of course not. It’s one thing to accept jail time as the price of civil disobedience if the jail time in question can be measured in months in a low-security facility. It’s quite another when it can probably be measured as a life sentence in a federal Supermax facility. Snowden had every reason to fear the latter.

Should Glenn Greenwald be charged with a crime because he “aided and abetted” Snowden, as NBC’s David Gregory suggested on Sunday? Of course not. A friend emailed this morning to ruminate about the “weird goings-on with Gregory,” and here’s how I answered:

The whole thing is even weirder than it seems at first glance. Greenwald works for the Guardian! If a guy working for the Guardian isn’t a “real” reporter, who is? What’s more, the Post published some of the same stuff. But no one’s asking Bart Gellman if he’s a spy.

It’s just crazy. Lots of magazines, newspapers, and cable news channels (ahem) have specific points of view, and lots of them do crusading reporting. But no one ever says that this blackballs them from the journalist club. To hear Gregory tell it, I.F. Stone wasn’t a journalist either. It’s nuts.

I know, I know: Gregory was just “asking the question.” Whatever. I can guarantee you that he wouldn’t have asked Barton Gellman that question if he’d been a guest on the show.

Anyway, it’s not coincidence that my answer to all of these questions is the same. Of course not! I’m not a deep-dyed supporter of everything Snowden has done, and I have lingering questions about his motivations, his timing, his actual knowledge of NSA programs, and his judgment. That said, some of the stuff making the rounds of the chattering classes is just crazy. Settle down, folks.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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