Which would contrast highly with most whistleblowers who believe that doing the right thing will result in their objective happening.
In an ideal world, he could release the information and each individual would engage with it, analyze it, make determinations about it, and judge whether or not it is important.
In our world, if he had followed the path of previous whistleblowers and given the information to a newspaper and returned to his house in Hawaii, he likely would have been immediately arrested, and the newspaper would have published very limited yet broad information in a single article in a way that would be easy for the rest of the media to dismiss. Then the character attacks would have overwhelmed the story.
Like it or not, presentation is important. Snowden has claimed his objective is making sure people know about these programs so they can decide about them. That objective, and his path thus far, seems perfectly in line with American idealism.
Thats this world, minus the people that keep "choreographing" things so they have the "right" impact.
Assuming his goals are to (a) maximise exposure of the things he's blowing the whistle about and (b) minimise his likelihood of getting screwed over, this seems like a pretty decent strategy
(I think other respondents are reading your comment about 'doing the right thing' as indicating that other whistleblowers are somehow more morally pure rather than hopelessly naive; whether you intended it or not I'm definitely on the side of the latter interpretation :)