Unbelievable. When it's the NSA spying on US citizens, everybody's paying attention, and US people scramble to point out that the EU isn't much better, either (which we knew already because it wasn't kept secret from us in the first place. blame us for the apathy, I applaud the US's (relative) outrage). And then something like this comes out, the UK hacking a neighbour EU country, and people are suddenly "huh we're tired of this news". Self-centred is more what I'd call it.
I don't know how this can be solved other than perhaps intense moderation to unflag everything regarding these revelations and let their popularity be determined solely by votes.
If you want a completely democratically run internet forum, create your own subreddit or on www.reddit.com.
Incidentally Hacker News was made partially as a response to the decline of the general reddit communities and with the hope of addressing at least some of their failures - such as relying too much on democracy.
The "knee-jerk" comes from the tendency of people to submit lots and lots of less important stories on the same handful of topics, rather than a few good ones. Remember when the front page was nothing but Erlang? Or nothing but Steve Jobs eulogies? For people that come for quality rather than quantity, it harms the signal to noise ratio. Submitting even more just exacerbates the problem, without creating better discussions (more threads != better threads) in exchange.
As tomjen3 suggests: find or create your own subreddit. Subreddits themselves exist because this same problem afflicted Reddit.
Edit: I'm sorry if I offended somebody. I'm simply trying to propose a solution for people that feel they aren't seeing the stories they want to see on HN.