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Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

Occam's Razor - Which is more likely?

1) The US government has persuaded major media outlets CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NYT, etc. to bury the interview.

2) The German media company that did the inteview is asking foreign news outlets for more money than they're willing to pay for the interview (and is protecting its copyright by having internet copies taken down).

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As shown on reddit[1], this hasn't stopped a number of other news organizations from covering it, but the coverage has been very limited. In addition, Fox, MSNBC, and CBS seem to have ignored it completely. It might not be a media blackout, but this is a somewhat significant story (moreso than Bieber being arrested, which I'm certain garnered far more time, even on the political-oriented stations).

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1wddfp/us_media_bl...

MSNBC didn't cover the interview because the entity ceased to exist last year. However, its successor, NBC News, did report the interview...6 days ago when it first came out. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/26/22454373-snowden-... This was the first result on Google.

Fox News reported the AP story here: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/01/26/german-tv-snowden-sa....

CNN covered the story here: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/24/world/europe/russia-snowden/.

Nobody in the US regards CBS as the 4th rail of news broadcasting, but they covered it here, with video: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/snowden-nsa-conducts-industrial-...

The partnership that owned msnbc.com ended last year, but the cable channel is still around.

False choice. It's far more likely they're not running it because the advertisers and the corporate brass don't like snowden.

It's far more likely they're not running it because no one cares. Seriously, the general public really doesn't care. Why would they report on something that's going to make their viewers change the channel?

They can re-air portions of it without paying any money (fair use), right? They do it all the time. Why not this time? And why not discuss it? They discuss findings in scientific journals without reprinting the entire articles, so why not discuss a high-profile interview without re-broadcasting the entire thing?

They can, and they did. For example, the New York Times included 3 minutes of the interview in their writeup 5 days ago:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/thelede/2014/01/29/video-fro...

It's the responsibility of the media to make the interview known to the public and direct the public to where they can view it (if they're not showing it directly on their network). When people talk about suppressing coverage, that to me is how they're doing it.

That 30 minute interview is greatly in the public interest.

That isn't how western government influences media in it's own country. Media know that the US government would be very unhappy about a certain story and they know that the US government is powerful and has carrots and sticks at its disposal.

Who is going to poke the bear?

The press seems more than happy to engage in bear-poking as shown with the prior administration and others in the past. There must be some other explanation.

That's a common fallacy.

http://www.chomsky.info/books/consent02.htm