Of course, on the Internet, it's not Occam's Razor that controls, but Godwin's, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the greatest dramatic implications must be selected.
"THE GOVERNMENT IS CENSORING THIS VIDEO cuz they dont want you to see it. IT'S STUCK AT 301 VIEWS!!!1111!"
The American media is in the business of selling time to advertisers, not necessarily informing the public. Duck Dynasty is more popular than Edward Snowden and that particular story was incredibly sensational, so it gets covered more, so it gets more viewers, so it makes the commercial time worth more. Conspiracies aren't necessary to explain it... it's not worth more effort for stations than it gets.
This looks like real self-censorship: it's not newsworthy enough to be worth alienating people that you might want to have as your friend later on. You still don't need a conspiracy to explain it; but it's nevertheless toxic for democracy.
Frankly, I think self-censorship like this is much worse than explicit censorship. At least with explicit censorship there's still some attempt to question the party line; but with self-censorship you've lost even that.
As to the video itself, is it possible ARD simply has a copyright claim it wishes to enforce?
>As to the video itself, is it possible ARD simply has a copyright claim it wishes to enforce?
Maybe? Affiliates certainly aren't going to pay money for it, they'll just take whatever feeds their parent station sends them, and if the parents aren't willing to pay for it then it doesn't get covered in depth.
It's on archive.org now:
https://archive.org/details/snowden_interview_en
(thanks to zeeed for the link)
Not entirely clear about the license, it says "opensource movies" and credits the NDR person in the metadata.
* media (corporations typically owned by larger corporations) can decide not to report what's against owners' interests
* advertisers (corporations buying access to eyeballs) may find news against their interests
Many journalists might want to report, but they have bosses/editors, and those covering important news are selected for having certain attitudes. Government may threaten to revoke access, but that's probably too marginal to cause a blackout.
Or you know, a soft-core version of the above.
Blackout doesn't involve violence -- just an order, implicit or explicit and some threat (which could just be "perhaps we'll call our friends at the IRS" or even "this is a matter of national security, trust us and don't play it. We'll return the favor to your media group.").
And it doesn't have to involve all the media, just the more wide-reaching networks, to control the main volume of public discussion. E.g they don't care if 20 or 30 million people see it. But they wouldn't like 350 million people watching it day and night, discussed in news and tv panels and editorials for a few days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Robertson_%27%27GQ%27%27_i...
I had no idea about that, it's a US thing :) .
1) There is no blackout, 2) the US media is covering this, and 3) the general public does not care - hense it's not a major news story.
I think "I'm terrified of being assassinated by Russian/Chinese authorities" from a major dissident asylum seeker would be getting much more play.
In any case I don't think this isolated interview is very significant in itself.
There's no need for hypotheticals here. When actual Russian dissidents wind up actually dead under extremely suspicious circumstances it actually does not get much more coverage in the US media.