Does Tom B really believe that the media has failed to cover the economy, and the unemployment rate, over the last 4 1/2 years?

That is a rather amazing assertion, given the stories and articles I’ve watched and read over that time.

It always seems to me that by and large, the media is corporate-driven and profit seeking. Which means increasingly that entertainment news takes precedence over more boring coverage of issues; that care is taken to not publish/air anything overly offensive to key advertisers; that the predominant current journalistic ethos of “balance” (at least outside the network that advertises itself as ‘fair and balanced’) dictates that partisans on both sides get unfiltered transmission – leading their supporters to think that the media is biased by not filtering the opposition; that economic issues are covered with a decided bias towards the interests of those key advertisers; and that there is a tendency towards social liberalism, because:
(a) social liberalism sells a LOT better than social conservatism in the marketplace (note the products of Rupert Murdoch’s Entertainment Division), and
(b) key advertisers by and large prefer to stay out of battles over social issues, or actually prefer the encouragement of social liberalism (see (a))

I’m not sure if the line The U.S. Embassy and CIA have been caught flatfooted by the developments. is supposed to be a critique … but I think that any assessment of our involvement in the country needs to start with recognizing just how fiercely nationalistic the Turks are. I cannot see how any overt recognition of, much less support for, groups in opposition to a democratically elected Turkish Prime Minister could do anything but backfire very badly.

Sometimes we need to recognize that other countries do have sovereignty to elect their own leaders and deal with the consequences even when from our perspective they’re really screwing up. Meanwhile is there any reason to suspect that American pushback against a staunch Islamist leader would do anything except strengthen his hand?

I appreciate an article that avoids the false dichotomy – “is Edward Snowden a hero or traitor”. One does not have to consider him a hero, or a noble figure, in order to recognize that from what we’ve seen so far the only thing he’s done is akin to playing Toto and pulling back the curtain to expose to the common man the workings of a system that foreign governments, large corporate interests, and the properly-connected were already well aware of, and that those with technical savvy (including those in terrorist organizations) could already guess at.

I suspect that to some extent the American media has been pushing this dichotomy, allowing them to focus on painting Snowden with increasingly less flattering hues, since it distracts from what most of us should be focusing on – why is it that the Government can systematically be operating a system that most Americans are at least somewhat uncomfortable with, while the media has with only a few exceptions stayed relatively mute about the growth and omnipresence of the security state?