Digby Discusses the Movie Citizen Four, Journalism and Snowden @spockosbrain

by Spocko

Tonight on Virtually Speaking Digby and Jay Ackroyd have a fascinating discussion about the movie Citizen Four. (Podcast link)

I was going to call in but I already got to talk to Jay about the pro-war media last week and the role of fiction in our political narratives with Digby on Sunday.

But I invite you all to listen for some interesting points Jay and Digby bring up.

They speak about the role of WikiLeaks in the movie, I was going to mention that I think Greenwald learned a lot about how the media “consumes” news.

I think he learned that you can’t just do document dumps anymore. The media and public will lose interest. If there is too much information. important aspects of an issue or story gets lost over some smaller “sexy” part. The roll out was spread out over time. The roll out kept the media and government scrambling to address each issue.

The other thing that I think Snowden (and maybe Glenn) knew is that the media WILL focus on the person. It was good at first to not identify the source so they could talk about the issues, but the media love/NEED to go into the Character of the Whistle-blower.

Digby mentioned how important this movie was to showing Snowden’s character. There will still be opportunities for character assassination, but the movie went a long way to show who he was and why he was doing this.

In many ways Snowden was a goddamn saint, so Greenwald took some of the hate. With Assange we went with the whistleblower we had, not the one we wanted.

Laura Poitras’s movie went a long way to help show the character of Snowden. Think about how it might have been edited differently. We all know what reality TV can do.

 I think Snowden’s selecting of Laura and Glenn was a smart move on his part. His understanding of deep encryption helped him protect his data, but his understanding of who these people were and how they would act helped protect his image and probably his life.

In a related story I heard Matt Taibbi on Sam Seder’s Majority Report talking about Michael Winston, who was a whistleblower talking about Countrywide’s horrible practices and the Justice departments’ failure to prosecute. Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece is, A Whistleblower’s Horror Story.

It turns out that BofA (Bunch of Assholes) had Winston’s case against them overturned, then put a lien on his house and went after him for court costs to send a message to other whistleblowers. Listen to the interview here.

The interview ended with Taibbi saying that the common thread in these cases is that people people often try to work the system from the inside, they think they will be thanked for pointing out the problems, but aren’t. And then their lives are over when they become whistleblowers.

Digby and Jay talked about the tension watching Snowden walking out of the hotel room, knowing that he might end up spending his life in a Supermax facility.

We might understand why the people inside governments or corporations go out of their way to destroy and punish whistleblowers. They feel they need to send a message. My question is, what mechanisms can we create or put in place to help whistleblowers?  And not just mechanisms, attitudes and practices. Because clearly some changes are in order.

• Journalists, learn how to encrypt and protect your communications with whistleblowers. 
• Human beings working in corporations, look at your systems. Are you fulfilling your own corporate governance rules? 
• People acting as corporate counsel, you are chartered with protecting the corporations, not specific officers. 
• PR and marketing people, do you really want to have to spin the deaths your company was responsible for? 

The Pulitzer for the Guardian and Greenwald, plus the Oscar for Poitras also sends a message, a good one.