The Guardian is, by their own admission, a center-left paper. That's in Britain, which means they are somewhere between "radical" and "terrorist mooslim communisocialifascist" here in the US. The person who broke the stuff for them is very strongly political. [2]
US corporate media, on the other hand, subscribes to the "view from nowhere" style [3], which they mistake for objectivity. It makes them easily manipulated; when you create a controversy, they are obliged to move away from it. That gets you the classic, "Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ: Round or Flat?" journalism. [4]
This is compounded by the way newspaper journalism has been in decline for years, and was even before the Internet drank their milkshake. [5] Now, major newspapers feel very vulnerable, and one of their few remaining assets is that people in power will talk to them. That makes them basically stenographers to power. [6]
So yes, US journalism's objectivity is often horrible, but the owners of The Guardian are overseeing an enterprise with revenues of £254.4 million a year, according to Wikipedia. That still seems like a corporate enterprise the owners of whom would want to protect. I believe it is still be possible to be a muckraker (or employ those who are like Greenwald) and have a sizable "corporate"-ness.
The Guardian is entirely owned by the Scott Trust, which is a trust set up specifically to safeguard their editorial independence. It doesn't have owners in the usual corporate sense of the word.
The difference is editorial independence. You know this.
The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, a few others, are in no way comparable to properties owned by media conglomerates. You know this.
If not "corporate", how would you refer to likes of News Corp, Clear Channel, Time Warner, Disney, etc? "Purveyors of propaganda for the power elite?" "Anti-democratic radical right wing noise echo chambers?"
"Corporate media" is a term which refers to a system of mass media production, distribution, ownership, and funding which is dominated by corporations and their CEOs. It is sometimes used as a term of derision to indicate a media system which does not serve the public interest in place of the mainstream media or "MSM," which tends to be used by both the political left and the right as a derisive term.
Note that the Washington Post went to the government to cooperate with them. It is not clear if WaPo would have published the same story if there wasn't a competitor (the Guardian) who had access to the same material. Snowden may have shared material with the Guardian purposefully either before or after he found out the WaPo was working the government in order to ensure this.
Note also that Greenwald has special circumstances which reduce his influence from corporate and US interests. First he works for a subsidiary of a UK corporation and does not report on UK issues. I also don't think he reports on corporate issues that would affect Guardian advertising. Finally, he lives in Brazil which may reduce US influence on him.
All that said no one is saying that corporate journalists never break stories that are critical to government or corporations, only that they are under strong influence not to and the effect is that few such stories are produced.
If the US media is inhibited from running stories about sensational overreaches by NSA, how did James Risen and Eric Lichtblau manage to get the SOLARWIND story published?
The NYT had the SOLARWIND story in 2004, and were going to publish it right before the 04 election (October) but sat on it under pressure from the administration. It was over a year before they decided to publish.
> AMY GOODMAN: Is it right, Eric, you were still — the Times wasn’t going to run this story until to your colleague Jim at the New York Times was going to publish his book, and that put the Times in a tremendously awkward position? It’s going to come out anyway, and their reporters are not the ones who are going to reveal it.
> ERIC LICHTBLAU: Yeah, that’s true, for the most part.
I don't know if this is the right example to support your argument.
They are not inhibited, they are positively and negatively incentivized. To say that the government and high-level government officials are a powerful influence is hardly contentious.
If you talk shit about your boss (even if it is true and done politely) it will probably negatively affect you. If you support your boss you will probably reap rewards. The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does.
I'm not sure this is really responsive to my point: I gave a specific example of a bombshell story the NYT ran that was arguably more harmful to "national security" than any revelation about spying on Barack Obama.
In that case you are going to have to make your point explicit. My understanding is that you are trying to say that the media outlets are not influenced by the government because there exist significant critical stories of the government.
But as I said "The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does."
I guess I'm just asking why today's story, about NSA spying on Obama, which is viscerally more interesting than the Risen story but less impactful to national security, would be "frozen out" of the mainstream media where Risen's story clearly wasn't.
