Online advertising process as described by Internet Advertising Bureau, October 2015. Wikicommons/Nagle. Some rights reserved.In his October 27 piece for this site entitled "Surveillance, privacy and the British press," author Jonathan Heawood raises (many) questions about the behavior of the British press in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Citing the apparent "cognitive dissonance" in some British news organizations' supporting both the Save Our Sources campaign and state surveillance, Heawood concludes that news organizations' financial dependence on data about their readers makes them the "strange bedfellows" of surveilling governments.
Many of the points that Heawood makes in the course of his piece hold true in the US as well as the UK: In 2013, for example, when Fox News reporter James Rosen was named as a possible "co-conspirator" (a criminal, rather than a civil, charge) by the US Department of Justice for his role in publishing classified information about North Korea's nuclear program, his own media company's criticisms were joined by those of many other news organizations. Yet just months before, Fox News had suggested that Edward Snowden might be a double agent, rather than a whistleblower, and in the wake of the recent shootings in California, a Fox News contributor suggested that law enforcement should increase surveillance of mosques and "stop worrying about people's rights" in the interest of national security.
