As the Village Voice reported: "Miller is not the first reporter to make this sort of switch--newsrooms are shrinking and folks have families to feed. ".He has shown that there is a viable, and lucrative, career in circling the revolving door between journalism and law enforcement (or any other institution)."
Now, CBS, the "big eye" network, has gone even further, as Danny Weil reports:
'CBS News has hired former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, as their senior security correspondent. Morell has been a frequent guest on CBS' Face the Nation, where he has disseminated CIA propaganda and misleading information, raising questions about CBS' journalistic integrity. Morell also works for Beacon Global Strategies, a DC consulting firm which peddles its government connections to defense contractors, raising even more questions about his role at CBS.
(This news came a few days after it was reported that CBS overlord, Les Moonves, is now bringing home $63 million a year.)
On December 23, 2013, Morell appeared on Face the Nation, where he promoted the government's campaign to prosecute Edward Snowden. On that day, Morell stated:
"He violated the trust put in him by the United States government. He has committed a crime, in my view. You know a whistleblower doesn't run. A whistleblower does not disclose information that has nothing to do with what he says his cause is which is the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. You know if I could talk to Mister Snowden myself, what I would say is, Edward, you say you're a patriot, you say you want to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, you say that you wanted Americans to have a debate about this and to make up their mind about what to do about this. Well, if you really believe that, if you really believe that Americans should be the judge of this program, then you should also believe that the Americans should be the judge of your behavior in this regard. So if you are the patriot that you say you are, you should come home and be judged.'
Now, it's our turn to judge: is this or is this not media complicity in the surveillance state? Bear in mind that had Snowden not done what he had--and if Greenwald and Poitras--hadn't done what they did, we would not have learned of what's being done by the NSA in our name. If we had waited on the big media to tell the story, we would all still be waiting.
News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and blogs at News Dissector.net. His latest book is Madiba A to Z: the Many Faces of Nelson Mandela. (Madibabook.com)
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