With the lack of the NSA / Edward Snowden leaks, it has become painfully obvious that MSNBC has become the Obama News Network. It's been that way for a while now, but the debates the news network has been perpetrating has turned into a "what do you like more? Pepsi or Coke?" argument, which is completely missing the point of the leaks.
As Jeff Cohen, former MSNBC employee, pointed out in his Huffington Post piece titled "How Do You Know When President Obama Is Lying? MSNBC Won't Tell You" some of the worse coverage of these leaks are coming from those who we consider "progressives" and not shills for the DNC.
Some of biggest perpetrators of this rhetoric is Joy Reid, Melissa Harris Perry and Jonathan Capheart, who is a daily guest on network. Joy Reid and Capheart blame Snowden's travels as the reason why the "journalists" can't do their job because Snowden is "making himself the story," and not the leaks. To me, that's just a lame ass excuse for not doing your actual job. In the HuffPo article, Coehn points to this when he writes:
I watched one MSNBC host function as an auxiliary prosecutor in Obama's Justice Department, going after Snowden -- while trying to link WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald to criminal flight.
In that segment, Joy Reid jumps on David Gregory's bandwagon by calling for the arrest of Glenn Greenwald. Cohen even goes after Schultz, Maddow and MHP by writing:
As Snowden arrived in Russia from Hong Kong, MSNBC host Ed Schultz blustered on about Snowden as a "punk" and "coward." Railing about the "security of the country" in tones Hannity would approve of, Schultz questioned Snowden's patriotism and credibility, asking: "If the United States of America is doing something so egregiously wrong in its surveillance program, how come he's the only one speaking up
In a bizarre monologue attacking Snowden (who's risked plenty, in my view), Harris-Perry hailed those who engage in civil disobedience for being willing "to risk your own freedom, your own body in order to bring attention to something that needs to be known. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested, attacked, smeared. Nelson Mandela went to prison for 27 years."
Nelson Mandela? He wasn't a civil disobedient who gave himself up. He was a fugitive, fleeing the apartheid police. He was on the lam domestically, like Snowden is now internationally. And some reports indicate that South African authorities were able to nab Mandela thanks to the U.S. CIA (one of the agencies now on the hunt for Snowden).
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has also disappointed. After doing a typically thorough presentation on the force-down of President's Morales' plane, she ended her report by expressing displeasure only that Washington had apparently gotten allies to go out on the limb "for nothing." Her objection to the harassment seemed to be: it hadn't succeeded. I didn't hear opposition to the action had Snowden actually been on board and apprehended.
I don't want to use anymore text from Cohen's article as I may be teetering to violating the Terms of Use, but this article lays out how this "news station for progressives" has turned into the Fox News for the Obama Administration. In my opinion, this lack of journalism is eerily similar to the coverage of the Iraq War run-up.
Update
I reposted the link because it was broken, but here it is in it's regular format.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...