Insider snark tells its own story
by digby
I guess this nasty little piece of snark is supposed to say something really insulting about Edward Snowden but for the life of my I can't figure out what:
Edward Snowden, the poster child for truth telling, answered questions live, but the audience was instructed not to record them.
Irony, much?
That was the scene at an awards ceremony held at the National Press Club this week where a watchdog group that decries government secrecy wouldn’t let attendees keep digital record of Snowden’s virtual appearance.
An attendee at the event tells the Loop the room was packed to see Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor and everyone’s favorite whistleblower, accept the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling from an undisclosed location in Russia. His remarks, the source says, were “poignant and moving.”
But during a question and answer session, Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight and emcee of the event, took the microphone and told the crowd, “I‘m sorry to interrupt just for a second but I want to make it clear that no one can be recording. There had been an understanding with the media but others in the room have iPhones…”
[...]
To layer on the irony, the freedom-loving Russian government did not seem to have any problem with Snowden being recorded when he asked Russian President Vladimir Putin a question on Russian TV.
The thing is, I don't think Snowden made the rules on either one of those video hook-ups. I guess it's fair to wonder why the Project on Government Oversight didn't want any recordings of his comments, but to backhandedly slam Snowden as a hypocritical "poster child for truth-telling" because of it is weird. And telling. The fact that journalists are so hostile to a whistleblower will never stop surprising me.
Mother Jones and others did record the session, reported his comments in full and published the recording. They reported the "irony" this way:
At one point during Snowden's appearance, an organizer of the event asked the audience not to record him—but this was near the end of his remarks, and numerous people in the audience were holding up smart phones and recording devices.
I have no idea why they said this, but it doesn't seem to have been some gestapo-like edict where they were confiscating iPhones or anything. So, whatever.
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