Journalism and the Nsa Revelations ─ Privacy, Security and the Press

Edward Snowden's revelations about the mass surveillance capabilities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other security services triggered an ongoing debate about the relationship between privacy and security in the digital world. This discussion has been dispersed into a number of national platforms, reflecting local political realities but also raising questions that cut across national public spheres. What does this debate tell us about the role of journalism in making sense of global events? What do these debates have in common and how do they differ from each other? How did the debates reflect on the role of journalism itself?

This book looks at discussions of these debates in the mainstream media in the USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China. The chapters focus on editorials, commentaries and op-eds and looks at how opinion-based journalism in different contexts has negotiated key questions on the legitimacy of surveillance and its implications to security and privacy.

Drawing from their specific expertise in different journalism cultures, the authors evaluate the NSA case against particular national trajectories in journalism. Does the NSA case mark another step towards political polarisation in the UK press? What sort of symbolic exchanges are taking place between established media institutions and a broader swath of alternative publishers in the US? How did the terrorist attacks in France change national debates in French newspapers? How were digital futures imagined in Russia and China?

Journalism and the NSA Revelations provides a rich and thoughtful analysis of the possibilities and limits of 'transnational journalism' at a time when its definition, functions and raison d'etre appear ambiguous.

Heikki Heikkila is Senior Research Fellow at Research Center for Journalism, Media and Communication (COMET) at the University of Tampere.