One way politicians play the news cycle is with something called the “Friday News Dump.” It works like this: A presidential administration releases a particularly distasteful news item around mid- to late afternoon on a Friday, timing it so that the news emerges either too late to make the network newscasts, or simply is seen by those newscasts’ smaller weekend audiences. That news item is usually not big enough to snowball into a full-blown scandal, but could potentially dominate the weekday cable-news echo chamber in the absence of a natural disaster, plane crash or something equally distracting. Then, the story emerges in Saturday newspapers, which nobody reads, along with some Saturday news programs, which nobody watches, and sometimes fails to pick up traction on the Web. If played properly, the Monday news cycle begins and whatever unpleasant little tidbit was dropped by the administration is shuffled off into obscurity.
But the Friday news dump was much easier to pull off, even as recently as five years ago, than it is now. And sometimes, it takes the blogosphere a few days to get cranking on certain news – which is what is happening this week on several of the most popular national lefty blogs that are apoplectic over a legal memo issued by the Obama Administration Department of Justice defending the government’s use of warrantless wiretapping in a case suing the National Security Agency to prevent it from eavesdropping on AT&T customers. This was, you may remember, a criticism of President George W. Bush wielded heavily by Democrats in the recent presidential election. The current DOJ seeks dismissal of the entire lawsuit.
From Slate.com’s Glenn Greenwald:
But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new “sovereign immunity” claim of breathtaking scope — never before advanced even by the Bush administration — that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is “willful disclosure” of the illegally intercepted communications.
In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and — even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal — you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned.
Strident Obama supporter and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has picked up the gauntlet on this, along with writers at left-leaning blogs the Daily Kos and the Huffington Post.
In reading these essays and blog posts, I think one can’t help but notice how conservative media’s portrayal of Obama as a “Messiah” who those on the left believe can do no wrong is an exaggeration. This criticism is coming from the mainstream left-leaning blogs, and the issue has filtered up to the left-leaning MSNBC largely because these influential bloggers have kept this issue front and center. But whether the Obama Administration takes note is another matter entirely.