[Itse]

Originally Posted by SebC

I see your New Yorker and raise you The Economist.

I think the Snowden case has lifted The Guardian as the one that rules over all. Despite enormous pressure, they keep asking all the hard questions and the right questions.

(Completely unrelated quotes to this topic, just examples of what I mean by "asking the right questions")

NSFW!

Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states. Can even President Obama and his most devoted loyalists continue to maintain, with a straight face, that this is all about Terrorism?

If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all

how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted

As to online comments, here's some sad science from Popular Science magazine, on why they shut down their comments section.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought.

That's heavy.