not true. media organizations that do not report in accordance with and to the governments favour may lose preferential access to press conferences as retaliation. their parent companies, viacom, CBS, and Warner for example, may lose the cooperation of the government on their next latest action film which may deny them access to state parks or military equipment and bases for filming and props. When you publish something the government doesnt like, they can also just straight up seize your profits from that material as well. https://www.businessinsider.com/us-government-can-seize-prof...
television news in the united states is under no objective requirement to serve the public interest in the 21st century. the news was originally provided as part of a service to the mandate from the FCC that license holders contribute to the public good, but modern news is partisan, divisive, appeals extensively to emotion, and uses manipulative scare tactics to drive viewership and ratings with a combination of conjecture and talk shows.
What the article doesn’t make clear is a publishing company could keep their profits from the book, the government only has a case for Snowden.
The readers are an important part of that calculus. How would your readers react when they know that information have been hidden? Some newspapers have readers that will feel betrayed and lose interest in the news outlet, others have more sectarian readers that do not care about such high quality news as long as it follows some ideological line. Lack of access is important, but readers are way more important.
You should not want a news organization to err on either extreme by publishing literally everything they get their hands on (Wikileaks) or acting as a de facto arm of the state (state media outlet of choice).
I would argue that neither extreme count as journalists.
>I don't think that's much of a revelation.
Absolutely, they basically wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't ask. Asking is a lot different than many other tactics.
But this is what they are actually doing. They saw some time ago that being in conflict with the state does not help revenue.
I would reformulate that so that security agencies have to do that calculus too and it is suspected that they do often calculate wrongly.
There is not a single example contrary to more information available to the public. There can be exceptions for immediate cases, but if you rely on information to stay hidden from the public for an extended period of time, it is a fault in your security architecture.
The word national security used to mean protecting a country just invaded, then moved to troops on the border looking like they'll invade. Now you've stretched it to the government doing mass surveillance on its citizens (and storing it forever). During COINTELPRO, Hoover and his secret political police in the FBI spied on and worked to anonymously disrupt feminist groups and other political organizations, and this is just a continuation of that - set up in secret incidentally. I don't see how some elite trying to set up a police state to exert political control has anything to do with national security. Luckily the FBI raided Trump recently, so Republican wariness may have them go back to that old idea of a Republican secretary of state that "gentlemen do not read each others' mail".