Is posting hundreds of mundane "news" articles with no substance really fighting?
Seeing the entire front page of HN covered in stories on it might be slightly annoying but it is much better than the alternative (no coverage) IMHO.
A balance between nothing and tabloid.
We're dangerously close to tabloid currently. Lots of irrelevant articles, lots of speculation and opinion, and the real stories are hidden in the noise.
I still think about 80% of the Snowden articles are worse than useless -- they're actively hiding the 20% of articles that are worthwhile, that we should all be reading.
But hey, I guess diverting our attention to the pointless bits of the story is an effective diversion tactic /conspiracy