While the Snowden leaks were being released, I made a habit of doing a few very general searches to get a sampling of how the events were being reported. I really wish I had taken it a step further and saved regular tables of those observations, because I suspect it could have been made into a very interesting paper.
Most of the time the lazy reprints of an AP/Reuters story.would dominate, as expected. Once and a while - usually after a really import release such as COTRAVELER[1] - the story would happen... and then suddenly everybody is talking about Prism and explaining how it is "just metadata". Any momentum the new story had ended was redirected into topics that were already known. There would be small-time media doing proper reporting, of course, but it was clear who the "big media" worked for.
The media following the orders of those that sign their paychecks isn't really news, but it was very interesting to watch it happen in realtime.
[1] I still believe that COTRAVELER is one of the most important thing we have learned from Snowden, as it builds relationship maps and it doesn't rely on the target performing some specific action such as an HTTP requests that QUANTUM can race. Bonus: it only relies on "metadata".