Bradley Manning Is Not a Royal Baby

[pullquote] As Britain and the US draw closer through their partnership in international crimes, their cultures become ever more intertwined. The royal silliness, of course, that afflicts Britain, has been given ample wattage in the American media. [/pullquote]

Inflammatory, sure– and also apparently the last time the trial was mentioned on NBC Nightly News. A similar brief summary aired on NBC‘s Today.

The other networks were hardly any better. On ABC‘s Good Morning America (6/4/13), viewers were told that Manning was an “Army private charged with the biggest leak of classified information in US history.” But apparently the biggest leak ever wasn’t big enough to merit much additional coverage; the only other mention of the trial on ABC came because WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange brought it up during an interview on the Sunday show  This Week (6/30/13).

CBS Evening News briefly mentioned the Manning trial on June 3, but has never talked about it since then. The day before the CBS show Sunday Morning reported (6/2/13) this:

There is a look at the week ahead on our Sunday Morning calendar. Monday, the court-martial begins on remaining charges against Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of passing government secrets to the WikiLeaks website. On Tuesday, Doctor Ruth Westheimer celebrates her eighty-fifth birthday. After fleeing Nazi Germany in her youth, Westheimer found success as a media sex expert.

Judging by the word count, the trial is slightly less important than Dr. Ruth’s birthday.

CBS This Morning had an interview with WikiLeaks‘ Assange on June 7– which including this question from host Charlie Rose:

Charlie Rose: a dependable mouthpiece for the superrich, and an establishmentarian in his own right. Rose owns a house in Henderson, North Carolina, a 575-acre (2.33 km2) farm in Oxford, North Carolina, an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City, a beach house in Bellport, New York, an apartment in Washington, D.C.,[3] and an apartment in Paris, France.

You know, let’s talk about the Bradley Manning case because everyday all of us who are in journalism believe that it’s the responsibility for the journalist to hold government accountable and that is the responsibility. But also there is a sense that you do not do things that threaten national security and endanger the lives of innocent Americans. That doesn’t seem to be a concern for you and Mister Manning.

Assange called that charge “completely false,” pointing out that U.S. government is not even making the case that individuals were harmed by the disclosures.

So that is the state of network television coverage of a whistleblower, held without trial for 3 years, who revealed information that made headlines in the most powerful news outlets around the world for months.  That is how U.S. television networks are covering a trial where the U.S. government is attempting to argue that publishing information that finds its way into the hands of U.S. enemies is in fact “aiding the enemy”– a stunning legal strategy that holds the potential to criminalize investigative journalism.

No, all of that is apparently just barely newsworthy. But a baby born to the British royal family is news– and has already been the subject of more substantive network TV coverage (NBC Nightly News, 7/14/13).

And the same could be said for a cheesy, little-watched TV movie Sharknado, which was the subject of an NBC Nightly News report on July 12. Or the NBC reports about a new flavor of Hamburger Helper or a new hardwood floor cleaning tool.

Kevin Gosztola, one of the independent journalists covering the Manning trial, recently told  Democracy Now! (7/16/13) that the trial “really is only being covered when the outlets in the U.S. media feel they have an obligation to cover something.”

Which, for the major TV networks, would seem to be basically never.