[jessaustin]

You might want to consume different sources of news media. The only times I've heard the name "Paula Deen" was in conversation with my parents and grandparents. I'm sure her travails (whatever they are or were) amount to a crisis for some people, but you don't have to pay attention to those people.

[Vivtek]

Oh. Your parents and grandparents aren't Americans, then?

Look, if you hang with the hipsters who "consume" better media, then sure, you won't have any clue what the vast majority of the public cares about. It's not surveillance. It's whatever mass opiate has been focus-grouped out for the week.

In the meantime, though, that mass opiate is mainlined into every public space in the land on countless television monitors in essentially every place where a person has to spend more than 30 seconds. They've got no time to think about the future - they've got to be outraged about this week's 15-minute hate, or admire this week's baby, or fear this week's terrorist.

You may simply not visit those downscale places. Good on you. But Washington really doesn't care, except to the extent that you earn more money they can extract or possibly build more centralized data processing services they can mine.

[sillysaurus]

Vivtek's point was that most people don't care about this, and consider the Paula Deen incident far more noteworthy.

[jessaustin]

That may have been true for whichever couple of days the talking heads devoted to the unfortunate Ms. Dean, but it simply isn't borne out over the long haul. If you look really hard, I doubt you can find a single piece about Dean that was produced today, while most outlets have several about Snowden.

[mpyne]

You can't find a piece about Paula Deen today because the attention has shifted to Prince George. Which, by the way, is exactly the point: While there are people who care about Snowden, NSA, etc., they are not currently any kind of substantial part of the public. We all ignore that at our peril.

The fact that Snowden may be a larger-than-normal individual news story doesn't change the fact that the story doesn't capture public attention in the face of the multitudes of other news stories continually cropping up and then going away again.

[jessaustin]

Prince Who? Look, I'm an American. We fought several wars to confirm that we don't have to give a flying fuck about King George III or any of his syphilitic inbred descendants.