Framing Glenn Greenwald: hegemony and the NSA / GCHQ surveillance scandal in a news interview

This article investigates the methods of hegemonic framing of the NSA/GCHQ surveillance scandal in a television interview of the journalist Glenn Greenwald on the flagship BBC Television news magazine Newsnight. Having uncovered the greatest mass surveillance project in human history, much of the mainstream media and indeed many academic studies have focused on the debates over the ethics and responsibilities of the journalists and news organizations involved. This research investigates how a television news interviewer inflects the story and directs attention to a series of ‘public concerns’, articulated primarily by those who caused the scandal and mediated through the journalistic voice. The main focus for this article is how a television news interviewer fails to articulate a set of concerns, instead being led by the newspaper mediation of those in authority.