Paper long abstract:

Norway is a newsprint country, 2/3 of households subscribe to at least one daily newspaper. What are Norwegian newspapers saying about surveillance after Edward Snowden's whistleblowing? We have tracked a range of newspapers for one week in March 2014 to see how surveillance was being covered.

In November, when the March week was chosen, it seemed Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald had mastered the management of the story, releasing "pebbles" of information into the media pool with a timing and order that would keep the story alive almost indefinitely to create a deep understanding of the workings of mass surveillance. However, media attention spans are notoriously short. What ripples would still be flowing out and reflecting back from those "pebbles" come March? Which would have faded away? Or, to use a connect-the-dots metaphor: what dots remain, what connections are drawn, and what overall image of surveillance is surveillance-themed journalism creating?

A Norwegian database search shows that the number of surveillance-themed newspaper items soared immediately after Greenwald began publishing from Snowden's leaked documents, June 2013. The numbers dipped during Parliamentary elections in September 2013, then rose again from October falling thereafter gradually.

Reading the articles themselves, one striking point is the number of key issues from Snowden's revelations that are not mentioned in the March 2014 newspapers, even when articles take up closely related points. Those "missing dots and connections" and the changed shapes their absence may create in the overall picture of surveillance will be our theme in this paper.