PR-wise, a story tends to have one bad guy
We (humans) are not always comfortable with multiple-villain stories and rather intolerant of no-villain stories.
At first I thought the obsession with demonizing Snowden beyond his real personal significance was to protect Obama from people being concerned about NSA practices. But those things (Snowden's character and NSA policy) are so dissimilar that one cannot plausibly cancel the other.
I thought demonizing Snowden was foolish... not likely to be effective in protecting President Obama from criticism.
I have come to believe that I was wrong, and that the Snowden-trashing may have been clever and effective. Also, that personalizing Snowden was clever and effective.
(I am talking about the entire media spectrum here, not merely DU.)
The story "NSA spies on everybody" has a built-in villain. The NSA.
But the story, "America internationally embarrassed and unpopular and less secure because NSA secrets walked out the door and into newspaper offices," is a different story. It is its own story.
And that story needs a villain. Since the means by which Snowden got stuff are not "catchy" (an invisible contractor for an invisible agency, blah, blah) the villain would be the Obama administration in general, or Edward Snowden.
And it appears that the focus on Snowden the person worked well, because nobody seems that upset about the underlying lack of security. (Including me. It has never crossed my mind that the Obama administration is insufficiently secretive.)
The story could be NSA allows Guardian to get piles of embarrassing material
"NSA allows"=the verb shows the villain of the piece
Or the story could be Snowden steals documents, gives them to Guardian
"Snowden steals"=the verb shows the villain of the piece
And it has worked out well, and I was mistaken to think it senseless.
This is kind of like, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." The NRA wants the headline to be Joe Blow murders... rather than Jim Smith shot with gun... because in PR terms there is only room for one villain. Once we get to Joe Blow we can stop looking where to cast blame.