Why Snowden waited a whole year for his TV close-up

By Brian Stelter, CNN

When Edward Snowden was identified as the source who leaked top-secret NSA documents last spring, reporters and television anchors immediately began jockeying to interview him.

How long, they wondered, might he wait to have his first sit-down television interview, to speak out about why he did what he did? One month? Two?

Snowden actually waited one whole year, for reasons that have a lot to do with how the news media works.

Ben Wizner, the ACLU attorney who has been Snowden's legal adviser and liaison with the press, called the wait part of a "very very deliberate strategy all along" to make mass surveillance the story, not the man.

"Waiting a year meant that there was so much to ask him about other than himself," Wizner said.

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