Budget is a pretty weak limiting factor when it comes to automated wiretapping. It may limit the usefulness (can't watch all the "bad guys") without limiting the abuses (creepy fed employee can watch you). Depending on the press assumes that they have both interest and visibility into the government's wiretapping, the former of which may not be true and the latter of which definitely is not.

Do you imagine that we have the ability to clearly identify terrorists via wiretaps? Why would we allow such people to walk around freely in the first place? The idea that we would simply stop them from flying is bizarre.

There are also significant drawbacks to efficient watching. Sure, it might catch a real terrorist. Or it might just watch to see if you're in a "dangerous" group: anarchist, revolutionary, extreme libertarian, etc. As a member of one of these groups, you might need to be interrogated. Meanwhile some creepy FBI agent is listening in on your wife because it gets him off, and your neighbor is being blackmailed by a DHS agent who's threatening to put him on the No Fly list and publicly reveal that he visits prostitutes.

I think that you grossly overestimate both journalism and government, where it regards their respective ethics.

Mainstream journalists, the ones most likely to have access to government officials and processes, are also the ones most co-opted by that system. It is all about access, and the ones who rock the boat too much risk losing it.

As for government, there is a reason why surveillance has always featured prominently in dystopian novels: it is understood by those who have studied the way governments work that they will almost always abuse their power. The power to put a population under surveillance is a kind of control, proportional to the amount it is being done; people understand that when a government is watching them, it is also monitoring potential dissidents and related opinions, organizing, etc.

In short, I'm surprised that anyone would be so willing to trust any government with complete and unhindered powers of surveillance. I wouldn't trust a single non-government entity with that, as it happens.