This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, October 14th, 2013:
In a greatly underreported study, a group supposedly gathered to protect the “integrity” of the press and to “defend the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal” has just discovered the obvious: the Obama administration has no more need of a fawning, deliberately forgetful, and endlessly forgiving press. It's no wonder it hasn't been widely covered: the report shows that the media has been taken for fools. The real question is, why are they surprised?
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued its report entitled “The Obama Administration and the Press” which shows clearly that the Obama administration is deliberately hampering and limiting the press's access to White House officials, who fear reprisals if they speak frankly about the treacherous and unconstitutional acts being committed almost daily by the administration:
In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records.
An “Insider Threat Program” being implemented in every government department … monitor[s] the behavior of [every government employee].
When someone goes off the reservation, the sanctions are severe. The administration has no problem using the 1917 Espionage Act to bring charges against people exposing information the government deems to be secret. It has already brought charges against seven employees and government contractors, more than have been brought in all previous administrations put together. And more investigations are underway.
The CPJ can't understand why. After all, Obama was elected and then reelected thanks to the press's willingness to overlook discrepancies and failings. It also overlooked associations with corrupt and evil individuals who have long sought to destroy America and replace it with a dictatorship.
Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of [those] investigations, and a Fox News reporter [remember James Rosen?] was accused … of being “an aider, abettor and/or conspirator” of an indicted leak defendant … exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job….
A reporter for the New York Times, the official mouthpiece for the establishment, was surprisingly candid. After reviewing the report, he said:
I think we have a real problem. Most [journalists] are deterred by those leaks prosecutions. They're scared to death.
[Our] sources are now afraid … it's having a deterrent effect. If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of american democracy (sic), this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government.
Why should he be surprised? Did he not know that once in power, a totalitarian regime will ignore its supporters after they have served their purpose?
The reporters and journalists behind the CPJ have, without exception, been promoting bigger government for decades, and have long ignored treasonous behaviors by government officials. People like Tom Brokaw, the disgraced Dan Rather, pro-Muslim Christiane Amanpour, former Editor-in-Chief for Time magazine and CFR member Norman Pearlstine, and others.
Especially galling is the feigned surprise by the author of the study, Leonard Downie, Jr., that the Obama administration is closing off access to the press now that their job is done. Downie spent 44 years promoting the liberal line at the Washington Post, 17 of them as its Executive Director. He knows how the game is played, and even wrote a novel about it: The Rules of the Game. In the flyleaf, which Downie no doubt approved, it is admitted that “no one knows more about Washington, its inner workings and secrets … no novel has better captured the tensions among business interests, politicians and the press, or the morally ambiguous ways in which they all really work.”
The man has no moral defense for helping elect the monster that now rules in Washington. For him to complain that he and his cohorts no longer have access to those “inner workings and secrets” is over the top.
The Obama administration is confident that it has successfully insulated itself from probing questions from the kept media that might possibly embarrass it. It has now set up its own media department, complete with videos, sophisticated websites, and its own newscast to provide the public with the sanitized propaganda that will serve its purposes. Downie even has the gall to complain that this self-anointed new media
discloses too little of the information needed by the press and the public to hold the administration accountable….
Instead, it's mostly self-serving information that would fail to hold the government to account.
Journalists are being told to speak to public affairs officers, but the public affairs officers [don't] call them back, or [are] hostile….
Of course. The mainstream media is now the enemy.
In 2010, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a radio program entitled Useful Idiots, during which it listed the names of various individuals who supported the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. They were deliberately blind to the totalitarian state he was building on the bodies of millions of its citizens. They included H.G. Wells, Doris Blessing, George Bernard Shaw, American shill Walter Duranty, and Paul “Old Man River” Robeson.
In political jargon, the phrase “useful idiot” describes people such as those in the American mainstream media who serve as propagandists for regimes they support, and who are used and then cynically discarded, neutralized, or even eliminated when they have served their purpose.
The editors at Investors Business Daily almost got it right:
Reporters [shouldn't] be disappointed had they done their jobs rather than cheerlead Obama's 2008 candidacy.
If a secretive, press-abusing administration [now] occupies the White House, it's in large part their own fault.
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Sources:
Investors Business Daily: Obama Administration Casts A Chill On Journalism
Associated Press: Report: Obama Brings Chilling Effect on Journalism
The Guardian: Obama's efforts to control leaks ‘most aggressive since Nixon', report finds
Report from the Committee to Protect Journalists: The Obama Administration and the Press
USA Today: Are Justice Department leak probes causing a chill?
The Committee to Protect Journalists
Downie's novel, The Rules of the Game
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