Veteran New York Times Reporter: The Obama
Administration Is “The Greatest Enemy Of Press Freedom That We Have
Encountered In At Least a Generation”
Veteran Journalists Reveal that –
Contrary to It’s Claims of “Openness” and “Transparency” – The White
House is Trying to Crush the Free Press
Veteran New York Times reporter James Risen said last Friday:[The Obama administration is] the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson agrees:
[The administration wants to] narrow the field of national security reporting to create a path for accepted reporting.
[Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters] will be punished.
[The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created] a de facto Official Secrets Act. ”
This is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering, and that includes — I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was Washington bureau chief of the Times during George W. Bush’s first term.Long-time CNN political reporter Bob Franken (now with MSNBC) said:
I dealt directly with the Bush White House when they had concerns that stories we were about to run put the national security under threat. But, you know, they were not pursuing criminal leak investigations. The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It’s on a scale never seen before. This is the most secretive White House that, at least as a journalist, I have ever dealt with.
[Q: And do you think this comes directly from the president?]
I would think that it would have to. I don’t know that, but certainly enough attention has been focused on this issue that, if he departed from the policies of his government, I think we’d know that at this point.
FRANKEN: Well, let’s use the “P” word here. This is propaganda when it comes from the White House: government covering the government. It’s not what you’re supposed to do in the United States of America. But we have an administration, every president gets to the point where he dislikes the press. It’s that simple. And every administration tries to manipulate the press. But this is the most hostile to the media that has been in United States history. Not only do we have this thing where they’re…
[Interviewer]: Wait, you would go that far?
FRANKEN: I would go that far.
[Interviewer]: The most hostile in history?
FRANKEN: The most hostile because first of all, we have the situation where they are in fact shutting out the press. And by the way, when they say you can’t have every photographer in, they know full-well that there’s a thing called a pool, which is to say you have one representative from each of the media that represents all of them and shares the pictures and the sound and all that kind of thing. So that’s totally disingenuous, which is a polite word.
But the reason I say most hostile is because of the Justice Department moves that they’ve made against the press. Obviously they have a contempt for the journalistic process. Those of us who are in journalism, of course, believe that it is vital if you’re going to have informed electorate as opposed to one that’s been propagandized.