Since the Obama administration has confessed to spying on journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News, have you noticed there are more stories about the Obama scandals in the news?
One of the most egregious is Eric Holder spying on the parents of Fox News reporter James Rosen. Why? Not because they have the audacity of raising a boy to be a man who would legally do his job as a journalist. Problem is, he does it in such a way as to reveal actions of the administration that the President doesn’t want publicized. So, don’t you dare raise a child to be a journalist or they’ll come for you, too.
To hell with the First Amendment if the purifying light of truth shakes the beliefs of Obama’s faithful.
While the New York Times and CNN continue to portray the IRS investigation as a political witch hunt by rapaciously partisan Republicans, much of the mainstream media are beginning to cover the scandal as what it is: political abuse of innocent American citizens.
Many stories from the mainstream media are actually exploring the question of whether Eric Holder lied during his first testimony to Congress as opposed to merely regurgitating the party line that Republicans, looking toward 2016, are making political cheese by milking the issue.
Still, the White House has its defenders in the media.
Ezra Klein, liberal commentator on MSNBC and the Washington Post, dutifully fulfilled his obligation as a devout Obama supporter on May 16th by writing with certainty that the IRS scandal is a “mess” that doesn’t implicate “the White House, or even senior IRS leadership.”
A few days later, news sites around the country published the White House confession that everyone at the White House knew about the IRS scandal “except the President.”
If Klein was assured by his White House contacts that no one there knew, they owe him more than an apology for using him so badly. He now concedes the targeting was “wrong.”
How do you think CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson feels? An investigative reporter who was verbally abused by an employee at the Department of Justice, Sharyl reports on the White House and federal government. She recently revealed that there has been an intrusion into her computer system, that her computers have been tampered with, but she can’t say who or what entity has done the suspected hacking until her lawyer and employer say she can.
Hacking someone’s computers at work would be bad enough. These are computers in her home.
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reports, “The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time.”
Without ever filing a charge, the Obama administration is saying they should spy on reporters forever and ever just in case they gather information they decide is so top secret that they should prosecute the reporter.
What sort of information might the Obama Administration deem worth prosecuting?
The Pentagon Papers?
Wait. That case has already been adjudicated and the government was wrong.
The more American journalists realize that they are in a fight for their lives that Mr. Obama started, the more likely you are to read about more and more of these scandals. The real outrage would be for the media to roll over and let the administration be the alpha dog, lording over journalists the government’s control of their content through intimidation and harassment backed up with its power to destroy their careers and personal lives with whatever information they can snag from their computers and phone records.
Journalists need to remind the President of Greener’s Law: “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”
More importantly, since journalists are using more than old media these days, the President would be wise to learn a far more pertinent new media rule:
“Never pick a fight with someone with thousands of page viewers.”
Contact Rick at rick@wdel.com, or follow him on Twitter@JensenVoiceover.