The Silencing

by Kirsten Powers

  While the White House prefers to line up the president with fanzines and their equivalent, when the doors finally do open to serious journalists, the Press Office selects reporters who, though not fanzine fawners, are prepared to play them on TV. In January 2013, 60 Minutes embarrassed itself in service of the White House propaganda machine, running a fluff piece featuring outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president that mined such fascinating and critically important topics as how the two get along. The facilitator of this love fest was Steve Kroft who informed Piers Morgan in an interview that President Obama liked to do 60 Minutes because “I think he knows that we’re not going to play gotcha with him, that we’re not going to go out of our way to make him look bad or stupid and we’ll let him answer the questions.”11 60 Minutes was once famous for asking hard questions. Now, at least if you’re President Obama, an interview with 60 Minutes looks more like a campaign promo.

  National Journal Reporter Ron Fournier, a former Associated Press Washington bureau chief, told me that President Obama “is an incredibly thin-skinned man. He likes the idea of transparency, but not if it makes him look bad.” And as a result, the Obama administration is the most hostile to journalists and transparency that he’s seen.

  He continued, “[Obama] is so sure that he knows what is right for the country that anything that makes him look bad is therefore evil. So a whistleblower is ‘anti-Obama’ and ‘anti-American’ because he is taking down President Obama who [sees himself as the] epitome of America. He is incredibly self-righteous. [President Obama] is ultimately responsible for the White House being un-transparent and combative with the media and attacking the whistleblowers. . . .”

  In July 2014, the Society of Professional Journalists sent President Obama a letter12 complaining about his White House’s lack of transparency. In extraordinarily blunt language, the Society wrote, “You recently expressed concern that frustration in the country is breeding cynicism about democratic government. You need look no further than your own administration for a major source of that frustration—politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies. We call on you to take a stand to stop the spin and let the sunshine in.”

  The letter blasted the president for “the stifling of free expression [that] is happening despite your pledge on your first day in office to bring ‘a new era of openness’ to federal government.” It cited a recent survey that found, “40 percent of public affairs officers [in the federal government] admitted they blocked certain reporters because they did not like what they wrote.”

  The Obama administration has even taken to censoring White House “pool reports,” from the rotating “pool” of reporters covering the president’s daily activities. Though the White House Press Office distributes the pool report to news outlets, federal agencies, and others, it has always been understood that the Press Office did not determine the content of the pool reports. No longer. On a number of occasions over the last six years, reporters have been told to change the reports or the White House would not distribute them.

  In one illustrative incident, then-Deputy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest nixed a passage by a Washington Post reporter that “contained a comment juxtaposing a speech Obama had given two days earlier lauding freedom of the press with the administration’s decision to limit access to presidential photo ops on the trip.”13

  Just how unprecedented and egregious is this kind of governmental interference with the media? National Journal’s Tom DeFrank told the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi that in his decades covering the White House he was only asked to alter a pool report one time. It was during the Ford administration and he refused. He said, “My view is the White House has no right to touch a pool report. It’s none of their business. If they want to challenge something by putting out a statement of their own, that’s their right. It’s also their prerogative to jawbone a reporter, which often happens. But they have no right to alter a pool report unilaterally.”

  SPYING ON REPORTERS

  More serious were cases of the Obama administration using the power of the federal government to harass reporters.

  In 2010, the Justice Department obtained search warrants, authorized by Attorney General Eric Holder, and secretly seized phone records and e-mails of Fox News reporter James Rosen,14 including a phone number belonging to his parents.15 The Justice Department argued that Rosen was a co-conspirator with a contractor who had allegedly leaked information for reports Rosen filed on North Korea.16 The investigation coincided with the White House’s increasingly vitriolic attacks on Fox News as not a real news network.17 Attorneys for Rosen’s source argued that the government had shrugged off author Bob Woodward’s use of much more sensitive unauthorized revelations from high level administration sources in his 2010 book Obama’s Wars; and former Undersecretary of State John Bolton termed the material in Rosen’s reports “neither particularly sensitive nor all that surprising.”18

  In testimony before Congress in 2013, after the probe became public, Holder denied that the Justice Department had been preparing to prosecute Rosen and refused to acknowledge that he had crossed a line in authorizing the investigation.19 Indeed, he called spying on a reporter “appropriate.” It was not until October 2014—a year after the Obama administration came under blistering criticism for its chilling overreach20—that, after announcing his retirement, Holder conceded that “I could have been a little more careful looking at the language that was contained in the filing that we made with the court—that he [Rosen] was labeled as a co-conspirator.”21 That’s quite an understatement.

  But the Rosen investigation turned out to be just one of a number in which the administration targeted reporters. In a brazen move by the Justice Department, federal investigators secretly seized phone logs of Associated Press editors and reporters following the AP’s publication of stories about Yemen-based terrorism in May 2012. This seizure included logs for numerous office lines, the AP main line in the House of Representatives, and journalists’ home phones and cell phones.22 The Justice Department had seized phone records from individual journalists before, but the scale of the seizures—covering a period of two months from lines accessed by more than one hundred reporters—was unprecedented.23 The Department of Justice’s disregard for their own legal process guidelines when seeking such information about members of the press—only as a last resort, only with the express authorization of the attorney general, and only when the need for information outweighs “the public’s interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information”24—resulted in a full scale backlash from the national media. Caroline Little, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, said the Justice Department’s action was a “shock” and violated “the critical freedom of the press protected by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”25 AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt was understandably outraged, saying, “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”26 But this was unfortunately par for the course with the Obama administration. As the New York Times noted, under the Obama administration, the “Justice Department has brought more charges in leak cases than were brought in all previous administrations combined.”27

  New York Times investigative reporter James Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who was one of those hounded by the administration, said, “I don’t think any of this would be happening under the Obama administration if Obama didn’t want to do it. I think Obama hates the press. I think he doesn’t like the press and he hates leaks.”28

  WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS

  In the 2008 Obama/Biden campaign manifesto “Document for
Change” the Democratic candidates promised to protect whistleblowers. The document celebrated government employees who were willing to speak out about fraud, waste, and abuse in government and promised to empower them to be “watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance” by strengthening whistleblower protection laws if elected. “Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. . . . Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process,” the document said.29

  Five years later, a 2013 report issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) documented the administration’s hostility to whistleblowers. The report’s author, former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. wrote, “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.”30

  Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson agreed, saying, in a 2014 interview, “The Obama years are a benchmark for a new level of secrecy and control. It’s created quite a challenging atmosphere for the New York Times, and for some of the best reporters in my newsroom who cover national security issues in Washington.”31

  “There’s no question that sources are looking over their shoulders,” said Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor of the Associated Press. “Sources are more jittery and more standoffish, not just in national security reporting. A lot of skittishness is at the more routine level. The Obama administration has been extremely controlling and extremely resistant to journalistic intervention. There’s a mind-set and approach that holds journalists at a greater distance.”32

  As a result, journalists must work doubly hard to collect sensitive information while protecting their sources. First Amendment Attorney Carey Shenkman observed that as a result of the Obama administration’s behavior, journalists are now avoiding digital communication, such as telephone calls and e-mails with sources, and are relying on personal meetings or in some cases using encrypted communications.33 Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post, confirms that “a few news organizations have even set up separate computer networks and safe rooms for journalists trained in encryption and other ways to thwart surveillance.”34 News organizations being forced to institute measures to hide their reporting processes from spying government eyes is something one would expect in China or Iran, not the United States. Instead of guarding the rights of a free press, the Obama administration has treated the press as if they were hostile agents of a foreign power.

  Downie’s sweeping study for the Committee to Protect Journalists concluded that as a result of the administration’s investigations and prosecution of leakers, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.35 Before the report was released, Downie wrote in the Washington Post that the administration “has disregarded the First Amendment and intimidated a growing number of government sources of information—most of which would not be classified—that is vital for journalists to hold leaders accountable.”36

  The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald summed things up in a 2012 column noting that when it comes to transparency and protecting whistleblowers, “[Obama’s] administration exploits secrecy laws to punish those who expose high-level wrongdoing while leaking at will for political gain. More remarkable is that a Democratic presidential candidate [Obama, running for reelection] is sticking his chest out and proudly touting that he has tried to imprison more whistleblowers on espionage charges than all previous presidents in history combined. . . . what Obama is doing with the power he has been vested is the exact opposite of what [he and the Democratic Party] claimed they believed four years ago.”37

  PURGING THE MEDIA OF DISSENTERS

  The vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are left of center. That’s been true for decades, and some prominent liberal journalists have openly confessed it. Daniel Okrent, for one, conceded in July 2004, when he was an editor at the New York Times, that on “social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation . . . if you think the Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.”38 Similarly at the Washington Post in 2005, one of the paper’s editors, Marie Arana, wrote “The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat.” She added, “I’ve been in communal gatherings in the Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.”39

  Longtime Washington Post political reporter Thomas Edsall wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2009: “The mainstream press is liberal . . . [and journalists] tend to favor abortion rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. . . . If reporters were the only ones allowed to vote, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won the White House by landslide margins.”40

  What was true then is true now. Politico’s Jim VandeHei, for instance, said in March 2012 that, “I’ve worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and worked here at Politico,” he said. “If I had to guess, if you put all of the reporters that I’ve ever worked with on truth serum, most of them vote Democratic.”41

  Obviously, mainstream reporters can be liberals or Democrats and still provide fair reporting so long as they are willing to check their bias at the door. Unfortunately, they seem to be blinded by their biases too often, and because so few people who don’t share their worldview exist in the newsrooms, there is nobody to push back against their biases. How was it, for instance, that the mainstream media managed to ignore the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, a grisly but hugely important story? Slate’s Dave Weigel explained in an April 2013 column that this journalistic lapse was the result of unified cultural and ideological views amongst a media that skewed left. “Let’s just state the obvious: National political reporters are, by and large, socially liberal,” he wrote. “We are more likely to know a gay couple than to know someone who owns an ‘assault weapon.’ We are, generally, pro-choice. Twice, in D.C., I’ve caused a friend to literally leave a conversation and freeze me out for a day or so because I suggested that the Stupak Amendment and the Hyde Amendment [barring federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions] made sense. There is a bubble. Horror stories of abortionists are less likely to permeate that bubble than, say, a story about a right-wing pundit attacking an abortionist who then claims to have gotten death threats.”42

  What is even more concerning than news judgments skewed by political bias is the effort by the illiberal left to politically cleanse the already largely liberal media of all dissent. How much control over the media do they need exactly? This is an effort in which the Obama administration participated with its war on Fox News. But the silencing campaign is not limited to the leading cable news network in the country. It’s been extended to startup websites, even one led by a liberal.

  In 2014, Media Matters spearheaded a campaign to pressure liberal columnist and editor of the new Vox.com website Ezra Klein into firing journalist Brandon Ambrosino. Ambrosino’s sin? Though gay he did not hold the “correct” positions on homosexuality, including his suggestion that gay rights activists should be more tolerant of the opposition, and find “a way to condemn evil without condemning the evildoer” like Martin Luther King Jr. “We no longer prize intellectual conversation, preferring instead to dismiss our opponents in 140-character feats of rhetoric,” Ambrosino noted. “We routinely scour the private lives and social media accounts
of our political opponents in the hopes of demonizing them as archaic, unthinking, and bigoted.”43

  As he asked gay activists to be more tolerant of opposing points of view, he was lambasted by the illiberal left for preaching this tolerance. Media Matters blasted out the headline, “Meet Brandon Ambrosino, Homophobes’ Favorite Gay Writer and Vox’s Newest Hire” and called him “a gay writer [conservatives] can hide behind to shield themselves from accusations of bigotry.”44 The American Prospect called Ambrosino’s hire “clickbait contrarianism at its worst.”45 Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern called the hire “unbelievably terrible,” dismissing Ambrosino’s beliefs as “reckless, retrograde, and vapid . . . [and] an embarrassment to us all.”46

  Ambrosino wasn’t hired to cover lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) issues. The illiberal lefties wanted him fired for believing in tolerance and expressing a willingness to listen to opposing points of view. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t going to write about LGBT issues. He needed to be ostracized for his prior heresies. Klein kept Ambrosino on but appeased his attackers with a promise to keep an eye on the heretic, “Brandon isn’t our LGBT correspondent,” explained Klein. “He is a young writer who we think has talent who’s going to receive a lot of editing and a lot of guidance.”47

  Another issue that brings out the ire of the illiberal left is climate change. In 2014 a group named Forecast the Facts called on the Washington Post to stop publishing anyone who questioned climate change. In support of their case they included a petition with over one hundred thousand signatures. The petition singled out “prominent climate change deniers George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and the Volokh Conspiracy blog.” They praised the Los Angeles Times policy of refusing “to publish letters to the editor that deny climate change.” They complained about a letter to the editor that asserted, “Ask 100 scientists to quantify the human effect on ‘climate change’ and you’ll get 100 answers.” The problem according to Forecast’s budding Robespierres? “This is not science; this is opinion,” they wrote. Yes, and letters to the editor are published in the “opinion” section.48 Forecast the Facts itself isn’t a board of scientists—even if it were, they shouldn’t be allowed to shut down debate—but, is in its own words, “a grassroots human rights organization”49 that holds the fundamental human rights of freedom of expression and thought in contempt.