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Bob Franken says Obama White House is the "most hostile" in history to free press
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Only Nixon Harmed a Free Press More
The search warrant filed to investigate the Fox News reporter James Rosen proved as many had suspected: President Obama wants to make it a crime for a reporter to talk to a leaker. It is a further example of how President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.
The government's subpoena of The Associated Press's phone records was bad enough. But the disclosure of the search warrant in the Rosen case shows President Obama has delved into territory never before reached by previous presidents.
The Justice Department obtained Rosen’s e-mail by using a search warrant in which it alleged that Rosen was a co-conspirator with a government adviser named Stephen Kim.
This conspiracy, as imagined by the Justice Department, commenced as soon as Rosen started e-mailing or talking with Kim. But reporters have the right to talk to anyone, under the First Amendment. Obama’s theory of conspiracy therefore strikes at the heart of that amendment.
Until President Obama came into office, no one thought talking or emailing was not protected by the First Amendment. President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information. This will stop reporters from asking for information that might be classified. Leaks will stop and so will the free flow of information to the public.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/21/obama-the-media-and-national-security/only-nixon-harmed-a-free-press-moreThe A.P. case is more evidence of President Obama's dismissal of the First Amendment in national security cases. There was no need to subpoena The A.P. without telling The A.P. And there was no need to subpoena scores of telephone records of A.P. reporters. The subpoena was over-broad.
The First Amendment protects The A.P.’s right to gather news, as it protects Rosen’s too. Obama’s view is that national security interests nearly always trump the First Amendment. No president has had this view before, except Richard Nixon.
BSF is a jilted Obama lover. He found him sleeping with his sister and won't forgive him. He is now as stridently anti-Obama as any of the RWers here.
BSF is a jilted Obama lover. He found him sleeping with his sister and won't forgive him. He is now as stridently anti-Obama as any of the RWers here.
BSF is a jilted Obama lover. He found him sleeping with his sister and won't forgive him. He is now as stridently anti-Obama as any of the RWers here.
BSF is a jilted Obama lover. He found him sleeping with his sister and won't forgive him. He is now as stridently anti-Obama as any of the RWers here.
The information age is complicated. Not condoning some of the administration's actions, but it's a much different world than previous administrations had to deal with.
Technology always advances. I'm not seeing how that justifies a war on whistleblowers or the erosion of privacy. Please explain.Agreed, and I don't really see this point addressed at all in these articles.
Also, some of you neocons surprise me that this wouldn't be your favorite thing about Obama, security over liberty, that is.
There can be no favorite thing abou Obama. Everything he does will destroy America.
But it is the administration of Barack Obama that has prosecuted more accused leakers under "espionage" statutes than all prior administrations combined -- in fact, double the number of all prior such prosecutions.
In The A.P. case, the Obama Justice Department flagrantly violated long-standing procedures, and its own internal guidelines, by obtaining weeks of office and home telephone records of multiple A.P. journalists without notifying the media organization in advance, thus depriving them of the opportunity to obtain a court ruling on the propriety of the government's actions. And now, in the most disturbing episode yet, it has formally accused another journalist, Fox's Rosen, of being a "conspirator" in a serious felony for doing nothing more than what investigative journalists do every day: work with their government sources to receive classified information that they can then publish for their readers.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/21/obama-the-media-and-national-security/government-will-decide-what-we-can-knowThis now-lengthy pattern has two primary effects. First, it creates a serious climate of fear in which investigative journalists are finding it increasingly difficult to do their job -- informing citizens about the secret actions of political leaders -- because everyone involved in that process is petrified of government persecution. As The New Yorker's Jane Mayer put it in a New Republic article detailing the harm done to journalism: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."
Second, it establishes a standard where the only information the public can learn is what the U.S. government wants it to know, which is another way of saying that a classic propaganda model has been created.
The 2008 version of Candidate Obama was absolutely right when he decreed that government whistleblowers are engaged in "acts of courage and patriotism" that "should be encouraged rather than stifled." The presidential version of Obama is wrong -- dangerously so -- in his still escalating assault on the sources and journalists who make that possible.