By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 30, 2016
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How do we hate Obama’s treatment of the press? Let me count the ways. Under his administration, the U.S. government has set a new record for withholding Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a recent Associated Press investigation. FOIA gives the public and press an irreplaceable view into the workings of the executive branch. Without timely release of government documents and data, vital questions can’t be answered and stories can’t be written.
Obama’s “Insider Threat Program” has turned employees across the government—from the Peace Corps to the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture—into information-squelching snitches. If this isn’t Trumpian behavior, I don’t know what is. “Obama hates the press,” New York Times national security reporter James Risen said not long ago, “and he hates leaks.” AP Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee has decried the “day-to-day intimidation of sources” by the Obama administration, judging it worse than the Bush administration on that score. And in a 2013 piece, POLITICO’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen documented Obama’s mastery of “limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.” As ProPublica has reported, at the same time the Obama administration has been paying lip service to protecting whistleblowers, it has pursued national security leaks to the press with a vehemence unmatched by any previous administration, using the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to journalists more times than all previous administrations combined. Obama holds infrequent news conferences, and he wastes reporters’ time by refraining from answering questions with any candor. He claims to helm “the most transparent administration in history,” while bending government policies and practices toward secrecy.Boo hoo. Jack Shafer and everyone else in the press can bite it. Know why? Because as hard as they find it to get information out of Obama, the rest of us find it just as hard to get information from them about the real problems with the way this administration operates. For all their complaining about how Obama expects them to just take his word for it on all kinds of things, they're awfully willing to do so. Whether they're ignoring the IRS scandal or turning a blind eye to plummeting labor force participation, or covering up the real consequences of Obama's foreign policy, or throwing out labels like "historic" for his debacle of an Iran deal or his disaster of a Cuba policy, they're the ones who are supposed to be telling us the truth. And they don't do it. They continue to cheer lead for Obama's policies even as they # about how hard he makes it for them to get the information they need. Screw them. If they had any self-respect at all, they'd turn those frustrations into greater scrutiny of Obama's policies and the real results of the decisions he's made. They'd tell us about the collapse of ObamaCare state exchanges. They'd tell us about the IRS's recent rebuke in federal court. They'd tell us about the real long-term trajectory of federal spending. They'd tell us about what Obama's policies have done to household income. But they don't, because they only have a problem with Obama's ineptness when it inconveniences them. As long as he gives the press what they want, he can continue to screw the rest of the nation. The news media are beneath contempt. They're as big a problem as Obama himself.
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