The American media has a disgraceful reputation, well-earned throughout our history. Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism lied us into one war and a hundred years later the New York Times helped Bush lie us into a war.
Michael Avenatti made 254 cable appearances last year, including 147 on MSNBC and CNN – think about that – and was literally a front-runner for the highest office in the land – because the media chose him without doing any due diligence.
Truth is the media is both easy to manipulate and is way too manipulative so it is normal for presidents to fight them.
Trump does it with words, Obama, a new report shows, took a much more dangerous approach though the media will never report it.
From The Daily Wire: On Thursday, the Columbia Journalism Review reported on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the Obama Justice Department’s attempts to crack down on leaks to reporters which reveal that the Obama administration’s actions against the press “were broader than previously known.”
CJR’s report, authored by Ramya Krishnan and Trevor Timm, is based on a highly redacted 59-page report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility completed Dec. 9, 2014 and obtained via FOIA request by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (where Krishnan and Timm work, respectively).
“In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom, issuing sweeping subpoenas for the phone records of the Associated Press and several of its reporters and editors as part of a leak investigation,” the authors report. While those subpoenas have long been understood as “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations,” they note, the recently unearthed 2014 report reveals that the subpoenas targeting AP “told only part of the story.”
The Office of Professional Responsibility’s report on the Obama Justice Department’s subpoenas of AP phone records reveals that “the DOJ’s actions against the AP were broader than previously known, and that the DOJ considered subpoenaing the phone records of other news organizations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC News,” the authors explain. The report also reveals “how narrowly the DOJ interprets the Media Guidelines, the agency’s internal rules for obtaining reporters’ data.”
The Obama DOJ’s targeting of the AP came in response to May 2012 reports containing classified information about the CIA’s thwarting of a Yemen-based bomb plot. In early 2013, the Deputy Attorney General approved requests by the DOJ to subpoena AP telephone records in an attempt to uncover reporters’ sources, prompting AP to complain that the DOJ had violated the Media Guidelines about how narrowly subpoenas for reporters’ phone records should be drawn.
Though the DOJ defended its broad subpoenas, the Office of Professional Responsibility’s report reveals that ethics lawyers were troubled enough by the sequence of events to look into it and found that the department’s handling of the investigation was more expansive than previously known. CJR reports:
The report, which was submitted to then–Attorney General Eric Holder in 2013, reveals that the leak probe was broader than previously understood. It reveals, for example, that, while the Justice Department obtained telephone toll records for 21 telephone numbers, the agency in fact issued “30 subpoenas to obtain telephone toll records for 30 unique telephone numbers.” The report reveals that those 30 subpoenas were intended to target seven reporters and editors, and covered a period of six weeks spanning April 1, 2012 to May 10, 2012.
The report also shows that, at least at one stage of their investigation, Justice Department attorneys considered subpoenaing the records of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ABC News. What’s more, the report strongly suggests that the attorneys went so far as to obtain “telephone numbers and other contact information” for reporters and editors at those organizations who had worked on articles about the Yemen bomb plot. The report records, however, that the attorneys ultimately decided against issuing additional subpoenas.
