NYT Reporter Risen: Obama administration is This Generation’s Greatest Enemy of Press Freedom’

Poynter.org ^ | March 24, 2014 | Andrew Beaujon

[lbryce]

“It won’t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,” Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. “For better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the First Amendment.”

The New Yorker staff writer and CNN commentator was appearing on a panel as part of a conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center. A lot has already been written about the conference (links below), so I’m going to pull out a theme that appears again and again in my notes: How much protection do reporters really have with regard to sources, and how much, if any, protection would a federal shield law give them?

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

[lbryce]

If the press, in fact, did feel their freedom was in any way impinged upon, that Obama indeed was their nemesis as this New York Times' reporter makes claim, why would the press so assiduously be supporting him by ignoring all and every aspect of his misbegotten, failed presidency, disregard all, everything he does to dismantle, unravel American power, prestige to third-rate status?

[ClearCase_guy]

The outmoded position of Court Flatterer has been resurrected. Journalists now prance around with bells on their feet, telling the president how brilliant he is and how stylish and beautiful his wife is.

I guess it beats being a peasant. Peasants don't get invited to nice parties.

[gusopol3]

They share his hatred for us.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

The mainstream media is so liberal, so leftist, so white guilt-ridden and so far enough up Obama’s ass that they couldn’t be found with a searchlight or pulled out by a tow truck.

As for Obama, he doesn’t give a damn. A communist commissar and a king never do.

[pjd]

“We ban drunk driving because drunk driving increases the risk of accidents,” he said

Well, walking upright increases one’s risk of falling down.