Posted on 10/17/2013 12:48:45 PM PDT by Mark
It’s telling that a new report on the Obama administration’s dealings with journalists comes from the Committee to Protect Journalists — an organization that normally focuses on press freedoms abroad.
President Obama’s White House has been so extraordinarily unfriendly toward investigative journalism — not just unfriendly, but an outright enemy — that CPJ had to look inward this time, examining the loss of freedoms of the press in our own country rather than pointing out problems in some Third World backwater.
And the report, by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, found that the administration has had “a chilling effect on journalists and government whistle-blowers,” as the Associated Press put it.
Obama has fallen far short of his campaign pledge of open and transparent government, the report found — to the surprise of no one who’s been paying attention.
“Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists,” Downie wrote in his introduction, which says the White House “curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press.”
The U.S. Justice Department’s secret seizure of phone records and emails of Associated Press and Fox News are only the most notorious of several examples of government overreach. The government also has been maddeningly slow to answer requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
In a blog post accompanying the report, CPJ senior adviser Jean-Paul Marthoz wrote, “The sneaky surveillance and prosecution of journalists in the search for leakers have a global cost. By disproving that U.S. journalists cannot be forced to go to court or to jail because they published something that embarrasses government officials, these actions provide easy alibis for enemies of a free press in authoritarian states and weaken the U.S. commitment to defend press freedom and embattled journalists everywhere.”
That’s exactly right. In its attempts to keep government’s workings secret from the people the government is supposed to work for, the Obama administration not only harms its own image and its people’s freedoms. It also hurts the cause of liberty around the world.
In the days preceding and following the adoption of the United States Constitution--the document which structures and limits the powers of the Executive Branch and that of every other segment of the federal government--the circulation of ideas was accomplished in numerous ways. There were newspapers, pamphlets, speeches and other forms of oratory, broadsides and "committees of correspondence."
From the Massachusetts Historical Society web site come these paragraphs:
"Ignorance is slavery -
"By the early 1770s, Boston's patriot leaders have had many opportunities to rally townspeople against perceived injustices (usually acts of Parliament or other objectionable activities undertaken by the British government or soldiery). Men like Samuel Adams understand that an informed citizenry is the best weapon against unfavorable government policy. Political ignorance is simply another form of slavery. How do patriots impart political knowledge to such a vast audience? Ministers, newspaper publishers, and even the Massachusetts General Assembly work to educate the public, but in 1771, patriot leaders in Boston experiment with a new form of instruction. They initiate an annual town lecture, which will be held each year on 5 March, an important anniversary for Bostonians. Some colonial leaders are skeptical, and question whether the general public can be educated in the ways of politics through such popular means."
In the fall of 1772, Bostonians address the latest rumors from Parliament: judges of the Superior Court of Judicature will no longer be paid by the colony's General Court. Instead, judges will be paid directly from the royal treasury, using money collected by the American Board of Customs Commissioners. Fearing this new process will "pervert the judgment of men," Bostonians petition their selectmen to act. In the process of debating the matter, Samuel Adams proposes the creation of a corresponding society to gauge the sentiments of other Massachusetts towns. On 2 November 1772, a committee is born when the Boston selectmen vote to establish a twenty-one-member Committee of Correspondence.
The Committee's first assignment is to prepare a series of reports outlining colonists' rights and Parliament's infringements upon those rights. The reports are gathered into a single document that becomes known as the Boston Pamphlet. Copies of the pamphlet are distributed to every town in Massachusetts, and town leaders across the colony debate the wisdom of following in Boston's footsteps.
Many towns do eventually appoint their own committees of correspondence, a development that troubles governor Thomas Hutchinson. As advocates of the committee system boast that Bostonians (and their committee) will prove to be the "saviors of America," Hutchinson and his opponents take every opportunity to disparage the town's Committee of Correspondence.
More positive news arrives from the "patriotic province of Virginia" in the spring of 1773. The House of Burgesses proposes some enhancements to Boston's committee of correspondence idea. In response to Virginia's proposal, Massachusetts creates a colony-level committee of correspondence chaired by Samuel Adams. The rhetoric of freedom, rights, and liberty bandied about by politicians is soon adopted by other colonists struggling with issues of slavery. In one poignant broadside, four slaves petition the Massachusetts General Court, hoping that the "divine spirit of freedom" will extend to the thousands of men and women literally enslaved in the colonies.
By the summer of 1773, the committees of correspondence have yet another issue to debate and discuss. In May, Parliament passes the Tea Act, giving the East India Company a monopoly over the sale of tea in the colonies. Committees are quick to share their thoughts on this "impending evil," but will their vitriol be enough to stop the tea from coming?"
Why is it that now, in the Year 2013, we have a regime in place which fears the formation of groups of citizens who may call themselves "tea partiers," or any other such name who, like their forebears of the 18th and 19th Centuries, call for liberty and freedom from elected and appointed government officials and their oppressive rules, regulations and "taking" of their income?
The free circulation of ideas in America, with all the technology available today, has the potential for restoring the concepts of individual liberty which so-called "progressives" have censored from the nation's textbooks and public discourse. As in the founding period, with current technology and ability to circulate ideas, the time has come to follow John Adams advice and, "Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." - JOHN ADAMS, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Let the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear the dangers of thralldom to our consciences from ignorance, extreme poverty, and dependence; in short, from civil and political slavery. Let us see delineated before us the true map of man. Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God-that consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness - and that God Almighty has promulgated from heaven liberty, peace, and goodwill to man!" - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"They (the Puritans) saw clearly that of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence, and right reverend eminence and holiness around the idea of a priest as no mortal could deserve, and as always must, from the constitution of human nature, be dangerous to society. For this reason they demolished the whole system of diocesan episcopacy, and, deriding, as all reasonable and impartial men must do, the ridiculous fancies of sanctified effluvia from Episcopal fingers, they established sacerdotal ordination on the foundation of the Bible and common sense." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"They even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God and that was worshipped." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America, than the press. Care has been taken that the art of printing should be encouraged, and that it should be easy and cheap and safe for any person to communicate his thoughts to the public. And you, Messieurs printers, whatever the tyrants of the earth may say of your paper, have done important service to your country by your readiness and freedom in publishing the speculations of the curious. The stale, impudent insinuations of slander and sedition with which the gormandizers of power have endeavored to discredit your paper are so much the more to your honor; for the jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." - Thomas Jefferson
But they are our protectors!(/S)
No wonder the “new media” has pretty much become very sucessful.
Journalists have blackophobia, or fear of being called racists for saying anything negative about a black guy, especially the black messiah who, like a black movie hero, has swooped in to rescue us helpless white folk from centuries of mucking up self-governance and decision making.
You forget their forgiveness and admiration of everything Clinton.
To a degree its Blackophobia.....but they really have Constitutionophobia.....fear of a Constitutional government.
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