Free Republic

Below is my column in the New York Post on the Associated Press guideline for reporters to avoid calling Hamas a terrorist organization. Voice of America and other media outlets have made the same decision. This is not about supporting the Palestinian cause. It is about correctly describing a group that commits terrorist attacks as a terrorist organization. Here is the column: Confucius once said that “the beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names.” That does not appear to be the approach of the Associated Press this week after the media organization told its...

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...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. government's aggressive prosecution of leaks and efforts to control information are having a chilling effect on journalists and government whistle-blowers, according to a report released Thursday on U.S. press freedoms under the Obama administration. The Committee to Protect Journalists conducted its first examination of U.S. press freedoms amid the Obama administration's unprecedented number of prosecutions of government sources and seizures of journalists' records. Usually the group focuses on advocating for press freedoms abroad. Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote the 30-page analysis entitled "The Obama Administration and the Press."...