First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay, we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?
Turns out it’s a fairly swift
sojourn from a president pushing to “delegitimize” a news organization
to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox
News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters. In
between, the Obama administration found time to relentlessly persecute
government whistleblowers and publicly harass and condemn a private
American citizen for expressing his constitutionally protected speech in
the form of an anti-Islam YouTube video.
Where were the media when all this began happening? With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.
It’s
instructive to go back to the dawn of Hope and Change. It was 2009, and
the new administration decided it was appropriate to use the prestige
of the White House to viciously attack a news organization—Fox News—and
the journalists who work there. Remember, President Obama had barely
been in office and had enjoyed the most laudatory press of any new
president in modern history. Yet even one outlet that allowed dissent or
criticism of the president was one too many.
This should have been a red flag to everyone, regardless of what they
thought of Fox News. The math was simple: if the administration would
abuse its power to try and intimidate one media outlet, what made anyone
think they weren’t next?
These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.
"What
I think is fair to say about Fox … is that it really is more a wing of
the Republican Party," said Anita Dunn, White House communications
director, on CNN. “[L]et's not pretend they're a news network the way
CNN is." On ABC’s “This Week” White House senior adviser David
Axelrod said Fox is "not really a news station." It wasn’t just that Fox
News was “not a news organization,” White House chief of staff Rahm
Emmanuel told CNN’s John King, but, “more [important], is [to] not have
the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox,
as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …”
These
series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to
hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope
and Change, Inc.
Yet only one mainstream media
reporter—Jake Tapper, then of ABC News—ever raised a serious objection
to the White House’s egregious and chilling behavior. Tapper asked
future MSNBC commentator and then White House press secretary Robert
Gibbs: “[W]hy is [it] appropriate for the White House to say” that
“thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work
for a ‘news organization’?” The spokesman for the president of the
United States was unrepentant, saying: “That's our opinion.”
Trashing
reporters comes easy in Obama-land. Behind the scenes, Obama-centric
Democratic operatives brand any reporter who questions the
administration as a closet conservative, because what other explanation
could there be for a reporter critically reporting on the government?
Now, the Democratic advocacy group
Media Matters—which is always mysteriously in sync with the
administration despite ostensibly operating independently—has launched a
smear campaign against ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl for his
reporting on Benghazi. It’s the kind of character assassination that
would make Joseph McCarthy blush. The main page of the Media Matters
website has six stories attacking Karl for a single mistake in an
otherwise correct report about the State Department's myriad changes to
talking points they previously claimed to have barely touched. See, the
problem isn’t the repeated obfuscating from the administration about the
Benghazi attack; the problem is Jonathan Karl. Hence, the now-familiar
campaign of de-legitimization. This gross media intimidation is courtesy
of tax-deductable donations from the Democratic Party’s liberal donor
base, which provides a whopping $20 million a year for Media Matters to
harass reporters who won’t fall in line.
In
what is surely just a huge coincidence, the liberal media monitoring
organization Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) is also on a quest to delegitimize Karl.
It dug through his past and discovered that in college he
allegedly—horrors!—associated with conservatives. Because of this, FAIR
declared Karl “a right wing mole at ABC News.” Setting aside the
veracity of FAIR’s crazy claim, isn’t the fact that it was made in the
first place vindication for those who assert a liberal media bias in the
mainstream media? If the existence of a person who allegedly associates
with conservatives is a “mole,” then what does that tell us about the
rest of the media?
What all
of us in the media need to remember—whatever our politics—is that we
need to hold government actions to the same standard, whether they’re
aimed at friends or foes. If not, there’s no one but ourselves to blame
when the administration takes aim at us.
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