The Obama Objective: To Control The News
First Amendment: For awhile, it looked like the White House wanted just to control "the narrative." But its seizure of AP phone records and surveillance of Fox employees now show its real aim: to control the news.
The Obama political team at the White House has always prided itself on its media savvy. After all, they got a candidate with an otherwise unsalable socialist past elected on a campaign that sold his personality, not his platform.
They won saintly press coverage, with much blather, mostly from the Washington Post about how Obama was all about "storytelling" and selling a "narrative."
They also mastered the hard propaganda, creating a Pepsi-Cola-like happy horizons logo to substitute for a platform and market their candidate and even employed pop artist Shepard Fairey to drive the hipsterly message home through his famous portrait.
But it turns out their mastery of the press went a lot deeper than just the political arts. The latest news that the Justice Department investigated Fox News reporter James Rosen and two other newsmen in the normal course of their investigative reporting on a national security matter — coming on the heels of their seizure of Associated Press phone records — suggests an administration obsessed with controlling the news itself with a heavy hand reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.
The AP flap has drawn a properly outraged response from the news agency, because the White House's obsessive efforts to find leaks cast such a broad, indiscriminate net against reporters just doing their jobs.
As for the odd federal investigation against Fox, it was a tiny leak of a matter — North Korea's plans to launch more nuclear tests if United Nations sanctions went through in 2009 — that would have changed nothing, whether reported or not. Yet it somehow merited a case against Rosen — with an effort to pin the title of "co-conspirator" to the journalist in an FBI indictment for the kind of reporting that Obama's allies in the New York Times and the Washington Post conduct all the time.
Much has been made of this White House's obsessive efforts to target leakers to an extent unknown in any other administration. But casting an over wide net now reaches into the operations of media organizations, threatening America's prized freedom of the press.
And yes, we think the White House did it because Fox News is a dissident news organization, one an Obama operative called "not a news network at this point."
Our question: When, and where, is this war against the media going to stop?
They won saintly press coverage, with much blather, mostly from the Washington Post about how Obama was all about "storytelling" and selling a "narrative."
They also mastered the hard propaganda, creating a Pepsi-Cola-like happy horizons logo to substitute for a platform and market their candidate and even employed pop artist Shepard Fairey to drive the hipsterly message home through his famous portrait.
But it turns out their mastery of the press went a lot deeper than just the political arts. The latest news that the Justice Department investigated Fox News reporter James Rosen and two other newsmen in the normal course of their investigative reporting on a national security matter — coming on the heels of their seizure of Associated Press phone records — suggests an administration obsessed with controlling the news itself with a heavy hand reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.
The AP flap has drawn a properly outraged response from the news agency, because the White House's obsessive efforts to find leaks cast such a broad, indiscriminate net against reporters just doing their jobs.
As for the odd federal investigation against Fox, it was a tiny leak of a matter — North Korea's plans to launch more nuclear tests if United Nations sanctions went through in 2009 — that would have changed nothing, whether reported or not. Yet it somehow merited a case against Rosen — with an effort to pin the title of "co-conspirator" to the journalist in an FBI indictment for the kind of reporting that Obama's allies in the New York Times and the Washington Post conduct all the time.
Much has been made of this White House's obsessive efforts to target leakers to an extent unknown in any other administration. But casting an over wide net now reaches into the operations of media organizations, threatening America's prized freedom of the press.
And yes, we think the White House did it because Fox News is a dissident news organization, one an Obama operative called "not a news network at this point."
Our question: When, and where, is this war against the media going to stop?
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/052013-656923-fox-news-probe-shows-white-house-effort.htm#ixzz2UotmSo2b
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