On second thought, perhaps FOX News can be forgiven its dogged determination to bring down President Obama the way the Washington Post brought down President Nixon. And there is no shortage of not just reporters but two-bit commentators vying to be the next Woodward or Bernstein.
After all, whatever the shortcomings in claims about Obama covering up Benghazi the way Nixon covered up Watergate, late-breaking reports about the IRS targeting his enemies are giving credence to this foreboding Nixon-Obama analogy.
(“Benghazi Cover Up? IRS Targeting His Enemies? Obama Looking More Like Nixon,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 11, 2013)
Nixonian? Well, according to those condemning Obama for his Administration’s latest alleged transgression, he’s much worse:
The Obama Administration woke up on Tuesday to another morning of scorching criticism about the [Department of Justice’s (DOJ)] decision to secretly obtain months of Associated Press phone records.
The DOJ tracked the incoming and outgoing calls on more than 20 AP phone lines, as well as the home, office and cell phone lines for six individual journalists involved in writing a national security-related story about Yemen that the Obama Administration did not want them to write.
(Huffington Post, May 14, 2013)
The Administration insists that it had a compelling government interest in obtaining the records secretly to avoid alerting the targeted journalists about its probe into untenable and, significantly, illegal leaks of classified information.
What’s more, the head of the DOJ, Attorney General Eric Holder, is on record boasting of this Administration’s policy of going after leakers like no other in U.S. history, having prosecuted twice as many of them as all previous administrations combined. It’s worth noting, however, that these unprecedented prosecutions are due in no small part to conservative journalists (mostly at FOX News) accusing Obama of dereliction of duty for failing to plug leaks on things like the heroics involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Primarily, of course, because they resented the fact that it was he and not his predecessor, George W. Bush, who got bin Laden.
Remarkably, though, even liberal journalists — who conservatives accuse of having a “slobbering love affair” with Obama — are condemning him for this policy. But I applaud him; not least because those criticizing the loudest are the very ones who have continually decried the inability of anyone in government to keep a secret.
And let’s be clear, the DOJ was not listening in on journalists’ conversations (i.e., tapping their phones). The intrusion everyone is up in arms about was merely getting records to determine which government officials may have spoken to journalists during a specific period of time.
Frankly, journalists expressing constitutional indignation at being violated in this context is rather like “Johns” expressing moral indignation at getting caught up in a sting on a prostitution ring. Perhaps they think the freedom of the press provided for in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is as absolute as the NRA/gun peddlers think the right to bear arms provided for in the Second is. Except that journalists — who actually seem more interested these days in competing with twitterers and bloggers for sensational scoops than in responsible journalism — should know better.
Freedom of the press does not grant the press unfettered access to government information; and the public’s right to know does not grant the public the right to know everything the government does. And any comparison to the totalitarian practices of the Chinese or Iranian government smacks of argumentum ad absurdum. (Hell, to listen to some of these prima donnas in the press, you’d think the CIA stands for the Chinese Intelligence Agency.)
In fact, this tension or conflict between the government and the press is inherent in a democracy. Which is why the best any sensible or fair-minded critic can do is quibble not about the propriety of this spying, but about its scope:
It is not unprecedented for the [DOJ] to secretly get the numbers of reporters. What’s remarkable is the sweeping nature of this, the dragnet approach … and that’s why you have some press watchdog groups tonight, and freedom of the press groups saying this is positively Nixonian. They have not seen a precedent for this in decades.
(NBC reporter Michael Isikoff, Rachel Maddow Show, May 13, 2013)
Meanwhile, it might be helpful to know that the targets of this sting were not the journalists, but the government officials who broke the law by leaking classified information (i.e., the nation’s secrets) to them. Again, let’s be clear, these officials are not public-spirited “whistleblowers” shedding light on government corruption (like Pentagon personnel colluding with defense contractors to fleece the government of billions through the procurement process: remember those thousand-dollar knots and bolts?). They are leaking information about covert operations that could get American soldiers killed.
Alas, the sad truth is that journalists these days would betray their own family’s secrets if they thought doing so would prove sensational enough to be wildly profitable – national security be damned.
But if it were up to me, I would prosecute not only the government leakers, but the AP journalists as well. After all, they are the ones responsible for blithely publishing classified information without regard for how it might compromise national security or endanger the lives of American agents. And good luck finding out if the publication of a leaked story leads directly to deaths in this context; because the press itself would have a vested interest in covering this up.
It seems lost on Isikoff and other critics that the only reason the scope seems so unprecedented is that this Administration is the first to make plugging leaks a priority. Which makes criticizing the DOJ for finally going after leakers rather like criticizing the IRS for finally going after offshore tax cheats.
And don’t get me started on the way journalists now troll social media for news and report on every tragedy as if it were the friggin’ Super Bowl. For journalism has become such a pathetic enterprise – so utterly bereft of principles like journalistic truth, professional independence, and duty to inform – that journalists think nothing of reporting what they think the public wants to consume as news instead of informing the public about what is newsworthy. Some purported news organizations even generate sensational, “viral” headlines and then have creative writers produce stories to match those headlines. Sadly, journalists are becoming just like investment bankers who think nothing of packaging a junk bond as a triple-A stock and selling it for a quick buck.
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Benghazi cover up…
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