With the outrageous decision by the Trump White House to bar a CNN propagandist posing as a reporter, more people are now starting to make the connection between press freedom and the issue of the “right to know” and of unimpeded information. But we have to ask once again, where was this concern when democrats under Obama were using the espionage act to jail whistleblowers and prosecuting journalists? Why no outrage on the eve of the Ecuadorian government turning over Julian Assange to be prosecuted by Western intelligence for the crime of publishing accounts of their nefarious actions? Where were these objective defenders of the right to information when the state was collaborating with private corporations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook to alter and limit political speech and information?
For some, attempting within the context of the ongoing and intensifying ideological struggle to move the focus and analysis away from an opportunistic and simplistic framework that focuses on personalities and individualized psychologies to material interests, structures and class interests can open one up to charges of not being sufficiently anti-Trump enough, or strangely “pro-Trump.” But it wasn’t Trump but Obama and both capitalist parties that inserted the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Actduring the last few days of his administration. An act that establishes a propaganda center in the State…