In an in-depth retelling of his experience as a national security reporter for the New York Times (NYT), published<\/a> in The Intercept, Risen explains how, on more than one occasion, the NYT yielded to government demands to withhold or kill his stories \u2013 including a bombshell report about the NSA\u2019s secret surveillance program under President George W. Bush.<\/p>\n Jaded by previous experiences of US government interference in his work, Risen writes that his NSA story set him on a \u201ccollision course\u201d<\/em> with his editors, \u201cwho were still quite willing to cooperate with the government.\u201d<\/em> His editors at the Times had been convinced by top US officials that revealing the illegal surveillance program would endanger American lives, Risen said.<\/p>\n Read more<\/p>\n Bill Keller, the then executive editor of Times, said the newspaper\u2019s decision to shelve the explosive report, which detailed how the NSA had \u201cmonitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years,\u201d<\/em> was motivated by the lingering \u201ctrauma\u201d<\/em> of the 9\/11 terror attacks, and the sobering reality that the \u201cworld was a dangerous place.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Risen\u2019s NSA scoop<\/a>, which later won him a Pulitzer Prize, was eventually published a year after he submitted it to his seniors \u2013 but only after Bush had been safely re-elected. Risen said that upon hearing the story was finally going to print, Bush telephoned Arthur Sulzberger, the Times\u2019s publisher, requesting a private meeting to convince him against running the story.<\/p>\n Risen also recounts how, in the run-up to the Iraq War, his stories questioning alleged links between Iraq and Al Qaeda \u201cwere being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.\u201d<\/em> While cooperation between the press and the government poses a number of troubling questions, Risen also points to the zealous persecution of whistleblowers, leakers, and even journalists themselves, as a root cause of the troubling state of American media.<\/p>\n READ MORE: Threatened New York Times journalist ordered to appear in court – report <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Leaks and unauthorized disclosures to the press were once \u201cgenerally tolerated as facts of life\u201d<\/em> in the intelligence community. Risen remembers how a top CIA official once told him that \u201chis rule of thumb for whether a covert operation should be approved was, \u2018How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?\u2019 If it would look bad, don\u2019t do it. Of course, his rule of thumb was often ignored.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Under the auspices of protecting \u201cnational security,\u201d<\/em> this presumed culture of tolerating leaks and respecting a journalist\u2019s special relationship with his or her sources was tossed out the window after the 9\/11 attacks. After being dragged to court by the Bush administration in an attempt to force him to reveal the identity of one of his sources, Risen was saddened to discover that the war on press freedoms only got worse under Obama.<\/p>\n Read more<\/p>\n \u201cMy case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined,\u201d<\/em> writes Risen. \u201cObama officials seemed determined to use criminal leak investigations to limit reporting on national security. But the crackdown on leaks only applied to low-level dissenters; top officials caught up in leak investigations, like former CIA Director David Petraeus, were still treated with kid gloves.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Now largely dependent on government-sanctioned \u201cleaks,\u201d<\/em> Risen laments what he describes as \u201cexaggerated reporting on terrorism\u201d<\/em> found in the New York Times and other media outlets, which has had a \u201cmajor political impact in the United States and helped close off debate in Washington over whether to significantly roll back some of the most draconian counterterrorism programs, like NSA spying.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Concluding his \u201ccollision course\u201d<\/em> saga with the New York Times and the Bush and Obama administrations, Risen observes that much of the mainstream media continues to dutifully report on \u201chyped threats,\u201d<\/em> missing \u201ckey lessons from the debacle over WMD reporting before the war in Iraq.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New York Times was \u201cquite willing\u201d to quash stories at the behest of the government, writes Pulitzer- winning former reporter James Risen. He warns that America\u2019s press has been muzzled by \u201chyped threats\u201d to national security. In an in-depth retelling of his experience as a national security reporter for the New York Times (NYT), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":342517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-342516","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n ![\"ARCHIVE:](\"https:\/\/cdni.rt.com\/files\/2018.01\/thumbnail\/5a4cfaa1fc7e93b1528b4567.jpg\")
\n <\/a>\n<\/div>\n
\n ![\"FILE](\"https:\/\/cdni.rt.com\/files\/2017.12\/thumbnail\/5a3fa133fc7e93cc498b4567.jpg\")
\n <\/a>\n<\/div>\n