{"id":46593,"date":"2013-06-30T08:30:37","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T07:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/americas-dirty-global-war-on-journalists\/46593\/"},"modified":"2013-06-30T08:30:37","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T07:30:37","slug":"americas-dirty-global-war-on-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/americas-dirty-global-war-on-journalists\/","title":{"rendered":"America's Dirty, Global War on Journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 28, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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Out of all the harrowing story lines in journalist Jeremy Scahill\u2019s new film \u201cDirty Wars,\u201d the one about Abdulelah Haider Shaye best spotlights the U.S. government\u2019s new assault against press freedom. <\/p>\n

Shaye is the Yemeni journalist who in 2009 exposed his government\u2019s coverup of a U.S. missile strike that, according to McClatchy\u2019s newswire, ended up killing \u201cdozens of civilians, including 14 women and 21 children.\u201d McClatchy notes that for the supposed crime of committing journalism, Shaye was sentenced to five years in prison following a trial that \u201cwas widely condemned as a sham\u201d by watchdog groups and experts who noted that the prosecution did not \u201coffer any substantive evidence to support (its) charges.\u201d <\/p>\n

What, you might ask, does this have to do with the American government\u2019s attitude toward press freedom? That\u2019s where Scahill\u2019s movie comes in. As the film shows, when international pressure moved the Yemeni government to finally consider pardoning Shaye, President Obama personally intervened, using a phone call with Yemen\u2019s leader to halt the journalist\u2019s release. <\/p>\n

Had this been an isolated incident, it might be easy to write off. But the president\u2019s move to criminalize the reporting of inconvenient facts is sadly emblematic of his administration\u2019s larger war against journalism. And, mind you, the word \u201cwar\u201d is no overstatement. <\/p>\n

As New York Times media correspondent David Carr put it: \u201cIf you add up the pulling of news organization phone records (The Associated Press), the tracking of individual reporters (Fox News), and the effort by the current administration to go after sources (seven instances and counting in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media), suggesting that there is a war on the press is less hyperbole than simple math.\u201d <\/p>\n

In this unprecedented global war, President Obama has been backed by the combined power of Justice Department prosecutors, FBI surveillance agents, State Department diplomats and, perhaps most troubling of all, a cadre of high-profile Benedict Arnolds within the media itself. <\/p>\n

One of them is \u201cMeet the Press\u201d host David Gregory, who, after saying journalist Glenn Greenwald \u201caided and abetted\u201d NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, demanded to know of the reporter: \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t you be charged with a crime?\u201d On the same \u201cMeet the Press\u201d program, NBC\u2019s Chuck Todd didn\u2019t want to know whether the NSA\u2019s surveillance is illegal, but instead demanded to know \u201chow much was (Greenwald) involved in the plot\u201d to expose the NSA\u2019s potential crimes. They were subsequently followed up by New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, after years of writing hagiography that helped Wall Streeters avoid prosecution, called for Greenwald\u2019s arrest. <\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, the result of all this is a culture of fear. As the CEO of the Associated Press recently said, there has been a \u201cchilling effect on newsgathering\u201d thanks to an assault that seems \u201ctailor-made to comfort authoritarian regimes that want to suppress their own news media.\u201d <\/p>\n

By definition, the consequences of that \u201cchilling effect\u201d will be difficult to see \u2013 stories never reported, facts never unearthed and whistles never blown. In cases like Shaye\u2019s, there will also be journalists not released from prison. <\/p>\n

No doubt, the resulting news vacuum is exactly what the Obama administration wants. After all, even if the White House\u2019s version of events is wildly inaccurate, deliberately misleading or completely untrue, such a vacuum allows the official story to become the only story. <\/p>\n

That kind of information monopoly is great for the president, and it is perfectly acceptable to the courtiers and glorified television actors in the Washington press corps who masquerade as real journalists. But it is quite the opposite for a world that desperately needs more independent reporting and assumption-challenging journalism, not less. <\/p>\n

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 28, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Out of all the harrowing story lines in journalist Jeremy Scahill\u2019s new film \u201cDirty Wars,\u201d the one about Abdulelah Haider Shaye best spotlights the U.S. government\u2019s new assault against press freedom. Shaye is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-46593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}