Former CBS reporter shows how the press protects Obama - Rick Moran

by Rick Moran


Even if Sheryl Attkisson's new book, "Stonewalled" becomes a bestseller, only a few hundred thousand people will ever read it. 

But every American citizen concerned about the present and future of America needs to read this book. Attkisson, a former investigative reporter for CBS who quit in disgust last year, details the incredible lengths to which the media went to protect the president and promote their ideological viewpoint at the expense of the news.

Kyle Smith has a long article in the New York Post on the book that should be read in its entirety. Here's a sample:

The administration, with the full cooperation of the media, has successfully turned “Benghazi” into a word associated with nutters, like “Roswell” or “grassy knoll,” but Attkisson notes that “the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama administration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a coverup.”
Similarly, though the major media can’t mention the Fast and Furious scandal without a world-weary eyeroll, Attkisson points out that the story led to the resignation of a US attorney and the head of the ATF and led President Obama to invoke for the first time “executive privilege” to stanch the flow of damaging information.
Attkisson, who received an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow award for her trailblazing work on the story, says she made top CBS brass “incensed” when she appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and mentioned that Obama administration officials called her up to literally scream at her while she was working the story.
One angry CBS exec called to tell Attkisson that Ingraham is “extremely, extremely far right” and that Attkisson shouldn’t appear on her show anymore. Attkisson was puzzled, noting that CBS reporters aren’t barred from appearing on lefty MSNBC shows.
She was turning up leads tying the Fast and Furious scandal (which involved so many guns that ATF officials initially worried that a firearm used in the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords might have been one of them) to an ever-expanding network of cases when she got an e-mail from Katie Couric asking if it was OK for Couric to interview Eric Holder, whom Couric knew socially, about the scandal. Sure, replied Attkisson.
No interview with Holder aired but “after that weekend e-mail exchange, nothing is the same at work,” Attkisson writes. “The Evening News” began killing her stories on Fast and Furious, with one producer telling Attkisson, “You’ve reported everything. There’s really nothing left to say.”
Readers are left to wonder whether Holder told Couric to stand down on the story.

Attkisson also used to play a game she called "substitution" - a popular game played often by the conservative media:

Attkisson mischievously cites what she calls the “Substitution Game”: She likes to imagine how a story about today’s administration would have been handled if it made Republicans look bad.
In green energy, for instance: “Imagine a parallel scenario in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally appeared at groundbreakings for, and used billions of tax dollars to support, multiple giant corporate ventures whose investors were sometimes major campaign bundlers, only to have one (or two, or three) go bankrupt . . . when they knew in advance the companies’ credit ratings were junk.”

One new tidbit of information of which I was unaware; Attkisson was asked to do a follow up story to the Rathergate Bush National Guard memos; she refused citing an ethics clause in her contract:

Ignoring Attkisson proved damaging to CBS in other ways. When a senior producer she doesn’t identify came to her in 2004 bubbling about documents that supposedly showed then-President George W. Bush shirked his duties during the Vietnam War, she took one look at the documents and said, “They looked like they were typed by my daughter on a computer yesterday.”
Asked to do a followup story on the documents, she flatly refused, citing an ethics clause in her contract. “And if you make me, I’ll have to call my lawyer,” she said. “Nobody ever said another word” to her about reporting on the documents, which turned out to be unverifiable and probably fake.

Most conservatives don't think much of the reporting profession - and for good reason. But once and a while, someone with real integrity and a passion for the truth emerges from the media scrum and tries to shine a light on the corruption in Washington and disinterest of the media. Attkisson now writes for The Federalist where she has already broken another significant story; Hillary Clinton aides scrubbing Benghazi documents requested by a House committee. 

We can be sure that Attkisson will continue to report the news as it should be reported; with honesty and letting the political chips fall where they may.

Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/former_cbs_reporter_shows_how_the_press_protects_obama.html

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