The Newest Strike in Obama’s War on Journalists

by Warner Todd Huston | October 31, 2013 1:03 pm

Some of you may recall back in May when it was discovered that President Obama had seized the phone records of over a hundred Associated Press reporters without conferring with the AP before he did so. This was only one small example of Obama’s war on the media, of course as there have been many such incursions into the curbing of freedom of the press. This month we got yet another one.

Obama’s AP phone record heist[1] was a big deal earlier in the year and had journalists all over the place screaming about losing their freedoms. But, because nearly every member of the press is a slobbering Obamaite, they soon forgot all about their savior’s un-American actions.

But this wasn’t the only time Obama has shown his utter contempt for Press, the very people that got him to office by giving him 100% favorable coverage for both runs for the White House.

A recent article in The Washington Post by Leonard Downie, who is currently the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, was stark in its assessment of how badly this president treats his lapdogs.

Downie noted that Obama has used the 1917 Espionage Act in cases that no president has ever invoked it. Obama is using electronic surveillance without telling reporters or their news agencies that he’s doing so and the writer lists some of the many government officials that Obama has prosecuted or made to quit their jobs over what Obama calls “espionage” or “spying.”

The WaPo piece also recounts the fears that many journalists have of this president just for doing their jobs.

Downie also reports that David E. Sanger, who has worked for the Times in Washington for twenty years, said, “This is most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”

This month we get yet another example[2] of how much Obama despises the oppresses the US press.

Obama had his Department of Homeland Security sweep down onto the home of Washington Times reporter Audry Hudson ostensibly because her husband, who was convicted of “resisting arrest” 30 years ago, was rumored to own a gun.

While Obama’s stormtroopers were in the house supposedly looking for an illegal gun they also took all of Hudson’s private computer files even as none of her belongings were listed on the warrant.

What authorities ended up taking with scores of files she was collecting from government whistleblowers, files that were going to form the basis for an article.

“They took my notes without my knowledge and without legal authority to do so,” Hudson reported. “The search warrant they presented said nothing about walking out of here with a single sheet of paper.”

Does anyone think it a bit precious for Obama’s stormtroopers to suddenly be interested in an “illegal gun” supposedly in the hands of a man convicted of “resisting arrest” 30 years ago just as that man’s wife was writing a story about government whistleblowers? And does any one think it was just an accident that her research and files were taken illegally by those same stormtroopers?

If you believe that it was all just happenstance, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

All this comes from the same Obama who came to office in 2008 claiming that he would have the “strictest ethics rules[3]“–not to mention the most transparent–administration in history. We can see how far that went.