Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Dana Milbank Slams Obama's Assault on the Press

There are various reasons you might not care about the Obama administration’s spying on journalist James Rosen and labeling him a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor” in an espionage case.

Liberals may not be particularly bothered because the targeted journalist works for Fox News. Conservatives may not be concerned because of their antipathy toward the news media generally. And the general public certainly doesn’t have much patience for journalists’ whining.

But here’s why you should care — and why this case, along with the administration’s broad snooping into Associated Press phone records, is more serious than the other supposed Obama administration scandals regarding Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service. The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.
Read the rest here.

Aside from being a generally good article, the source is important. Milbank is a  dyed in the wool lefty Obama drone. This is just the latest sign that the MSM is having a sudden recollection that they are supposed to be journalists, and not members of the White House cheer-leading squad. This could be very bad news for Zero.

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