Our beloved corporate-owned fourth estate has received a taste of nasty government medicine that other activists have recently swallowed in heavy doses: Obama’s prescription of overzealous investigations to find government whistleblowers.
Mainstream media was flabbergasted this week after the Associated Press revealed that the U.S. Justice Department secretly tracked and obtained the phone records of upwards of 20 reporters and editors who work for the wire service. DoJ apparently seized the records to learn who in the government leaked information about a Saudi double agent that had infiltrated al Qaeda.
But a question lingers in my mind: why is the media surprised the government is spying on them? When the AP scandal broke this week, Democrats and Republicans expressed anger. In a Fox News online article, Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte said he planned to grill Attorney General Eric Holder because “Congress and the American people expect answers and accountability."
Mainstream media also jumped on the bandwagon, and arguably drove it. Big publications lined up and released a series of articles condemning the government's overreach.
A scathing column published on a Time magazine blog compared Obama’s intrusion in the media to George W.’s efforts: “To judge from this week’s developments, we’re still accelerating in the direction set by George W. Bush after 9/11 towards a retrenchment of White House power and secrecy, and new limits on the media."
The Los Angeles Times wrote an editorial bashing Obama’s aggressive investigations: “Retaliatory leak investigations and unjustified, open-ended searches such as that performed on the AP discourage that reporting and cow sources into submission. Such searches may simplify the work of investigators, but they thwart the larger purpose of free debate, a grave sacrifice indeed. What's good for Justice may be bad for justice."
Mainstream media, for a change, are onto something. Obama’s administration has shown a tendency to prescribe poison to cure healthy democratic debates. But what strikes me about the media’s uproar was the near-universal lack of mainstream media anger as the U.S. government moved heaven, hell and Pluto to find Julian Assange and shut down WikiLeaks.
Obama’s government tracked Assange across the globe and harassed his financiers to end the flow of Wiki-information to the public. Assange had government secrets and Obama wanted to know who spilled the beans. Eventually, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning was exposed as the government whistleblower, prosecuted and jailed.
How did the mainstream media react? Did they express outrage over the Assange witch-hunt and Manning prosecution? Did they quickly write editorials condemning Obama? No. Just the opposite happened. The mainstream media took the opportunity to write articles slamming the nonprofit whistleblower organization.
In a September 2011 article, The New York Times wrote:
"Representative Candice S. Miller, Republican of Michigan, issued a statement saying, 'The latest release of stolen American secrets by the organization WikiLeaks once again proves that they are a terrorist operation.' She urged the Obama administration, which is conducting a criminal investigation of the group, 'to take decisive action to shut this criminal operation down.’”
The Los Angeles Times — the same newspaper that criticized Obama for overreach this week — published an editorial last month calling the case against Manning “overkill,” but added, “Even if Manning was engaged in principled civil disobedience, he must face the consequences that await anyone who violates the law in a supposedly higher cause.”
So where are the editorials now calling for the prosecution of the person who leaked information to the AP? Nowhere. Why? Because corporate media got a taste of the same bad medicine prescribed to other activists — and, lo and behold, mainstream journalists find it yucky.
Comparing the AP scandal to WikiLeaks is not hyperbole. The government’s promise to aggressively launch an investigation into the AP fiasco, and the case against WikiLeaks/Assange/Manning, are at their core pretty much the same. The administration claims now, as it did during the early days of the WikiLeaks saga, that aggressive government action was needed because American lives were at risk. However, activist groups like Human Rights Watch claim the government has never proven that these past leaks directly lead to the death of Americans.
Many academic studies have documented how the mainstream media dismiss activists by framing them in a negative light. No doubt that treatment will continue. While I loath the escalated spying by the U.S. government on the nation's press, I can’t help but feel happy that mainstream journalists are finally outraged about bitter, nasty, undemocratic medicine that has been prescribed to those who have previously spoken out against our government.
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