So Attorney General Eric Holder invited members of the media — some of whom his Justice Department had expressly targeted for surveillance under dubious national-security claims — in for sit-down, and almost nobody came.
The Associated Press, one of Holder’s targets, said no. The New York Post said no. The New York Times said no. CNN said no. Fox News, another target, said no. Even the liberal Huffington Post said no, not if it’s off the record. (Reporters for Politico, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Daily News did meet him yesterday.)
Of course, Holder had insisted the chat (to “discuss guidelines,” whatever that means) be off the record — which meant that nothing he told them could be reported publicly. Under the circumstances, that’s basically a license to lie.
It was probably worth a try for the embattled AG, who’s facing multiple congressional investigations, calls for an independent prosecutor and ever-louder demands for his resignation, including from some on the left. After all, most of the Fourth Estate is still reeling from the news that its beloved Obama administration has been waging a surreptitious (until now) campaign against it.
But the newsfolks still managed to come up with the right answer — “no!”
If the nation’s top cop has anything to say to the American people via the (constitutionally protected) press, let him say it loud and say it proud.
To play along would just continue the cozy little game the administration has been playing with its largely adoring media acolytes, giving favored reporters, columnists and news anchors the sense that — since they all share the same social and political values — they’re on the same team.
Indeed, the news that the administration has been spying on targets at The Associated Press and Fox News (the latter long a target of vituperative propaganda from the White House) may well be the best thing that’s happened to the press in years. At last, its members are being forced to choose between their passion for the president and his “compelling personal narrative,” and their duty to hold the government accountable.
Naturally, both Obama and Holder have adopted a “who, me?” approach to the scandals — laughably claiming that the first they ever learned of them was when they read about them in the newspapers.
Holder even brazenly told Congress that going after the press “is not something I’ve ever been involved in” — when he’d personally approved the subpoena for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s phone records.
More chutzpah: The president is now pushing a media “shield law,” similar to those in most states, ostensibly to protect the credentialed members of the media from the very assaults on their integrity that he’s been spearheading. Originally proposed in 2009 and reintroduced by Sen. Chuck Schumer, it’s called (stop laughing) the “Free Flow of Information Act.”
As the Chicago Tribune editorialized: “It’s the equivalent of a guy sending roses to his girlfriend after he stole tulips from her garden.”
In any case, it’s too little, too late. The bill is rife with national-security exceptions — the very excuse Holder & Co. employed to go after Rosen and the AP in the first place.
It’s also aimed at professional print and broadcast journalists. Today, however, the “media” is no longer synonymous with the major news organizations huddled along Sixth Avenue; it’s also Web sites major and minor, independent bloggers, “citizen journalists” and just plain Nosy Parkers, scattered across the country. Many of them don’t make a dime at what they do.
The elites see this as anarchy, but in truth we’re right back where we started, in the days of the troublemaking citizen-pamphleteers like Tom Paine who — like their counterparts today — often wrote anonymously or under pseudonyms. (The Federalist Papers, anybody?) If the Obama crew really believes in transparency and the “free flow of information,” they need to cover the little guys, too.
That system gave us our constitutional system of limited government. No wonder the entrenched interests in both government and the press fear it so.