{"id":20206,"date":"2014-03-25T11:31:59","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T17:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=20206"},"modified":"2014-03-25T11:31:59","modified_gmt":"2014-03-25T17:31:59","slug":"obama-this-generations-greatest-enemy-of-press-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=20206","title":{"rendered":"Obama this generation\u2019s \u2018greatest enemy of press freedom\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"obama-hope\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Risen: Obama administration is this generation\u2019s \u2018greatest enemy of press freedom\u2019<\/strong>
\nby Andrew Beaujon – 24 March, 2014 – Poynter.org<\/p>\n

\u201cIt won\u2019t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,\u201d Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. \u201cFor better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the First Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Yorker staff writer and CNN commentator was appearing on a panel as part of a George Polk Awards conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center. A lot has already been written about the conference (links below), so I\u2019m going to pull out a theme that appears again and again in my notes: How much protection do reporters really have with regard to sources, and how much, if any, protection would a federal shield law give them?<\/p>\n

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is \u201cthe greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.\u201d The administration wants to \u201cnarrow the field of national security reporting,\u201d Risen said, to \u201ccreate a path for accepted reporting.\u201d Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, \u201cwill be punished.\u201d<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s aggressive prosecutions have created \u201ca de facto Official Secrets Act,\u201d Risen said, and the media has been \u201ctoo timid\u201d in responding.<\/p>\n

Toobin appeared on a panel that followed, moderated by Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, who announced that if he weren\u2019t a paragon of journalistic detachment, he\u2019d say \u201cthe persecution of James Risen is a scandal.\u201d The attorney Laura Handman noted that the U.S. Department of Justice\u2019s new guidelines for accessing journalists\u2019 records carve out a big space for the government to decide what constitutes \u201cordinary newsgathering.\u201d …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Risen: Obama administration is this generation\u2019s \u2018greatest enemy of press freedom\u2019 by Andrew Beaujon – 24 March, 2014 – Poynter.org \u201cIt won\u2019t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,\u201d Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. \u201cFor better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[4303],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20208,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20206\/revisions\/20208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}