Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington
By Sharyl Attkisson
In her best selling book, Stonewalled, former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson spells out in riveting detail what conservatives have known for years about mainstream news reporting. Outlets such as CBS News fashion their coverage with an eye towards electing their preferred candidates. Nowadays that means favorable reporting on Barack Obama and his administration and negative stories for his critics.
Stonewalled opens with Attkisson's discovery that her personal computer, another computer that she used for work, and quite possibly the CBS News internal network had all been hacked. Attkisson's activities were being monitored by persons unknown. She brought in cyber security experts to analyze her hardware. They confirmed it: Her computers had been breached. But that wasn't the worst of the news. Since there are so few organizations capable of such a thorough a penetration, analysts suspected that the hackers most likely belonged to one of our government's three-letter agencies. The experts found more.
They're also worried about my home phone. It's practically unusable now. Often when I call home, it only rings once on the receiving end. But on my end it keeps ringing, and then connects somewhere else. Nobody's there. Other times, it disconnects in the middle of calls. There are clicks and buzzes. My friends who call hear the strange noises and ask about them. I get used to the routine of callers suggesting, half-jokingly, "Is your phone tapped?"
...
On top of that, my home alarm system has begun chirping a nightly warning that my phone line is having "trouble" of an unidentified nature.
An agency of the federal government was secretly monitoring Attkisson. The time was October, 2012, and Attkisson was digging into the September 11th terrorist attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Hackers were trying to find out what Attkisson knew and how she knew it
Benghazi had the Obama administration in cover up mode. Questions posed by reporters about the attack and the apparent lack of an administration response to it were deflected or dismissed by White House spokesmen as partisan witch-hunting. While some in the news media were satisfied with the White House version of events, Sharyl Attkisson was not, and because of it she got a close up look at the administration's methods for dealing with reporters who ask tough questions.
"Know your enemy"
PR officials get to know the reporters on the story and their supervisors. Research them. Lobby them. Look for their weak spots. If they don't adopt the preferred PR viewpoint, the PR officials launch a campaign to controversialize and discredit them."Mine and Pump Strategy"
When ask to provide interviews and information for a story, the PR officials stall, claim ignorance of the known facts, and mine and pump the reporter for what information he has."Controversialize"
...The officials controversialize the reporter and any whistle blowers or critics to tru to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence...
It's a scripted process. The Obama PR machine works to discredit the reporter, while at the same time it tries to spin the story in a way that puts Obama in more a favorable light. If the story can't be spun, the next step is to delay. Spokesmen plead ignorance. Questions are brushed aside. Eventually, officials respond to the repeated questions with something like, "Why are you still asking about this? It's old news, we've already answered all that. Can't we move on?" Throughout the process the administration puts pressure on reporters, producers, and news executives: Be reasonable, it's tough enough without your badgering.
It's not as if Obama hasn't got his allies in the media. The relationship between corporate CBS and the Obama administration tends to be cooperative, which means that many of the obstacles confronting Attkisson came from her own management. It is this that Attkisson devotes much of Stonewalled.
In example after example — Fast and Furious and the illegal transfer of guns to Mexican drug dealers; the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and the lies told to the public; the deaths of four Americans at the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the administrations cover up of what happened; green energy subsidies and the associated corruption — Attkisson reveals how CBS News management would at first be enthusiastic about her stories, then would try to get Attkisson to agree to a softening of impact, and finally would just refuse to let her stories go on the air.
In her concluding chapter, Attkisson relates an anecdote that strengthens a suspicion I've had for some time now. She tells of a phone call she received from a White House official that she chooses not to name. It came a few days before the second presidential debate between Obama and Mitt Romney.
The White House official and I chatted casually about unrelated topics and then he introduced a non sequitur: "The president called Benghazi a 'terrorist attack' the day after in the Rose Garden," he told me.
At the time, I hadn't given any thought to whether the president had or hadn't termed the Benghazi assaults "terrorism." The debate on that point hadn't widely emerged and I was still focused on the State Department's denial of security requests from Americans in Libya prior to the attacks.
Since I really didn't know what the president had said in the Rose Garden the day after, I didn't offer a comment to the White House official on the other end of the phone. He repeated himself as if to elicit some sort of reaction.
"He did call it a terrorist attack. In the Rose Garden. On September twelfth."
If you watched that second debate you may recall how Obama stunned Romney and nearly everyone else with the statement,
"The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those committed this crime."
A flabbergasted Romney replied,
"You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?"
Romney and the audience were further shocked when moderator Candy Crowley took the opportunity to jump into the debate on Obama's side.
CROWLEY It—it—it—he did in fact, sir. So let me—let me call it an act of terror...
OBAMA Can you say that a little louder, Candy?
CROWLEY He—he did call it an act of terror.
Is there any chance that Crowley had not been prepped for Obama's surprise announcement. A review of that Rose Garden speech transcript shows that Obama made no such connection between Benghazi and terrorism. On the contrary, on the day Obama was speaking in the Rose Garden, Susan Rice had still not yet made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to state the administration's position: The attacks were a spontaneous reaction to an insulting internet video. Officials up and down the administration had pushed the spontaneous demonstration narrative for weeks, but here was Candy Crowley, now corroborating Obama's new claim that he had immediately called it a "an act of terror."
Attkisson's revelation, that the White House also passed this nugget to her, convinces me that Crowley knew going into the debate what Obama was going to say about his "day after" Rose Garden speech. She knew she could expect to hear him say it during the debate, and she knew what she was supposed to do about it. It was her job to jump in in support of Obama's lie, and then immediately steer the debate to another topic.
A left-wing ideological slant to news coverage is not a recent phenomenon, and it's by no means rare. In the 1930s the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reports by Walter Duranty that glorified Josef Stalin and his Sovie regime, while ignoring the starvation of millions in the Ukraine. But what was possible then is not so easy now. In the 1930s, newspapers could be secure in the knowledge that their stories would go largely unchallenged. Even into the 1960s and 1970s, newspapers and network news organizations had the power to dictate what was news and what wasn't, and they enjoyed the trust of the American public. Contradictions had almost no chance of being heard.
Today the internet makes vast stores of information available to anybody with a computer who wants to go looking, and once the information is out there it almost never goes away. On top of that, anybody can publish on the internet and potentially reach an audience of millions. This calls for a different set of strategies, and the Obama PR machine has mastered them as Attkisson describes in detail in Stonewalled.
It's hard to overstate the importance of this book. In bygone days there was at least the semblance of an adversarial relationship between the press and the White House. Some times more antagonistic than others. With the election of Barack Obama, the most left-wing president ever, our already left-leaning media has tilted even further left and has pretty much abdicated the traditional role of the press. Adversary has become ally. We are in an information war. Never before has news reporting been so blatantly dishonest, with entire media organizations working to promote the progressive, left-wing agenda.
Fortunately, there are still the few courageous individuals like Sharyl Attkisson who are willing to report the truth in spite of concerted efforts to suppress it.
Update: With regard to the cooperative nature of the CBS News/Obama White House relationship, I should have included this information:
Here’s the crux. The Rhodes brothers.
Ben Rhodes, David Rhodes.
Ben is a deputy national security advisor to Obama and writes speeches for him. In September 2012, Ben was “instrumental,” according to ABC News, in changing the White House talking points (the story) on what happened in Benghazi.
Ben’s brother, David, is president of CBS News. Attkisson was working for David. She was investigating all the changes (12) in the Benghazi talking points. She was shut down.
[Emphasis above is mine.]
"Changing the White House talking points" refers to removing all reverences to terrorism and blaming a YouTube video for the violence in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans.
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