3:
Spying on the Associated Press
It turns out there is much more to the story about the government investigating leaks to the AP. It turns out the news organization and the government had been negotiating, about when to release the news, and the AP had held its story for five days and was wrangling with the White House over who would break it suggesting that there may be questionable practices of censorship and self-censorship on both sides.
Andrew Beaujon of the Poynter Institute that covers media practices reported:
"The Associated Press held its story about a foiled underwear bombing for five days, Carol D. Leonnig and Julie Tate report in The Washington Post. But on Monday, May 7, "CIA officials reported that the national security concerns were "no longer an issue,'" they write. "Then the government began jostling with AP over who would get to break the story ."
When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA
then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively
for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?
Then an administration official called, saying, "AP could have the story exclusively for five minutes before the White House made its own announcement. AP then rejected the request to postpone publication any longer."
The AP may be our leading news agency, and a News cooperative no less, but it has a long history of collusion with power, belittling opposition movements worldwide, echoing US government claims and skewing the news.
This goes way back--here's a story I found from 1914 from the Radical magazine "The Masses."
They
wrote then, "Last summer, after a number of publications, including Collier's
Weekly and The Independent, had delicately intimated that the
Associated Press gave the country no fair amount of the struggle between labor
and capital in West Virginia, THE MASSES decided to look into the case.
It decided that if this thing were true, it ought to be stated without
delicacy.
The result was a
paragraph explicitly and warmly charging the Associated Press with having
suppressed and colored the news of that strike in favor of the employers.
Accompanying the paragraph was a cartoon presenting the same charge in a
graphic form.
Upon
the basis of this cartoon and paragraph, William Rand, an attorney for the
Associated Press, brought John Doe proceedings against THE MASSES in the
Municipal Court of New York. Justice Breen dismissed the case.
Rand
then went to the District Attorney. And the District Attorney considered the
case serious enough to receive the attention of the Grand Jury. He secured an
indictment of two editors of THE MASSES for criminal libel. Max Eastman
and Arthur Young were arraigned on December 13, pleaded not guilty, and were
each released on $1,000 bail. The date for the trial is not set. The penalty
for criminal libel may be one year in prison, $5,000 fine, or both."
So much for Freedom of the Press! In this case, critics were demanding freedom from the press.
4.
Benghazi Blunders
The government has released emails on Benghazi, The Republicans want more. The issue is defined as one of bad security by Hillary Clinton's State Department. Once again, there's been no independent investigation. It has become a partisan football while skirting deeper issues.
Former CIA analyst
Melvin Goodman has come forward to question whether this office in Benghazi was
really a consulate but an "intelligence platform" for use in a covert war that
the sacking of the embassy became part of. He writes:
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