Mediated #3

Obama and Holder Are Not Our Friends

This opinion article at Aljazeera America is written by David Cay Johnston. He is an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzter Prize while at The New York Times. He wrote this opinion piece on a speech given by Lowell Bergman who argues that journalism is under attack from corporate and government power. Johnston agrees and says that Bergman is right. Bergman spoke at the largest-ever gathering of investigative journalists in San Francisco the first week of July 2014. Johnston says it is a speech every American should know about.

“We thought that after the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales years that Barack Obama and Eric Holder were our
friends,” Bergman said. “They are not. While the president has said he supports whistle-blowers for their ‘courage and patriotism,’ his Justice Department is prosecuting more of them for allegedly talking to the press or ‘leaking’ than all the other presidents in the history of the United States.”

Bergman has a cogent argument with this statement. Why should journalist be afraid of reporting the truth when it is their job to do so? It is not so much that journalists are trying to keep the truth from the public, but rather they are afraid of the consequences that would follow for reporting the truth.

Bergman warned his audience, “We are on a collision course with the Justice Department and the White House. They advocate transparency and then they practice repression. Everything has to be approved by the White House — including leaks!"

Even though the title is misleading and fallacious, I believe his argument to be cogent. Johnston and Bergman are both experts in the field of journalism. They would know just as well as anybody else what is happening in the journalism world. Their reasoning is cogent. The argument is based on truths, and it would be hard to poke many holes in the argument when, as Johnston writes, two days after Bergman’s speech, the head of the NSA said in an hour-long interview with The New York Times that the damage caused by the Snowden revelations was, in fact, not such a big deal. Yet Obama’s campaign to tighten the lid, and keep you in the dark, continues.

Obama campaigned on the promise of ending the extreme secrecy of the Bush administration, yet he has been caught sweeping many things "under the rug". Where is the transparency that he promised us years ago?