Sharyl Attkisson left CBS News believing her stories were inappropriately shot down by her bosses, but she told Fox News that she primarily blames the Obama administration for pressuring the media.
Attkisson explained that the White House would call or send emails, asking CBS to retract or change certain stories that the president didn’t like:
“There have always been tensions, there have always been calls from the White House — under any administration, I assume — when they don’t like a particular story,” she admitted. “But it is particularly aggressive under the Obama administration, and I think it’s a campaign that’s very well organized and designed to have sort of a chilling effect.”
In the end, she said it worked. Her bosses weren’t eager to deal with the “headache” of hearing from Washington again, so they ran fewer controversial stories and more that fit with Obama’s agenda. In addition, they didn’t fight for her stories because they didn’t want conflict with the White House.
She said the pressures from the current administration were more openly aggressive than any she has experienced in her twenty years with CBS. Government officials guarded public material as if she didn’t have the right to see it, and called her stories “phony” and “bogus”:
“Even, really the last year or so, when I would write an article online — which would be sort of the fallback position when something couldn’t get on television but was still a great story that could be circulated, I’d publish it online — they would even call about those,” she revealed. “Or they would call about the headline of the online article.”
This blatant attack on the media shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Obama administration has a long history of trying to suppress news that it finds threatening. Remember when the FCC was planning to flood newsrooms with government inspectors a few months back?
Fortunately, they can’t stop Fox from reporting the news or The American Spectator from telling the truth. Thankfully, Attkisson was willing to speak out and remind people that the press isn’t as objective as they claim.
