The Death of Rule of Law – Part III of VI: Freedom of the Press

Death of the Free Press

In April and May of 2012 the U.S. Justice Department, headed by President Obama’s friend Eric Holder, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, secretly obtained two months of Associated Press phone records. It was a fishing expedition. After all, who knows if someone at the AP is doing something illegal, treasonous or a threat to citizen security, right? Uncle Sam had to check to make sure… just to make America safer for the rest of us. Wow, did this catch the left-leaning, progressive AP off guard! In a time when so many politicians and government agencies are subverting the Rule of Law, the AP has largely given the lefty progressives a pass when it comes to hardball reporting. The AP could have (and ethically should have) reported all sorts of underhanded deals going on in DC, embarrassed the elites and changed the outcomes of elections in the process, yet they did not. Words are powerful, and the AP’s finely crafted words helped make the Obama presidency possible in the first place… and this is how Eric Holder repays them? Oh, the outrage! Oh, the “No one is going to prison for violating our Constitutional rights?” outrage!

Today, as Obama’s FCC, headed by Chairman Thomas Wheeler, plans to embed government observers in newsrooms across the nation to monitor the decisions of the Free Press, you would think the AP would again be outraged… or at least mention the story in passing. After all, the AP is a cornerstone of America’s Free Press. Yet a keyword search of “the news” on the AP homepage turned up no results, like some sort of conspiracy exists. Fox News certainly thinks so. Fox is the only major media outlet that regularly monitors and criticizes Obama’s government from a conservative point of view. They are the ones who will feel the brunt of the chilling effect of embedded government observation. Could it be that the AP is so desperate to stuff a sock in Fox’s big mouth that they are willing to hop back into the sack with a Government that spies on them? It makes me wonder. The AP ought to change their name to GP, or Government Press.

Anyway, no matter how you slice it, if we allow our Government to spy on our journalists and embed government agents in our newsrooms at will, our Constitutionally protected Free Press is essentially dead, put down by the Government with hardly a whimper. Without a truly free and independent press to investigate and report political wrongdoing, the people cannot make informed decisions. If the people cannot make informed decisions, if propaganda rules the day, democracy is dead.