President Trump takes a lot of heat for his treatment of the press while many reports indicate that his administration is one of the most transparent. A new report is indicating that former President Obama, who is the media’s darling and fearless leader, was actually the real enemy of the free press and the leader of the least transparent administration since Richard Nixon.
According to The Daily Wire:
Obama, who pledged “the most transparent administration in history,” was deemed “the least transparent and the most antagonistic toward the media since the Nixon administration” by The San Diego Union-Tribune, which summed up his efforts to control the media in a single paragraph.
Some specifics? Obama’s administration prosecuted three times as many cases targeting whistle-blowers and leakers than all previous administrations combined. It said there was probable cause that a Fox News reporter was a “co-conspirator” in a plot against the U.S. government because of his attempts to gather information about North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. It secretly scoured the phone records of nearly 100 Associated Press reporters and editors for two months, which an editorial in The New York Times characterized as “a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.” And in 2014, according to AP, the Obama administration broke its own record for censoring government files or refusing to provide files sought under the Freedom of Information Act.
Since 1945, the government has used the Espionage Act of 1917 just 11 times to prosecute journalists and their government sources. Seven of those occurred while Obama was president.
By the time Obama was leaving office, his administration had set a new record for rejecting Freedom of Information Act requests from journalists trying to gather information, censoring materials or flat-out denying applications for access in 596,095 cases — or 77 percent of the time, according to a review conducted by The Associated Press. The irony of the situation was perfectly captured in a Vice News headline: “It Took a FOIA Lawsuit to Uncover How the Obama Administration Killed FOIA Reform.”
It appears that the liberal media is showing their blind allegiance by portraying Obama in a glowing light while his efforts in the shadows were to stop the flow of information to their colleagues. But that must be ok if he does it politely and eloquently.
