“Trump Wages War on the Press, but Was Obama Much Better to Reporters? (Guest Column)” in Variety | Trump Ended Up Using Speech |

April 30, 2021 / Great Bloggers

As it turned out, the ‘war’ was actually a ‘war of words’. In one sense, Trump turned out to be the greatest proponent of Article 19, then our own American Press.

| Obama, who campaigned on a promise to protect government whistle-blowers, made greater use of the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and menace journalists than all other presidents combined.

Obama’s Justice Department accessed the personal email of a Fox News reporter and surveilled the reporter’s parents and colleagues. They seized the home, work and mobile phone records of journalists at the Associated Press.

Risen, who fought the administration to protect his sources, got so deep in his own legal battle with Obama that he selected a reading list for prison before the government finally backed off.

White House officials subverted the press in a number of ways while touting themselves as the most transparent in history.

Obama routinely banned news photographers from official events. He went months between press conferences and used social media to circumvent reporters.

First lady Michelle Obama took policy trips overseas with no press on her airplane. The White House scrubbed public visitor logs of names it didn’t want in the news.

The Obama administration posted the worst record in history for fulfilling requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.

In a bleak episode of unintended irony, an open-government group gave Obama an award for transparency in an Oval Office ceremony closed to the press.

Trump may well end up being worse on press issues than Obama, and today’s White House reporters could be picking out their prison reading lists eventually.

But for now, those on duty there are guardedly hopeful. | ~ Paragraph 8 on, Variety

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Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh claims US Navy behind Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion | New York Post

By Great Bloggers | February 13, 2023

WASHINGTON — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has alleged US Navy divers laid bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September, drawing a denial from the Pentagon Wednesday.

Hersh, who scooped journalism’s top award more than five decades ago for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968, cited an unnamed source in reporting on Substack that Americans planted remotely triggered explosives that wrecked three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe.

Hersh, 85, went on to claim that the Navy conducted the operation under the cover of a NATO maritime exercise, BALTOPS 22.

In a short statement, Pentagon spokesman Marine Corps Lt. Col. Garron J. Garn told The Post “the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosion,” reiterating the Defense Department’s response to the same question in October.

Swedish officials suspected the blasts were the result of “gross sabotage,” and some Western officials were quick to blame the attacks on Moscow as it blocked gas supplies to Europe in response to sanctions over last year’s invasion of Ukraine.

“These are deliberate actions, not an accident,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at the time. “The situation is as serious as it gets.”

Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh claims US Navy behind Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion | New York Post