John Cole Reminds Us of What a REAL War on Press Freedom Was

It was the tactics the Bush Administration used to bully, intimidate, mislead, and manipulate the media. Cole's excellent examples:

Paying Armstrong Williams, Michael McManus, and Maggie Gallagher and others for favorable opinions about WH policies or to attack opponents of the WH.

-Planting Jeff Gannon to lob softball questions.

-Used reporters to out a CIA agent, then sat by and watched reporters go to jail to protect their sources.

-Fed reporters misinformation about WMD in Iraq, then used those reporters stories as corroborating evidence of the existence of WMD in Iraq.

-treated Helen Thomas like a leper.

-waged a coordinated campaign against NBC.

-kicked all the NY Times reporters off of their planes.

-the Pentagon Pundit program, which sold the war by planting former military officers on networks. Uncovering this story earned a journalist the fucking Pulitzer.

-Staged mock press conferences with FEMA employees pretending to be reporters.

-allowed Ari Fleischer to tell everyone (but directed at journalists) they needed to “watch what they say and what they do.”

By the way, again, just for the record, I'll say this: Fox "News" is merely the propaganda arm of the Republican Psychotic Right Wing. It bears as much of a relationship to journalism as did Pravda under the old Soviet regime. It employs pathological liars and thugs like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and is run by a right-wing Republican hack/hitman named Roger Ailes, who has the ethics of a starving sewer rat, which just barely puts him above Karl Rove.

Period.