Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington Paperback – November 24, 2015

Formerly with CBS News and now freelance by choice, Sharyl Attkisson is a shining star in the dark night of television journalism. Her career has made her tough and smart and nosy, as a good journalist should be. Yet Sharyl remains a Girl Scout inasmuch as she still wants to trust The Powers That Be.When I was a younker, I always trusted Uncle Sam and CBS News. I believed every word spoken by Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer and Eric Sevareid and Daniel Schorr and the rest. Then I did a hitch in the Marines. Now, after Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and Vietnam and POWs and Watergate and Ronald Reagan and Oliver North, after Rush Limbaugh, after Dark Alliance, after journalism's betrayal and professional slaughter of Gary Webb, after Bill and Hillary and Janet Reno and Ruby Ridge and Waco, after the Gulf War and the Drug War, after the Twin Towers and George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney and Afghanistan, after WMD and Judith Miller and embedded journalism and Wolf Blitzer and Colin Powell and Iraq, I can't find it in me to believe anybody in politics, or government, or journalism. Neither can I believe that any journalist would be fool enough to take government's word for anything.Now, along comes Sharyl Attkisson. She reports that she was a true believer when she graduated from what she claims is one of the best journalism schools in the country. Of Sharyl's first years as a working journalist, she writes: “This was at a time when I believed the government had to tell the truth.” Then she caught county government dumping raw sewage in lakes and rivers while county government insisted it was doing no such thing. Then there was the time the state department of agriculture told her there was no citrus canker infestation in Florida citrus groves. According to official Florida sources “there's been no citrus canker in Florida since 1933. Period.” Then Sharyl asked a farmer about citrus canker in his crop. He said “Sure. In fact the state fellas are here right now getting ready to burn a bunch of bad trees.”So Sharyl lived and Sharyl learned. As her experience and skill increased and her career blossomed, she found herself being lied to about progressively more important things by progressively more important people. After she joined the elite team at CBS News, she found herself being lied to by various corporations, by departments of the federal government, by the heads of such organizations, by leading politicians and then by news executives, her superiors at CBS itself.That's how it went for Sharyl and so it goes for everyone else in journalism. I met a fellow once – a reporter retired from a small-town newspaper – told me that everyone lies to journalists all the time and that no working journalist can believe anything (s)he is told by anyone.Ms. Attkisson now knows the ropes. Sharyl reports that she was tough and cynical and nosy by the time she got to CBS. Yet, when friends began warning her that her home computers were hacked, she didn't take them seriously. Instead, she blamed her phone company for crappy service because her home phone squealed and squawked and howled and barked so much and so often that it was “practically unusable.” She blamed her Internet service provider for the fact that her computers – usually in the wee morning hours – turned themselves ON and OFF, seemingly at random. When the machines turned themselves ON, they growled and beeped and yelped, coughed and hiccuped and farted, drank her liquor, danced to Conga rhythms, and hopped around the room trying to stomp on her household pets. Sharyl wrote that she once watched her monitor in horror while some of her files were deleted before her eyes.Sharyl then tells that she put up with those wacko computers for months before some spooky acquaintance finally persuaded her that the machines were indeed hacked and her phones were indeed tapped. The spooky friend called in one of his spookier pals (Call him Big Spook) who got on Sharyl's keyboard and ran diagnostics on her computers. Big Spook saw what he saw (Whatever that was) and within a short while announced his verdict, which was unambivalent. Big Spook said that the hack of Sharyl's machines was an uncommonly sophisticated job which was not done by teenage vandals but more likely by experts such as U.S. government spooks. CBS executives' ho-hum reaction to news of the hack led Sharyl and her spooks to suspect that CBS knew Sharyl's machines were hacked long before Big Spook figured it out.Of course I'm only foolin' about drunken, farting computers and Conga music. But I'm also serious. The behavior of Sharyl's computers as she herself described it was so totally bizarre that her reluctance to recognize the behavior for what it was left this reader agape, thinking that Sharyl is incredibly naïve and more credible as an ordinary dumbbell.That said, I should now state positively that Sharyl Attkisson is not a dumbbell. She may not know as much as some folks know about computer behavior, but she knows one hell of a lot about broadcast journalism and the inner workings thereof.If you, the reader, watch and read American news and are not yet brain-dead, you must wonder why American news venues (All of them. Every one.) no longer tell hard news but spread soft soap, boohoo fairy tales, and propaganda instead. Why has American journalism become a collection of lying, limp-wristed, pretty-faced cowards and timeservers and schlubs? What happened to the Murrows, the Cronkites, the Izzy Stones and the likes of George Seldes? Where are the replacements for high-caliber critics such as H. L. Mencken and A. J. Liebling?If you ever ask yourself such questions, you may also wonder why American journalism forsook fiduciary responsibility to American citizens, to democratic government, and to the Constitution of the United States. If you are curious about any of that, then Sharyl Attkisson wrote the first chapter of Stonewalled just for you. She calls it Media Mojo Lost: Investigative Reporting's Recession. It is the foundation of her book. It is Sharyl's inventory of the arsenal of weapons deployed by enemies of truth in journalism. It could just as easily serve as an obituary for concepts such as 'democratic government' and 'news'.Sharyl's list of truth-killing weapons is long (pp. 15-91) but it is by no means boring, and readers must ingest Media Mojo Lost if they hope to “get” the rest of the book. Ordinary citizens who take the trouble to do so will come away from Stonewalled knowing a lot more about American journalism and what has become of it than they knew going in. Experienced journalists – who already know some or all of the things that Ms. Attkisson grouches in her book – might yet be staggered by the impact of all those things gathered together and piled in a heap without so much as a keg of cold beer in the foreground, placed there to mellow the vista.In subsequent chapters, Attkisson acts the tour guide: She walks readers through important stories such as BATF's 'Fast and Furious' gun-running scandal; the state department's fustercluck at Benghazi; Obama's personal, prize fupuck dubbed 'Healthcare.gov,' and a few others. Each tour illustrates how reporters are frustrated, how obfuscatory tactics deployed by business and government and by journalists themselves thwart exposés of criminality and incompetence that might sway the American people toward the righting of wrongs, badly needed systemic reforms, and the eventual achievement of social justice.As far as this writer is concerned, any journalist in the room wants to accuse Sharyl Attkisson of lying about or exaggerating any of that stuff – before he/she opens his/her yap – should go ask Gary Webb about the issue.Those who have not yet read Stonewalled may not yet know that David Rhodes, who is president of CBS News, is brother to Ben Rhodes, who is White House deputy national security advisor. Now that Sharyl has told it, I wonder how many realize what that tale implies about truth in journalism and how many are still willing to believe that CBS News gave us 'fair and balanced' coverage of events in Benghazi? How many still believe anything CBS News has to say on the subjects of Healthcare.gov? national security? foreign policy? the NSA? Edward Snowden? Ukraine? Russia? MH-17? the Obama administration?I wonder about all of that because, of those who still believe that crap, I'd like to ask: Do the networks ever send you a thank-you note? If they don't, they certainly should – along with a lifetime supply of beer and chips and Prozac®.Away back at the beginning, I wrote that “Sharyl remains a Girl Scout inasmuch as she still wants to trust The Powers That Be.” I wrote that because, at the end of Media Mojo Lost, she threw in the following paragraph:"My own network is passing up stories on the crumbling Affordable Care Act; an exclusive investigation I offered about a significant military controversy; an investigation uncovering a history of troubles surrounding Boeing's beleaguered Dreamliner; and massive government waste, fraud, and abuse. Largely untouched are countless stories about pharmaceutical dangers affecting millions of Americans, privacy infringement, the debate over President Obama's use of executive orders, the FDA monitoring of employee email, the steady expansion of terrorism, the student loan crisis, the confounding explosion in entitlements, the heartbreaking fallout from the Haiti earthquake, continuing disaster for government-subsidized green energy initiatives, the terrorist influences behind “Arab spring,” various congressional ethics investigations and violations, the government's infringement of and restrictions on the press, escalating violence on the Mexican border, the debt crisis, the Fed's role and its secrecy, to name just a few." (Stonewalled pp 85-86)When I read that paragraph, I wonder how many times I'd have to shoot a horse in front of Sharyl before Sharyl would admit that the horse is dead. I'm not sure I could afford enough ammunition to do the job. In the matter at hand, she needs to recognize and admit to herself that The Powers That Be are now 'the powers that were' because they are awash to the scuppers in corruption – corruption so deep, so thick, so vast it dwarfs anything smaller than the Atlantic Ocean.If Sharyl could admit that to herself, she'd understand that no government, no corporation, no profession so utterly corrupt can solve any problem. The U.S. government may get overthrown (unlikely) or it may collapse because it is too sick to be of use to anyone (a near certainty), but pursuit of stories about the Affordable Care Act, the Boeing Dreamliner, the Haiti Earthquake, the “Arab Spring,” will neither stop nor stay the inevitable. Government and journalism being in bed together as they are, corrupt journalism assures that such stories will never be written and corrupt government assures that such stories will never be published. The public mind – corrupted by professional liars – would choke on such stories anyway, just as the public mind will probably choke on Sharyl's fine book.Because the whole body of Sharyl's Stonewalled adds up to the fact that the horse is dead, she should report the problem. She should realize the implications of what she has written, go home, and write about how we the people might go forward from here. If she can't or won't do that, then I'm left with the impression that much of what Stonewalled expresses – albeit is truth – is the proverbial fury of the woman scorned. Maybe, too, pieces of a broken heart rattle around in Sharyl's book. But for so long as Sharyl invests any faith in that old, dead horse, she will remain frustrated and hurt.Speaking my opinion of journalism per se:1) It has long been apparent to every thinking person that America needs a new model of press ownership. Corporations have failed our nation miserably.2) If journalism schools crank out bus-loads of twisted twits who want nothing more than a paycheck after spending a week placidly munching droplets of “information” that leak from the nether regions of corrupt business and government, then journalism schools should be closed because they waste money and are of no benefit to America. Americans could force journalism schools to close if Americans cut federal money from any educational institution that treats “Journalism” and “Communication” as academic disciplines.3) Advertising is one big club that business wields in stemming the free flow of information. If we're going to have a new model of press ownership, we might as well dream up a fair and equitable way to fund our new press. Perhaps those businesses who want to buy advertising could put their ad money into pools from which dollars would be doled out to needy print and broadcast news venues.4) National security is another, perhaps the biggest of all clubs used to murder truth in journalism. So Congress could pass a law that makes it a felony for government officials to conceal information about governmental affairs from journalists and the public. Further in that direction, Congress could make a law saying that all information collected by government is paid for with tax dollars and is therefore public property, freely available to any citizen who requests a copy. The so-called 'Freedom of Information Act' we've presently got is a rude and stupid joke.5) Ninety-five years ago Walter Lippmann surveying dangerous trends in journalism that were already apparent in his day, expressed his thoughts in a book titled "Liberty and the News" (1920). Lippmann foresaw the mess in which America and journalism now find themselves. He predicted then that “some day Congress, in a fit of temper, egged on by an outraged public opinion, will operate on the press with an ax.” I think the operation is way past due, but we'd have to launder our filthy Congress before any sort of useful reform could be enacted.6) Certainly America should examine ways in which the licensing of journalists could and should be implemented. Journalists who knowingly lie about public affairs should be denied press credentials, cast out of the profession, and perhaps sent to prison. Doctors can be jailed for malpractice. Lawyers can be jailed for malpractice. Why should journalists be allowed to operate beyond the law?7) Finally, it should be noted that medicine, law, and many other professions long ago adopted codes of ethics. Journalism, as a profession, has never adopted a code of ethics. Some news outfits have codes of their own that apply to employees, but the profession of journalism has no written code. Shop around a bit, readers will find that some of our “best” journalism schools don't offer classes in Ethics. The upshot is that journalism is an amoral profession. Why, then, does America listen to people who are strangers to Ethics? How can there be malpractice in a profession that has no moral code?Rather than sit around and beat the old, dead horse, Sharyl Attkisson and other honest practitioners must pick themselves up and start thinking about what shape reforms should take and what steps we in the United States must follow if we are to produce and enjoy the finest journalism in the world.Summing up: I feel that Ms. Attkisson's Stonewalled has some vision problems in that Sharyl doesn't look ahead from where she got knocked on her keister. But her vision problems are not errors of fact. Sharyl Attkisson is a mighty fine journalist, and she put into Stonewalled all the truth experience has taught her about the shame of her chosen profession. Good American citizens will buy her book, read it closely, and ponder what it implies about their future.Four Stars.Solomon sed.

I just finished reading one of the most remarkable and yet disturbing books that I've come across in some time.Former CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has written a blockbuster of a book with a blockbuster title: Stonewalled: My Fight For Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington. Despite the attempts to denigrate her in the media (which ironically follows the same pattern of "controversializing" an opponent which she describes in her book), she is eminently qualified to write this book. She has been a working journalist for more than thirty years (over twenty years of that time being with CBS News) and has been described in the Washington Post as a "persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government's story." She is the recipient of five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting . Her work has appeared on the CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning, 48 Hours, and CBS This Morning. Up until recently, Sharyl Attkisson has been "an insider's insider." She has done multiple investigative stories critical of both Republicans and Democrats.Since the book came out last Tuesday, I have read and watched multiple interviews of Sharyl Attkisson. (Not one of these has been with any of the Big Three networks - surprise!). There is one sensational and disturbing section of the book in which Attkisson discloses that both her CBS computer and her personal computer were found to have unauthorized software installed on them that were too sophisticated for anyone but the government to have installed. Almost every interview focuses on this one part of the book, which is indeed incredible and frightening. One of the three separate investigators who analyzed her computers stated that it was "worse than anything Nixon ever did." However, few of these interviews really delve into the bigger picture of what the book is about. In this review, I'm covering the first chapter. I am reviewing the entire book on my blog at waynenalljr.blogspot.com.Chapter 1: "Media Mojo Lost: Investigative Reporting's Recession"As a consumer of news for the last forty years (I remember watching the Watergate Hearings gavel-to-gavel when I was ten years old. I was a strange kid!), it has been obvious to me that the national news media was and still is flagrantly biased towards the left side of the political spectrum. The difference between the way that a Republican Administration and a Democratic Administration are reported on should be obvious to any thinking person. However, in Stonewalled, Attkisson not only confirms what I've known all along, but shows how endemic this tendency is, citing multiple examples by playing "The Substitution Game" throughout the book. In each of these sections, she chronicles how the mainstream media covers a story coming from the Democratic side, then posits how reporters would have covered the same story if it had come from the Republican side. One example that she gives is then-Senator Obama's remark in 2008 presidential campaign that he had visited fifty-seven states. The news media by and large gave Obama a pass. While stating that everyone knows that he meant forty-seven states, she states, "the remark, nothing more than a verbal gaffe, didn't make big headlines. Substitution Game: What if Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had uttered the same misstatement? Do you think the news media would've been so quick to overlook it?" Anyone who paid attention to the way the press excoriated Palin would know the obvious answer to that question.Yet, Attkisson, in her book, shows that the endemic liberal bias of the press is only one of the barriers to fair and honest reporting of the facts. She also makes the following point:Pushing original and investigative reporting has become like trying to feed the managers spinach. They don't like the taste, but they occasionally hold their nose and indulge because it's good for them--or because it looks good. They much prefer it to be sugarcoated , deep-fried, or otherwise disguised so that it goes down easier.She states that the mainstream press as a whole has lost its "mojo", which she describes as the press's "ability to serve vigorously and effectively as the Fourth Estate (and be the) watchdog to government and other powers that may otherwise overstep their bounds." The national news media has become compliant. In many cases, they have allowed the government under the Obama administration to bully them into submission. They also practice "playing it safe."Playing it safe means airing stories that certain other trusted media have reported first, so there's no perceived "risk" to us if we report them, too. We're not going out on a limb; we're not reporting anything that hasn't already been reported elsewhere. But it also means we're not giving viewers any reason to watch us. Playing it safe can mean shying away from stories that include allegations against certain corporations, charities, and other chosen powerful entities and people. The image of the news media as fearless watchdogs poised, if not eager, to pursue stories that authorities wish to block is often a false image. Decisions are routinely made in fear of the response that the story might provoke.She later states:The tendency to stick to mostly "safe" stories means you'll see a lot of so-called day-of-air reports on topics that won't generate pushback from the special interests we care about. Think: weather, polls, surveys, studies, positive medical news, the pope, celebrities, obituaries, press conferences, government announcements, animals, the British royals, and heartwarming features. They fill airtime much like innocuous white noise.She describes this as "homogenized, milquetoast news." She illustrates this by comparing stories from one evening's news on the Big Three networks:On February 21, 2014, all three networks lead with three minutes on the troubles in Ukraine. Everyone has two to three minutes on the weather: a new popular favorite dominating the news almost every night. Everyone has stories on the Olympics. Everyone does the exact same feature in the middle of their broadcasts about a woman who saved her baby nephew's life (a story widely circulated on the Web the day before). Everyone reports President Obama's decision to award the Medal of Honor. Two of the three networks devote more than two minutes of their precious, limited news time to tributes to their own network's employees: one who passed away and another who is retiring. Are we producing a newscast more for ourselves and each other rather than the public? What did we really tell America on this night that they didn't already know?What are some of the stories they could have covered instead?My own network is passing up stories on the crumbling Affordable Care Act; an exclusive investigation I offered about a significant military controversy; an investigation uncovering a history of troubles surrounding Boeing's beleaguered Dreamliner; and massive government waste, fraud, and abuse. Largely untouched are countless stories about pharmaceutical dangers affecting millions of Americans, privacy infringement, the debate over President Obama's use of executive orders, the FDA monitoring of employee email, the steady expansion of terrorism, the student loan crisis, the confounding explosion in entitlements, the heartbreaking fallout from the Haiti earthquake, continuing disaster for government-subsidized green energy initiatives, the terrorist influences behind "Arab spring," various congressional ethics investigations and violations, the government's infringement of and restrictions on the press, escalating violence on the Mexican border, the debt crisis, the Fed's role and its secrecy, to name just a few.In this chapter, she also describes the many fascinating ways that the government, especially the current administration (which even the press now acknowledges to be the most obstructive in history), manipulates the press for their own ends. In one of the most shocking ways (to me) that they use it what is called "The Astroturf Effect," in which the Obama administration teams up with a cadre of special interests who:...disguise themselves and write blogs, publish letters to the editor, produce ads, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts, start nonprofits, or just post comments to online material with the intent of fooling you into believing an independent or grassroots movement is speaking.One of the "astroturf" websites is the ultra-liberal Media Matters, which is an Obama administration sycophant. Even before her book came out this last week, they have been publishing multiple articles supposedly "debunking" this book. Must be hitting close to home!If the book had only this first chapter, it would have been worth the price of the book. However, there's much more.You can read the rest of my review on my blog at waynenalljr.blogspot.com.

Before Trump, Obama’s spying Whitehouse practiced on journalists. This is one such account, and it’s appalling.

I came across Sharyl when Steve Bannon had her on his War Room show. I did a little investigating and came across this book. Obama is still held up as some sort of saint in the UK mainstream media. Sharyl's book, as well as a number of others that I've now read, clearly show that Obama and his administration were anything but saints. Intimidating journalists and hacking into their computers should not happen in western liberal democracies. This all happened under Obama, as Sharyls books covers in some detail. Highly recommended.

Wow, absolutely amazing eye opening book. Furst came across the authir at a ted talk and then bought the book. Amazing to learn how much the media is controlling the political narative. I go to a variety of places now to gather world news.

Although now a few years out of date this book shows how bad it was..........it's gotten a whole lot worse folks!

A fascinating expose of how power is abused in the modern world. The politicisation of the security arms of government is well documented here, and makes for alarming reading. There is not much liberal about the liberal establishment!

An intriguing book that opens the door to wondering what all National Govts are upto. This book is specfiically for US nationals and what their government (supposedly "transparent") but it is a serious warning to everyone.