White House Threatens Journalists
CEO, co-founder, and publisher of INN, graduated with a degree in journalism and is the current Managing Editor of The Ocean City Sun. A former columnist at Atlantic City Weekly, he interned at The Daily Caller while studying at the Washington Journalism Center on Capitol Hill. He's passionate about creative writing, traveling and prefers to live in a perpetual state of crisis and adventure.
WASHINGTON – Bob Woodward, the senior Washington Post columnist who broke the Watergate story in the 1970′s said that the White House has begun to threaten him over his report published last week that claimed President Obama repeatedly lied about advocating for the sequester trigger.
Speaking on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Wednesday, Woodward told host Wolf Blitzer that he believed the White House was purposely trying to make him feel “uncomfortable.”
White House officials refused to appear on CNN to defend President Obama. Woodward said the reasoning for this was because the allegations he has made are “irrefutable.” Instead of making an appearance, the White House has stooped to intimidation tactics against the journalist.
When asked by Blitzer what was going on between himself and the White House, Woodward said,
Well, they’re not happy at all and some people kind of, you know, said, ‘Look, we don’t see eye-to-eye on this. They never really said, though, afterwards, they’ve said that this is factually wrong…
Blizter asked what had been said to Woodward, in which he replied:
It was said very clearly, ‘You will regret doing this.’
Woodward did not reveal who said this, but according to Buzzfeed, sources are saying Gene Sperling, the director of the White House Economic Council made the threat.
Woodward went on to say,
I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don’t look at it that way, we do look at it that way.
Lanny Davis, a former Clinton aide turned columnist at The Washington Times has also said that his publication was threatened by the Obama White House.
Davis told WMAL’s Brian Wilson and Larry O’Connor that a White House official threatened to revoke the Washington Times’ press credentials over one of Davis’ columns.
As a supporter of President Obama, Davis was surprised when his editor received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of his columns. The aide told the Times editor John Solomon that if he continued running Davis’ columns, he or his reporters would lose White House press credentials.
Has the Obama administration forgotten that journalism is meant to serve the governed not the governors?
