Essay "Is the Government Suppressing the Press?"

by Shirley Michael (Currently working at "write my personal statement"service. She helps students with their assignments. On this service you can buy coursework online or hire a professional writer like Shirley)

Whatever happened to the liberal press in this country? In fact, what has happened to the press at all?

Remember the Clinton days when journalists fell all over each other to scream insulting questions at the President? They claimed they were defending the public’s right to know.

Now we have an administration that carefully stage manages a press conference, with the President selecting questioners from a list in his hand rather than accepting open questions from the floor. We see Helen Thomas, dean of the Washington press corps since the Kennedy era, banished to silence in the back row because she dared to voice her opinion about the quality of this administration.

We once allowed an overly zealous prosecutor to spend $50 million of our tax dollars to investigate every minute detail of the Clintons’ financial and private lives, in the end proving nothing more than that the President had had succumbed to a weakness that any one of us is capable of. We listened while this prosecutor publicly asked the President of the United States, probably the most powerful person in the world, questions that most men would not ask each other in private. When, after 9/11, the head of the FBI was asked why his people were not paying closer attention to possible terrorist activities, he said that too many of them had been assigned to the Clinton investigations! And nobody ever asked if this was the best use we could make of our money.

Since January 2001, the media have been controlled in a way that would have made Stalin proud. When questions are raised about Dick Cheney’s ties to the oil industry, they are brushed aside as confidential or not in the national interest. When senators questioned the need for waging war on Iraq, they were labeled “unpatriotic.” We have gone from several years of budget surpluses to the largest deficit in history with barely a notice. We are spending billions on Iraqi “liberation” and reconstruction while in our own country, children don’t have enough to eat, a large percentage of the population can’t afford health care, and senior citizens can’t afford prescription drugs. And nobody is investigating.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that the so-called intelligence reports leading to the Iraq invasion were carefully manipulated to support our claims of weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Our young people were asked to risk their lives for some political purpose that is not yet clear. And the killing goes on. We have now lost 183 people, 47 since the war “ended.”

Shouldn’t we be outraged? Shouldn’t we be asking questions and demanding answers? Why aren’t we? Because the press has been effectively silenced, so we have no one to focus and fan our outrage. As one journalist stated on TV several months ago, there is now an impenetrable wall of silence around the administration. People simply refuse to answer questions. How can this be? Whatever has happened to the free press in this country?

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