Emmy Award-winning, former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson is pushing her book Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington and recently appeared on Mark Reardon’s talk show on KMOX in St. Louis.
She said that the political elite have developed a highly sophisticated system of pushback to discourage investigative journalism. She said that “public relations by special interests, political interests, corporate interests have learned how to scare (journalists) off from meaningful stories.”
She said the Obama administration ” enlisted expert help again from their PR people, their surrogates, their bloggers to print untrue things to controversialize the reporting, to controversialize the reporters who were doing the reporting.”
She said it worked with CBS News.
She also described how her CBS laptop computer and her home Apple computer were compromised during her pursuit of stories detrimental to Obama.
“It’s pretty chilling when you consider the extent of the abilities they had, according to the forensics reports, to monitor my every keystroke, to activate Skype by getting the password to my account, and listen through Skype on to audio if I was talking in the room or talking on the phone,” she said. “Being able to exfiltrate files using Skype, downloading and refreshing these surveillance methods periodically using something called a BGAN satellite terminal, using WiFi when I was at a Ritz Carlton at one point. I mean they left some very distinct trails because I don’t think they ever thought I would have the ability to have highly-skilled specialized forensics people be able to find what was in there. Ordinary computer analysts may be very good, but unless they know exactly where to look and they’re familiar with some of the proprietary government practices, I’m told, they will never be able to find the things that were found in my computer. But I was able to go to some very good sources.”
Sharyl Attkisson Describes Sophisticated News Silencing