"It's funny to me that the Associated Press is nailing itself to a cross" [View all]

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Will Pitt: An Open Letter to Gary Pruitt, President and CEO of the Associated Press May 14, 2013

Dear Mr. Pruitt et al.:

Some of us in the so-called "alternative media" have been yelling and screaming for years about the government's legalized ability to plunder our right to privacy to little avail, while you big dogs in the "mainstream" news media haven't bothered to give a damn in all that time. Too taxing to report accurately and consistently on complicated issues, yeah?

It was Abraham Lincoln who said, "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts." A shame; maybe if you'd been better at bringing the real facts to the people, the people would be better informed, and the elections/legislation that legalized the travails you currently endure could have been avoided.

It's funny to me that the Associated Press is nailing itself to a cross because you've been victimized by the same laws, politicians and tide of history you've either blissfully ignored or gleefully promoted for so many years.

Well, welcome to the future you helped to create. I have neither pity nor sorrow for you, but I am hopeful that your sudden inclusion in the ranks of the "Oh Shit, They Can Do That?" Club will inspire you to truthfully and factually inform the American people about what has been happening to their country right under their, and your, nose.

Sincerely,

William Rivers Pitt

An Itty Bitty Pity Party for the Associated Press

By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
Published May 14, 2013

excerpt:

Gary Pruitt, President and CEO of the Associated Press, rose up raging on Monday afternoon and threw a bag of live rats over the White House fence. To wit:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters , general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

. . .

The government would not say why it sought the records.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16352-an-itty-bitty-pity-party-for-the-associated-press

...prescient, as ever:

Jason Kint @jason_kint 1h
“This is a grave disservice to the American people.” - Associated Press in response to the clear ongoing retaliation by this White House against a free and plural press.