New York Times reporter James Risen unloaded an attack on President Obama as he accepted a journalism award at Colby College in Maine. “I think [President] Obama hates the press. I think he doesn’t like the press and he hates leaks,” he said. “I don’t think any of this would be happening under the Obama administration if Obama didn’t want to do it.”
"Journalists have no choice but to fight back because if they don’t, they will become irrelevant,” Risen said in accepting the Elijah Lovejoy Award for courage in journalism. Lovejoy was a Colby graduate who was murdered in 1837 while defending his printing press against a pro-slavery mob in Illinois.
According to centralmaine.com, Risen took the occasion to compare his own journalism against the government's war on terrorism to the abolitionist fight against slavery. Does that clash a bit with a black president, being cast as a modern-day equivalent of a slavery defender? Don't stop Risen. He's on an arrogant roll about his own importance:
With a crew from CBS’s “60 Minutes” filming Sunday’s Lovejoy Convocation, Risen spoke to a packed chapel about how the U.S. war on terrorism after 9/11 treats whistle blowers and those who seek to bring the government’s actions to light as criminals. It was much like how Lovejoy was treated — as a disruptive force who became an abolitionist decades before abolitionism had any impact in the broader society, Risen said.
Lovejoy, he said, was a minister whose newspaper was primarily a religious paper, but he hated slavery and that led him to write articles openly opposing slavery three decades before the Civil War. Missouri was a slave state and Lovejoy challenged the conventional wisdom during a time in which slavery was a mainstream view in both the north and the south.
There was virtually no debate at the time in most political circles about abolishing slavery and the mainstream press did not question slavery, Risen said. Lovejoy and others in the abolition movement were considered dangerous radicals whose mental stability was questioned, he said.
Risen said to attack slavery “meant you were attacking the laws of the U.S.”
“By challenging slavery in a slave state like Missouri, Elijah Lovejoy showed special courage.”
Risen said it is important to study abolitionist writers to see what it’s really like to challenge conventional wisdom.
“Of course we now know Elijah Lovejoy was on the right side of history,” he said.
Risen said Americans now slip off their shoes in airports, observe the killing of Americans who have not been given due process and watch the government use torture tactics and conduct mass surveillance of people’s communications.
“Meanwhile, the government has eagerly prosecuted whistle-blowers who have tried to bring any of the government’s actions to light,” he said.
There is a new basic assumption, he said, that there is a need for a global war on terror.
“Today, the U.S. government treats whistle-blowers as criminals, much like Elijah Lovejoy.”
Risen said the government loses its credibility when it claims that every leak causes irreparable damage to national security. “I think it’s one of these things that the government has gotten into the habit of, crying wolf constantly and they’ve lost a lot of credibility on these issues," he said.
Risen could face jail time for refusing to reveal his sources for his 2006 book State of War, but the Obama administration has indicated Risen won't go to jail. No one ever wonders if one reason a journalist protects his sources is they helped him earn a nifty book advance.
