President Barack Obama came
into office in 2009 promising a new era of unprecedented transparency in
his administration. But when he leaves office, reporters may remember
him for an effort that has largely turned out to be the opposite — and
for being what one affected reporter has called the "greatest enemy to
press freedom in a generation."
At a time when journalists'
roles in covering different, critical conflict zones have been under the
microscope, renewed attention has come to the case involving James
Risen. He is the New York Times journalist who has been fighting efforts
by two different Departments of Justice — under Presidents Obama and
George W. Bush — to compel him to identify sources from a 2006 book
that reveals a secret CIA plan to sabotage Iran's budding nuclear
program.
For the past five years, he has
battled the Obama administration's Justice Department, which in 2009
took a rather unprecedented step of renewing a subpoena scheduled to
expire that year. From his case and others the Obama administration has
pursued, Risen told The Times' Maureen Dowd recently that Obama represented a fundamental obstacle for press freedom.
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