OPINION: Revelations about the degree the Obama administration controls journalists and information should chill everyone who believes in the foundations of our republic. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Paul Jenkins
Alaska Dispatch News
May 14, 2016

A friend told me he was in a cab in a large East Coast city when he struck up a conversation with its driver, a Polish immigrant, and asked the guy about the differences between the two countries. The driver answered: “You get so much propaganda here. You get it all the time. We do not get this much in Poland.”

We both chuckled at the story. That was then, this is now as the White House scrambles to stuff all the snakes back into its can after one of President Barack Obama’s closest aides outed the administration’s snuggle-buns relationship with some members of the Washington press corps.

Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes — a wannabe novelist and, somehow, Obama’s right-hand guy on foreign policy — inexplicably told The New York Times Magazine the Washington press corps increasingly is composed of ignorant reporters. “They literally know nothing,” he told the interviewer.

In the deeply troubling piece, Rhodes painted them as young, hurried, not-very-bright, compliant boobs unwittingly complicit in the administration’s creation of an “echo chamber” of support. In other words, they easily fall for the company line — its “narrative” — and dash off to parrot its storyline on social and more traditional media to the utter delight of Rhodes and others.

More: Obama’s control of the press is a dangerous precedent for a free republic