Sharyl Attkisson: CBS News Too ‘Shy’ To Investigate Obama Scandals [Video]

You may have noticed that Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS News investigative journalist, has been making the rounds of CNN and Fox News to talk about the circumstances that led to her quitting the network before her contract expired.

What it came down to is that Attkisson could no longer get her stories on the air. She’s now working on a book about how her investigations were stonewalled, appropriately titled Stonewalled.

Emmy-award winning Attkisson is one of the few mainstream media reporters that covered the Fast and Furious scandal, a botched Obama administration operation that allowed firearms to fall into the hands of drug cartels. These same weapons have been linked to the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and many others. She was also digging into the Benghazi scandal and certain aspects of the botched Obamacare rollout.

At the time she left CBS in early March after a long career there, Politico reported that “Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias, an outsize influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt that her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.”

Subsequent interviews seemed to validate the Politico reporting, although Attkission has been very measured in talking about what she has called the “declining appetite for original and investigative reporting” on the TV news networks.

See the embedded videos below and draw your own conclusions.

Sharyl Attkisson also claimed that there was concerted effort to “controversialize” her journalism as a way to preemptively discredit her investigations into the Obama administration scandals and thereby distract from the underlying facts of what her reporting came up with.

During her investigations, her computer was also hacked, and the investigation into the data breach is still ongoing.

In the recent set of interviews, Attkisson suggested that executive producers and senior producers at the network weren’t very enthusiastic about investigative journalism with the Obama administration in power. As such, she had a hard time getting stories on television “When a broadcast doesn’t want a story,” despite all indications otherwise, “they simply don’t air the story” or heavy-handed editing will transform a story into “a shadow of its former self when it does air,” she explained.

CBS managers seemed to have no reluctance about aggressive reporting on the failures of the George W. Bush GOP administration; with President Obama, a Democrat in the White House, the media has grown unusually timid, according to Attkisson.

Said Attkission on Fox: “The press in general seems to be very shy about challenging the administration as if it is making some sort of political statement other than just doing our job as watchdogs. I didn’t run into that same kind of sentiment as I did in the Obama administration when I covered the Bush administration very aggressively on its secrecy and lack of freedom of information responses and its poor management of the Food and Drug administration… the Halliburton/Iraq contract questions of fraud… the bait-and-switch on TARP, the bank bailout program… all of those stories under Bush were met with a good reception — these were different managers at that time as well, but nobody accused me of being a mouthpiece for the liberals at that time.”

On CNN, Attkisson offered a similar assessment about the liberal ideology among some CBS managers:

“It’s fairly well-discussed inside CBS News that there are some managers recently who’ve been so ideologically entrenched that there’s a feeling and a discussion that some of them — certainly not all of them — have a difficult time viewing a story that may reflect negatively upon government or the administration as a story of value … they never minded the stories that go against the grain of the Republican party but they do often seem to feel defensive about, almost personally defensive about stories that could make the [Obama] government look bad, even if it is as simple as a government waste story that doesn’t pinpoint anybody in particular and takes on both parties. It’s seem as though some are very sensitive about any story might appear as though it criticizes the government.”

CBS was apparently also reluctant to air negative stories on certain powerful corporations, she noted.

Attkisson also claimed that there was so much pushback from the “secrecy obsessed” Obama administration about controversial issues that some producers decided it just wasn’t worth the headache to pursue certain stories that would ruffle feathers in Washington. This intense pushback and pressure have had a chilling effect on original reporting at the networks, she insisted. “I think there has come to be a narrowing universe of stories that are desired by the broadcasts, and it leaves us sometimes I think with newscasts that don’t dig very deep.”

Fighting what she acknowledged amounted to a “two-front war” with the Obama administration and her CBS bosses grew very wearisome.

Separately, Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times, a publication that is otherwise very supportive of the Obama administration and the whole liberal/progressive agenda, has said about contemporary press freedom that “The Obama years are a benchmark for a new level of secrecy and control. It’s created quite a challenging atmosphere for The New York Times, and for some of the best reporters in my newsroom who cover national security issues in Washington… Sources who want to come forward with important stories that they feel the public needs to know are just scared to death that they’re going to be prosecuted, Reporters fear that they will find themselves subpoenaed in this atmosphere.”

The late Michael Hastings, the investigative journalist who tragically died in a Los Angeles car crash last year, admitted on MSNBC that most star-struck reporters, including himself, “swooned” in the presence of Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Do you think Sharyl Attkisson’s assertions of liberal bias and corporate bias in the big media hold water?

[top image credit: Honeyplant]