Sharyl Attkisson: Team Obama is having ‘chilling effect’ on media

The Obama White House, for all its talk about openness and transparency, is hardly in the business of promoting openness and transparency in government — and is way worse when it comes to clamping down on the media than previous administrations, Sharyl Attkisson said.

Ms. Attkisson, who left CBS in part because of the network’s reluctance to report on the truth of issues that would put President Obama or his appointees in a poor light, said that “chilling effect” wasn’t present when President Bush held the high office.

“I didn’t run into that same kind of sentiment [at CBS] as I did in the Obama administration when I covered the Bush administration very aggressively,” Ms. Attkisson said, during an appearance on “Media Buzz” with Howard Kurtz, The Blaze reported.

She described how the “chilling effect” from the White House played out at CBS with her stories: “It never runs. Or it dies the death of a thousand cuts, as some of us say. If it’s something they don’t want, it will be changed and revised and shortened and altered so much that it’s a shadow of its former self if it does air.”

Ms. Attkisson had been steadfastly pursuing answers into the attack on America’s facility in Benghazi that left four Americans dead, as well as looking at issues tied to the Department of Justice’s Fast and Furious gun-running program, when she announced her resignation. And she said the White House has been steadily clamping down on the media’s watchdog abilities for years.

“There is pressure coming to bear on journalists for just doing their job in ways that have never come to bear before,” she said, The Blaze reported. “Now there’ve always been tensions. … But it is particularly aggressive under the Obama administration, and I think it’s a campaign that’s very well organized, that’s designed to have sort of a chilling effect and to some degree has been somewhat successful in getting broadcast producers who don’t really want to deal with the headache of it.”