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"If we knew everything then that we know now, one week after it happened, I think that would have been really devastating to Obama's reelection campaign," says former CBS reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, referencing the 2012 Benghazi terrorists attacks. Recently revealed White House emails suggest that the Obama administration may have attempted to mislead the American public by placing the blame on an Internet video and not Islamic terrorists, which would have raised questions about Obama's foreign policy strategy.
Attkisson, an award winning investigative reporter, was one of the few journalists who continued pursuing the Benghazi story long after many in the main stream media lost interest. According to Attkisson, her bosses at CBS wanted her to drop the story. As a result, she left CBS, her employer for two decades, this past March over what she claims is "liberal bias" at the network and a lack of serious devotion to investigative reporting.
She goes on to say that many in her field are frustrated by the decline of hard-hitting investigative reporting endemic at all networks and not just CBS. The congealing of corporate, news, and political interests at networks have made investigative journalism a relic of the past.
"As one whistleblower put it to me: things have never been worse for people who try to speak the truth inside the government about illegalities and wrong doing. In their view, and I tend to agree, every administration is more clamped down and closed than the one before it. And the next one starts at the finishing point. It's very hard to make it go backwards. There are rules being implemented now against journalists and the type of work that we do that I think will be very hard to unwind."
Attkisson sat down with Reason TV's Nick Gillespie to discuss her reporting on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and the decline of investigative journalism in America.
About 20 minutes.
Camera by Todd Krainin and Joshua Swain. Edited by Amanda Winkler.
Go to http://reason.com/reasontv/2014/05/03/former-cbs-reporter-sharyl-attkisson-ben for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new stories go live.
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