- Jun 19, 2000
- 18,890
- 642
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What country is it that we're living in again? Mr. Jilani can be expecting his IRS audit any day now.
Suffocating pressure: Former ThinkProgress writer describes White House censorship
Suffocating pressure: Former ThinkProgress writer describes White House censorship
Zaid Jilani, a former blogger with the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress, explained this week how the Obama administration frequently tries to censor the progressive organizations content when it departs from the White Houses agenda.
In a post titled, How Working in Washington Taught Me Were All A Little Like RT America, Jilani explained how the White House frequently played the part of the Kremlin leaning on management to push their writers in a particular direction, and punishing them if they strayed from the party line.
One of the controversial topics that was very constrained in our writing at ThinkProgress in 2009 was Afghanistan., he wrote. CAP had decided not to protest Obamas surge, so most of our writing on the topic was simply neutral we werent supposed to take a strong stand.
Jilani had just published a story one of the most successful things [he] had ever written at that point which indicated troops levels at the end of Obamas Afghan surge would actually be higher than at any point in the George W. Bush administration. And it came complete with a graph, which congressional opponents of the war took into committee hearings on Capitol Hill.
The Obama administration was furious.
Phone calls from the White House started pouring in, Jilani claimed, berating my bosses for being critical of Obama on this policy . . . Soon afterwards all of us ThinkProgress national security bloggers were called into a meeting with CAP senior staff and basically berated for opposing the Afghan war and creating daylight between us and Obama.