"Scandal: Hillary Clinton employed a private intelligence service whose key operative had influence over CBS' coverage of Benghazi. Which raises the question: Who is more corrupt, Clinton or the mainstream media?
From her own point of view, it would make sense for Clinton to employ a private intelligence service, even with all the intelligence-gathering capacities at her disposal as secretary of state. A private company is naturally more efficient than any federal bureaucracy. Clinton also had little interest in the nuts and bolts of the intelligence process within her own job.
There were no Libya analysts at State during the Benghazi attack, and Clinton did nothing to change that. Reforming the process to get better intelligence would be a lot tougher than outsourcing, so she outsourced.
But most important, in using a private service, she knew that it would have no overriding loyalties to civic principles, such as rule of law or the national interest, that every federal bureaucracy must uphold. A private service's only loyalty is to its individual client.
It helped of course that the chief of this private service, first exposed last March by Gawker and ProPublica, was her old pal Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton loyalist known for his sliming tactics during the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal. So with a setup like that — which Romanians hacked a while back — it didn't take long for this operation to turn itself from an off-the-books information-gathering operation into a Mafia-like news manipulation operation targeted at the U.S. public.
The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway reports that Blumenthal's operation employed a former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller, to supply intelligence for the secretary of state at the same time he worked as a paid consultant to CBS News — acting as a "consultant" just as the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi broke.
Hemingway dug, and he found multiple CBS employees who said that Drumheller had a key role in shaping the network's coverage, quite contrary to what the CBS public relations office told him."
That information would explain the mainstream media's dereliction of duty in its Benghazi coverage. At the time, the press seemed so concerned about getting President Obama re-elected that it ignored news about his administration's failure to spot the terrorist operations around U.S. diplomatic compounds, and then tried to cover them up after the attacks.
At least three CBS journalists did try to get the facts — and in varying ways were all punished by their bosses, who were being advised by Drumheller.
Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson was repeatedly treated as a troublemaker by CBS executives for her Benghazi coverage, which she recounted in her book "Stonewalled," and saw her stories relegated to the CBS website instead of the evening news.
Chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was suspended for seven months for using a bad source — a draconian punishment, given the soft treatment that news organizations such as Rolling Stone have given their correspondents for making comparable blunders.
Logan's story was detrimental to the White House's Benghazi talking points, bad source or not, and probably was the real reason someone wanted her off the air.
Lastly, Attkisson reported that "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft had a key newsmaking point in his interview with Obama that contradicted the Benghazi narrative and was left on the cutting room floor, just as election day 2012 approached.
Who are the CBS bigshots who employed Drumheller? Network President David Rhodes is the older brother of Ben Rhodes, who just happens to be Obama's deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. The younger Rhodes is the author of the Benghazi talking points, which forwarded the narrative that the attacks were just the work of mobs incensed by a YouTube video insulting Islam and not the work of terrorists.
What we have here is a massive disinformation project against the public, with Clinton at its center. Clinton owes the public answers about her private intelligence operations and her willingness to take unprecedented steps, unseen until now, to manipulate the content of the news."
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/093015-773524-did-hillary-clinton-spike-cbs-coverage-of-benghazi.htm?p=fullWho is more corrupt? A most difficult question to answer. Story, however, explains the treatment CBS gave excellent reporter, Sharyl Attkisson. She was getting too close to the truth.
