James Risen: Media Censorship Happened Inside the NYT

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James Risen, a former New York Times reporter who is now The Intercept’s senior national security correspondent, says the erosion of press freedom can be traced back a decade, but most recently in thanks in part to the attitude of the Obama Administration. 

"I was sitting in the nearly empty restaurant of the Westin Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, getting ready for a showdown with the federal government that I had been trying to avoid for more than seven years," Risen writes in a new story. "The Obama Administration was demanding that I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for a chapter about a botched CIA operation in my 2006 book, 'State of War.' I had also written about the CIA operation for The New York Times, but the paper’s editors had suppressed the story at the government’s request. It wasn’t the only time they had done so."

The details behind that reporting and more — including reporting on the lead up to the Iraq War and the NSA’s domestic spying program — are the subject of a piece out in the Intercept this week by Risen. 

This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich