Former ThinkProgress writer claims the liberal group faced “suffocating pressure” from the White House to censor articles critical of the Obama regime

A former writer for the liberal group Center for American Progress, Zaid Jilani, recently spoke about the “suffocating pressure” they felt from the Obama White House to censor articles when the group strayed from the party line.

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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 organization’s content when it departs from the White House’s agenda. In a post titled, ”How Working in Washington Taught Me We’re 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. “I’m writing this post to explain how working in Washington taught me we’re all a little bit like the good folks who work at RT America,” Jilani explained, “struggling against editorial censors, doing our best to follow our conscience despite sometimes suffocating pressures from our publishers and sponsors.” 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 Obama’s 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.

The Obama regime was furious so what did they do?



“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.”

The Obama White House pressured management and management cracked down on the writers for daring to oppose the president.

“What that meeting with CAP senior staff showed me was that they viewed being closer to Obama and aligning with his policy as more important than demonstrating progressive principle, if that meant breaking with Obama,” Jilani explained. “Essentially, they were doing the same thing to us RT America is telling its American producers to do now — align with your boss, who is the president of the country.”

Is it any wonder why Zaid Jilani is a former writer for ThinkProgress? Barack Obama understands that if you control the message you control the people and that is what this regime has set out to do from the beginning.

Barack Obama once said that Americans were listening to the wrong media outlets and when one of the media outlets which is supposed to be on his side strays from his message the big boot of the Federal government steps in and crushes whatever objectivity might still be left in the media.