https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/pen_america_mocks_1st_amendm
On Saturday, I received an email from Stephen Fee, the Communications Director for PEN America, alerting me to a virtual gala celebration on December 8 to honor Barack Obama with its 2020 Voice of Influence Award.
Among other topics, Obama will share with the PEN audience how “disinformation — and media outlets willing to spread it — are an immediate threat to democracy.” PEN’s mission, so they tell us, is “to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.”
Is this a hoax? Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than he deserves this award. A report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in October 2013 showed that only in Bizarro World would Obama merit such an honor.
In the way of background, a group of foreign journalists founded the CPJ in 1981 to protect their colleagues around the world from harassment by authoritarian governments. The CPJ is not exactly part of the much-bruited “right-wing noise machine.” Au contraire!
Over the years the CPJ board of directors has included any number of liberal luminaries, among them Christiane Amanpour, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Clarence Page, and even serious leftists like Victor Navasky, longtime editor of the Nation. The principal author of the report was Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post. In the opening paragraph of the report, Downie sliced right to the heart of the issue:
In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An “Insider Threat Program” being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.