The big chill

Gary Pruitt, CEO of AP, says that many government sources have quit talking in the wake of the DOJ’s snooping.

“What I learned from our journalists should alarm everyone in this room and I think should alarm everyone in this country. The actions of the DOJ against AP are already having an impact beyond the specifics of this particular case,” AP CEO Gary Pruitt told an audience at the National Press Club. “Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even about stories that aren’t about national security. In some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person.”

As I’m fond of saying, transparency so thick you have to cut it with a knife.

In my darkest hours, when I am more than half convinced that our country has reached the tipping point, the thing that most strongly buttresses that opinion is the fact that the systematic destruction of our freedom is being engineered, not by a cadre of evil geniuses, but by a relative handful of ignorant punks who, in a saner age, would never have risen above the muck of local politics. A truly great nation, I tell myself, would not suffer the pretentious overreaching and the sleazy machinations of these glorified ward heelers.