Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

Sharyl Attkisson

Nov 2014 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

Seasoned CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson reveals how she has been electronically surveilled while digging deep into the Obama Administration and its scandals, and offers an incisive critique of her industry and the shrinking role of investigative journalism in today’s media.

Americans are at the mercy of powerful figures in business and government who are virtually unaccountable. The Obama Administration in particular has broken new ground in its monitoring of journalists, intimidation and harassment of opposition groups, and surveillance of private citizens.

Sharyl Attkisson has been a journalist for more than thirty years. During that time she has exposed scandals and covered controversies under both Republican and Democratic administrations. She has also seen the opponents of transparency go to ever greater lengths to discourage and obstruct legitimate reporting.

Attkisson herself has been subjected to “opposition research” efforts and spin campaigns. These tactics increased their intensity as she relentlessly pursued stories that the Obama Administration dismissed. Stonewalled is the story of how her news reports were met with a barrage of PR warfare tactics, including online criticism, as well as emails and phone calls up the network chain of command in an effort to intimidate and discourage the next story. In Stonewalled, Attkisson recounts her personal tale, setting it against the larger story of the decline of investigative journalism and unbiased truth telling in America today.

Ratings and reviews

This book enraged me at times. I always knew at some level that our government was corrupt but it was more along the lines of the stereotype that politicians lie. I was naïve enough to think that even if I disagreed with the politics of an administration that they were well intentioned just wrong according to my truth. This book has shown me her how close we are to losing our republic. I can't believe what a gutless evil bunch of cowards are running both or government and the news media. Even with good people trying to do the right thing they go beyond obstructing the truth to actively blocking it and trading down this who try to tell it. If that isn't the definition of evil then I don't know what evil is.

Written as a victim and from her poorly hidden right-wing agenda. She thinks herself the very first that has ever been slighted by the political power of the White House. These "facts" have been a part of our political games since the beginning of politics.

Well, the chapters on Fast and Furious then Benghazi were more than worth the price of the book. But the icing on the cake is the stomping on freedom of the press and individual rights is mind boggling. With a background in IT but not in the truly technical sense, I was able to get the gist of that and it was frightening. One thing that I now have a different POV on is, surprisingly, Edward Snowden.

About the author

Sharyl Attkisson has been a working journalist for more than thirty-five years and is host and managing editor of the nonpartisan Sunday morning TV program Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson. She has covered controversies under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, emerging with a reputation, as the Washington Post put it, as a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story.” She is the recipient of five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting. She has worked at CBS News, PBS, and CNN and is a sixth degree blackbelt master in Taekwondo.