It's more like ensuring that we don't assume that things come into existence as soon as we personally become aware of them, then that we don't assign them completely to the current person who, since we personally dislike him, caused us to pay attention in the first place.

The US government has been caught spying on and manipulating journalists since the G.W. Bush administration, and Obama was particularly energetic.

It’s not the same but comes to mind in the discussion: “embedded reporters”. They have been around a long time, arguably including World War Two, but were taken to some pretty extreme levels in the ‘03 Gulf War. The cosy relationship is corrupting and completely unhelpful, with state control and propaganda pushed by supposedly independent journalists who are contracted to say-no-evil.

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/me...

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/200...

Obama spied on Sharyl Atkinson is pretty well known.

It's not, because it never made sense. She was a nobody and the things she reported on where reported by others.

One of her allegations of hacking was a stuck delete key [1]

[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/10/31/7140247/the-right-is-convince...

You are correct about that case, but others are well-documented, specifically regarding the AP and James Rosen:

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post stated: "The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_articles_about_the_Depart...