Atkisson was the first "mainstream media" reporter to report and then seriously investigate Fast and Furious.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/07/sharyl_attkisson_exposes_big_media_in_emthe_smearem.htmlSharyl Attkisson Exposes Big Media in The SmearExcerpts:
Journalists today are elitists with their own agenda, never actually practicing journalism. Only a handful can be respected, trusted, and believed. Sharyl Attkisson falls into this category. She is an author and investigative reporter who hosts the syndicated TV news series Full Measure. Attkisson is a whistleblower of sorts in educating the public about the biased media. Her latest book, The Smear, reveals the tactics used to influence opinions in order to obscure the truth.
Today's media and leftists seem to take a page not out of the OSS, but out of Goebbels's strategy. Attkisson wants to inform Americans on the tactics used by political operatives on both sides as well as corporate operatives. These tactics fall into categories of "Astroturf and transactional journalism," all tools of the smear campaign. She told American Thinker her definition of a smear: "taking a sprinkle of truth and perverting it into a weapon of mass destruction to advance an undisclosed larger goal, often political or financial. Smear campaigns take something that many times has a grain of truth and amplifies it to accomplish the annihilation of their target."
Attkisson has experienced smear campaigns personally. In an email, then-attorney general Eric Holder's top press aide, Tracy Schmaler, called Attkisson "out of control" and intended to call CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer to get the network to stop her reporting on Fast and Furious. After Attkisson's first book, Stonewalled, came out, the liberal smear group Media Matters reviewed it as having "sloppy inaccuracies and absent context that reinforce her image as a journalist more interested in a biased narrative than uncovering the facts."
As an investigative reporter, Attkisson is an expert at detecting smear campaigns. She warns, "One smear artist I interviewed said nearly every image you run across in daily life, whether it's on the news, a comedian's joke, a meme on social media, or a comment on the internet, was put there for a reason. It's like scenes in a movie, he said. Nothing happens by accident. Sometimes people have paid a great deal of money to put those images before you. What you need to ask yourself isn't so much 'is it true,' but 'who wants me to believe it and why?'" This is why everyone should be reading The Smear: to find out how they do it, who is doing it, and what to look for regarding these dirty tactics.