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Thanks Oshkalaboomboom.

Roosevelt enjoyed an extended honeymoon with the press his first year as president. Yet, FDR’s legendary charm began wearing thin in 1934. By 1935, things were sliding into open warfare. He repeatedly griped about what he called “poisonous propaganda.” In the president’s mind, any reporter who wasn’t strongly for him was against him. Asking tough questions about his New Deal programs amounted to treason. Roosevelt took those questions as personal attacks and nurtured bitter grudges. By the time he ran for re-election in 1936, he complained that 85 percent of the press was against him. (Although that didn’t prevent him from winning one of history’s biggest landslides.) The Roosevelt administration especially played hardball with the new, and highly influential, medium of radio. When the FCC was created in 1934 (bringing broadcasters under federal regulation for the first time), FDR tapped the man who’d handled radio in his 1932 presidential campaign to head it. Radio networks got the message pronto: Don’t question Team Roosevelt, and nobody gets hurt. Henry A. Bellows, vice president of CBS Radio noted, “no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.” Things sunk to an all-time low in 1942. The first year of our involvement in World War II went badly for America. It was a rough way to start a war. During his Dec. 18 news conference at the White House, FDR shocked reporters by producing a Nazi Iron Cross medal, symbol of Germany’s dictatorial militarism, handed it to a New York Daily News reporter and instructed him to give it to columnist John O’Donnell at his paper. FDR said O’Donnell had earned it by giving aid and comfort to the enemy through his columns. And it didn’t stop there. O’Donnell later covered the fighting in Europe. Returning home in 1945, he and another reporter had their White House credentials yanked due to “their isolationist, anti-British, anti-Russian pens.” A nasty spat followed, eventually becoming public when it spilled into the Philadelphia Record’s pages. It grew so nasty that Steve Early, the very first White House press secretary, threatened to resign if the men’s credentials weren’t returned. FDR grudgingly complied.

General William Tecumseh Sherman despised the press. He banned them from traveling with his troops, and even had one reporter court-martialed for defying his order. I recall in a book I read that one time, General Sherman found a reporter in his camp, had him arrested, and told him that there was a train leaving at a certain time, and that he’d better be on it. And like the press today, they made up stories, and called Sherman names as revenge for his being so anti-press.