Posted on 04/28/2010 10:20:54 AM PDT by mojitojoe
One of the enduring story lines of Barack Obama’s presidency, dating back to the earliest days of his candidacy, is that the press loves him.
“Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me,” Obama joked last year at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
But even then, only four months into his presidency, the joke fell flat. Now, a year later, with another correspondents’ dinner Saturday night likely to generate the familiar criticism of the press’s cozy relationship with power, the reality is even more at odds with the public perception.
Obama and the media actually have a surprisingly hostile relationship — as contentious on a day-to-day basis as any between press and president in the past decade, reporters who cover the White House say.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454.html#ixzz0mPrqoQ9Q
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Interesting article.
I think he’s playing the press just right. It’s surprising that they’d take this kind of crap, but apparently Obama’s team knows just how to push their buttons.
They end up whining, but you don’t see any of them doing anything about it.
After the election, I thought maybe they’s sort of lord there help over Obama. But instead he was able to p|ss right in their faces. And incredibly they took it! And still are!
Moral of the story? Somewhere deep inside, people who are not very bright actually know that about themselves. They can be bullied pretty easily.
I thought perhaps headline should read “Why Reporters WENT Down on President Obama”...
Maybe she was talking about the okra recipes... :-)
Poitico once again pushing the left’s talking points. The media has always been 100% for Obama, and any pretense to the contrary is just “show” for the unwashed masses.
But how much you wanna bet every one of these disgruntled reporters would vote for Obama again?
The dishonor here is a two way street.
The left eating their own.
“A few days later, Gibbs said at one of his briefings, “This is the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”
Peals of laughter broke out in the briefing room.”
...that’s a good sign.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Much of the criticism is off the record, both out of fear of retaliation and from worry about appearing whiny. But those views were voiced by a cross section of the television, newspaper and magazine journalists who cover the White House.”
“worry about appearing whiny”??? think not. RETALIATION!
From the article:
“Clemons’s post on his findings, “Communications Corruption at the White House,” was harsh, particularly coming from a policy wonk who tends to agree with most of Obama’s stances. “
Communications Corruption at the White House
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2010/04/communications/
~~~~~~~~
Looks like the print stenographers may be crawling out of their self-induced coma, but the TV parrots still cherish their role as pets of the fascist regime, content to dine on cheap morsels of White House talking points.
Of course reporters are down on him. Wasn’t there a cartoon posted here showing reporters lined up, waiting their turn to go down ...
Don’t bet on it.
“And this attitude, many believe, starts with the man at the top. Obama rarely lets a chance go by to make a critical or sarcastic comment about the press, its superficiality or its short-term mentality. He also hasn’t done a full-blown news conference for 10 months.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454.html#ixzz0mQ1dp0gH
If you cover City Hall, you talk to the mayor. If you cover the Yankees, you’ll hang around Derek Jeter’s locker. The White House is no different, and aides past routinely filled that need by letting the press pool toss the president a couple of questions every so often, usually at one of the various events that fill his calendar every day.
Not Obama. He has severely cut back the informal exchanges with the press pool, marking a new low in presidential access.
The numbers speak for themselves: During his first year in office, President Bill Clinton did 252 such Q & A sessions — an average of one every weekday. Bush did 147. Obama did 46, according to Towson University professor Martha Kumar.
It was last September in Pittsburgh, when about 20 journalists were attending an off-the-record dinner with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel during the G-20 summit. Also in attendance: New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, a White House favorite.
As one White House reporter tells it, “Jim Jones and Denis McDonough and Gary Samore were lurking in this very dark, nice dining room that we were in. And we were all kind of wondering why they were there. Then, at one point at the dinner, McDonough tapped on Sanger’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear. Sanger got up and walked towards this clutch of NSC people, including Jones, and they walked off.”
“We were all flummoxed and floored by this whole thing,” said the reporter. “A few reporters cornered McDonough and said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t do that in front of other reporters.’ He said, ‘Oh, you guys, you’re barking up the wrong tree! We didn’t give anything. You’ve got nothing to worry about.’”
But later that night, Sanger posted a blockbuster scoop: As Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy would announce the next morning, the Iranians had a secret nuclear site but kept it hidden for years from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The other reporters — Sanger’s dinner companions earlier — were sent scrambling at around midnight to match the Times’s account.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454_Page3.html#ixzz0mQ2hbdRY
But they still love him, all the more.
The purpose of this BS is disinformation to try to portray the WH press as investigative and unbiased.
Another event that riled many in the press corps took place March 20. The Washington Examiner’s Julie Mason confronted former Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe, author of a highly favorable book about the Obama campaign, when he attempted to join the White House pool on the Saturday before Congress’s big health care vote.
“You’re not in the pool,” Mason recalled telling Wolffe. “You shouldn’t be joining.” Mason said Wolffe claimed that he was there courtesy of “a special invitation from the Obama administration.” Wolffe is working on a second book on the Obama administration.
“Are you working for them officially now?” shot back Mason.
“The White House wants their friend to be in the pool and we don’t know what recourse we have,” Mason later told POLITICO. “It’s just completely unfair to the press corps and flies in the face of the concept of a free press.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454_Page4.html#ixzz0mQ3E2iXA
The difficulty in tracking down Gibbs isn’t limited to the road. Even reporters for major newspapers say they have trouble getting their calls and e-mails returned.
Journalists say that Gibbs seems to spend a lot of time with Obama and that it cuts down on his time to talk with them.
Getting mad
And just what happens when you upset the White House?
Among White House reporters, tales abound of an offhand criticism or passing claim low in an unremarkable story setting off an avalanche of hostile e-mail and voice-mail messages.
“It’s not unusual to have shouting matches or the e-mail equivalent of that. It’s very, very aggressive behavior, taking issue with a thing you’ve written, an individual word, all sorts of things,” said one White House reporter.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454_Page5.html#ixzz0mQ3skfH6
with a thing you’ve written, an individual word, all sorts of things,” said one White House reporter.
“It’s a natural outgrowth of campaigning, where control of the message is everything and where a very tight circle controls the flow of information,” The New Yorker’s Packer said. “I just think it is a mistake to transfer that model to governing. Governing is so much more complicated and is all about implementation — not just message.”
One of the most irritating practices of the Obama White House is when aides ignore inquiries or explicitly refuse to cooperate with an unwelcome story — only to come out with both guns blazing when it takes a skeptical view of their motives or success.
“You will give them ample opportunity on a story. They will then say, ‘We don’t have anything for you on this.’ Then, when you write an analytical graph that could be interpreted as implying a political motive by the White House, or something that makes them look like anything but geniuses, you will get a flurry of off-the-record, angry e-mails after you publish,” one national reporter said. “That does no good. If you want to complain. Engage!”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454_Page5.html#ixzz0mQ4ASRTx
Some reporters say the pushback is so aggressive that it undermines the credibility of Obama’s aides. “The willingness to argue that credible information is untrue is at its core dishonest and unfortunately calls into question everything else the press office says,” one White House reporter said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454_Page6.html#ixzz0mQ4Pubis
Compton said that if the Obama White House’s sense of being besieged by the press is authentic, it bespeaks a kind of innocence born from a candidate and a president who has never confronted a full-on Washington feeding frenzy.
“They ain’t seen nothing yet,” the longtime ABC reporter said. “Wait till they have to start really circling the wagons when someone in the administration is under attack, wait till there’s a scandal, wait till someone screws up, then it’ll get hostile.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36454_Page6.html#ixzz0mQ4aK1Li
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