At least the president is proving himself to be an equal-opportunity hypocrite. Last month the “most open and transparent administration in history” banished a reporter from the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle from covering future presidential visits to the Bay Area. Her transgression was having dared to record a protest of the president at a fund-raiser.
This month it is the conservative Boston Herald that is being denied access to a local appearance by his nibs because it had the audacity to place a Mitt Romney op-ed on its front page.
Matt Lehrich, a White House spokesman, explained the Herald’s "misstep" in an email to the organization:
I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters. My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting U.S. President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits.
Lehrich gave the Herald assurance that not all local papers had been banned from the press pool, noting that the Boston Globe would be covering the president’s visit. In other words, the Herald staff can read all about Obama’s fund-raiser in its local rival, just like anyone else who drops a dollar and buys the paper.
An article in the Herald about this latest act of censorship quotes a journalism professor at Boston University as stating:
Newspapers don’t have to be unbiased to get access. You can’t just let only the newspapers you want in.
What makes the administration’s behavior that much more galling is its bald-faced efforts to portray its clashes with the press as legitimate redress for breaches in protocol. In last month’s dust-up with the Chronicle staffer, the alleged grievance was that the reporter had used a cameraphone, which is strictly verboten—not that she had created a visual record of an episode that was embarrassing for the thin-skinned president.
Putting the lie to the claim that the administration is simply holding members of the fourth estate to rigid prescribed journalistic standards is the White House’s war with FOX News, which Obama himself derided as
ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.
Not all of the administration’s battles have been with conservative news outlets. The San Francisco Chronicle, as noted earlier, is quite liberal, a fact that did not preclude its receiving the bum’s rush for crossing the president.
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