Trump bars CNN and NYT from press briefing.

Flashback: When Candidate Obama Booted 3 Papers From His Campaign Plane, Nobody Cared

The year was 2008. The candidate had a big lead in the polls going into election day. And in a preview of how petulant he would be act as Commander-in-Chief as it pertains to his treatment of the press, Barack Obama decided he didn’t like what three newspapers were writing about him, so he kicked its reporters off his campaign plane.

Sound familiar?

But instead of simply owning up to not agreeing with the way the Dallas Morning News, New York Post and Washington Times were doing their respective jobs, the president’s team played dumb in insulting everyone’s intelligence in claiming it was simply a matter of suddenly having a limited number of seats on said plane.


“Unfortunately, demand for seats on the plane during this final weekend has far exceeded supply, and because of logistical issues we made the decision not to add a second plane,” said Obama campaign senior adviser Anita Dunn.

Uh-huh. And you’ll never guess which publications somehow still made the seat cut:

Glamour, Jet and Ebony.

Eight years ago, there wasn’t the kind of collective gasps from the media like we’re seeing this week when Donald Trump was equally as childish in stripping the Washington Post of its press credentials. In fact, there was barely a peep about it in 2008. The Obama Administration would go on to be called in many media circles — and this includes both the conservative and liberal variety — as the least transparent in history by setting a record of withholding more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other ever in power (AP, March 2016).

No matter. This is just how selective outrage works. And since it’s 2016 and it’s Trump, his decision — a decidedly wrong one, as pointed out in this space earlier this week– has been met with overwhelming, dizzying dismay.

Chris Cillizza in 2016 on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: “Barring reporters from public events because you disagree with what they write is a dangerous precedent.”

Chris Cillizza in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Slate in 2016 on Trump’s decision: Trump’s Washington Post revocation “marks an unprecedented escalation in his war” against media.

Slate in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: Trump’s decision is “nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press.”

Baron in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

You get the idea…

But give Trump this: he came out and said exactly why the Post was getting the boot. Team Obama obviously went a much more junior high route in claiming otherwise. Adding: And for those who argue that kicking reporters off a campaign plane is different than revoking credentials altogether, the primary theme is the same: Restricting or eliminating access simply over disagreement on editorial and/or approach by a publication…

“We’re protesting it and we’re not happy about it,” said editor Bob Mong of the Dallas Morning News at the time. “We’re not in a swing state, but given our history of outstanding political reporting, we’re upset, particularly when you see guys like Glamour on board.”

Guys like Mong got little support from his fellow media members at the time. It’s not because the act was wrong of course, but who the candidate that was dropping the axe was.

CNN Contributor Bakari Sellers this week: Trump taking away Washington Post‘s press credentials “is fascism at its worst.”

You gotta love hyperbole. Sellers, of course, was silent on the same fascism when it presented itself in 2008.

It’s the worst kind of bias — the bias of omission — that’s in play here…

The kind that occurs when it comes to that other time reporters were banned by another candidate in an election year.
 
Max E. Pad said:
Flashback: When Candidate Obama Booted 3 Papers From His Campaign Plane, Nobody Cared

The year was 2008. The candidate had a big lead in the polls going into election day. And in a preview of how petulant he would be act as Commander-in-Chief as it pertains to his treatment of the press, Barack Obama decided he didn’t like what three newspapers were writing about him, so he kicked its reporters off his campaign plane.

Sound familiar?

But instead of simply owning up to not agreeing with the way the Dallas Morning News, New York Post and Washington Times were doing their respective jobs, the president’s team played dumb in insulting everyone’s intelligence in claiming it was simply a matter of suddenly having a limited number of seats on said plane.


“Unfortunately, demand for seats on the plane during this final weekend has far exceeded supply, and because of logistical issues we made the decision not to add a second plane,” said Obama campaign senior adviser Anita Dunn.

Uh-huh. And you’ll never guess which publications somehow still made the seat cut:

Glamour, Jet and Ebony.

Eight years ago, there wasn’t the kind of collective gasps from the media like we’re seeing this week when Donald Trump was equally as childish in stripping the Washington Post of its press credentials. In fact, there was barely a peep about it in 2008. The Obama Administration would go on to be called in many media circles — and this includes both the conservative and liberal variety — as the least transparent in history by setting a record of withholding more Freedom of Information Act requests than any other ever in power (AP, March 2016).

No matter. This is just how selective outrage works. And since it’s 2016 and it’s Trump, his decision — a decidedly wrong one, as pointed out in this space earlier this week– has been met with overwhelming, dizzying dismay.

Chris Cillizza in 2016 on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: “Barring reporters from public events because you disagree with what they write is a dangerous precedent.”

Chris Cillizza in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Slate in 2016 on Trump’s decision: Trump’s Washington Post revocation “marks an unprecedented escalation in his war” against media.

Slate in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: Trump’s decision is “nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press.”

Baron in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

You get the idea…

But give Trump this: he came out and said exactly why the Post was getting the boot. Team Obama obviously went a much more junior high route in claiming otherwise. Adding: And for those who argue that kicking reporters off a campaign plane is different than revoking credentials altogether, the primary theme is the same: Restricting or eliminating access simply over disagreement on editorial and/or approach by a publication…

“We’re protesting it and we’re not happy about it,” said editor Bob Mong of the Dallas Morning News at the time. “We’re not in a swing state, but given our history of outstanding political reporting, we’re upset, particularly when you see guys like Glamour on board.”

Guys like Mong got little support from his fellow media members at the time. It’s not because the act was wrong of course, but who the candidate that was dropping the axe was.

CNN Contributor Bakari Sellers this week: Trump taking away Washington Post‘s press credentials “is fascism at its worst.”

You gotta love hyperbole. Sellers, of course, was silent on the same fascism when it presented itself in 2008.

It’s the worst kind of bias — the bias of omission — that’s in play here…

The kind that occurs when it comes to that other time reporters were banned by another candidate in an election year.
More...


So a candidate w/no political power is the same as the president, and plane occupancy is the same as press room occupancy? keep grasping....getting closer to those straws.
 

Feb 24, 2017 Updated: 11:50pm, Feb 24

Trump TV network a ‘realistic’, ‘plausible’ possibility

http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2017/02/24/trump-tv-news-network/

Mr Trump could be out of the Presidency as early as two years if the Democrats regain control of the Senate and the House and move to have him removed.

“Trump is finished. Trump TV is next,’’ boomed The Atlantic.

“Is Donald Trump’s endgame the launch of Trump News?’’ pondered Vanity Fair.

Does this go some way to explain Mr Trump’s relentless damning of the mainstream news organisations – including relatively sober broadsheets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post – as “fake news”?
More...
 
Obama's Attacks on Journalists are Worst Since Nixon

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."

Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.

The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." Among the most shameful aspects of the Obama record:

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being 'an aider, abettor and/or conspirator' of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."

It goes on to detail how NSA revelations have made journalists and source petrified even to speak with one another for fear they are being surveilled:


'I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,' said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. 'It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to monitor those contacts,' he said."

It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press."

Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:

The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."

And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: "Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.

The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration's attacks: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."

Back in 2006, back when Iwas writing frequently about the Bush administration's attacks on press freedom, the focus was on mere threats to take some of these actions, and that caused severe anger from vocal progressives. Now, as this new report documents, we have moved well beyond the realm of mere threats into undeniable reality, and the silence is as deafening as the danger is pronounced.

Related matter
Along with David Miranda, I testified yesterday before a Committee of the Brazilian Senate investigating NSA spying, and beyond our latest revelations about economic spying aimed at Brazil, one of the issues discussed was the war on press freedoms being waged by the US and UK governments to prevent reporting of these stories. The Guardian, via Reuters, has a two-minute video with an excerpt of my testimony on that issue.
http://www.alternet.org/media/obama-and-journalism
 
Here4money said:
So a candidate w/no political power is the same as the president, and plane occupancy is the same as press room occupancy? keep grasping....getting closer to those straws.
More...


lol if he stopped there maybe, Obama's attacks on journalists are well known, check the sources on these articles, guess next you will say "Alternet is a right wing news source," lol.
 
Max E. Pad said:
Obama's Attacks on Journalists are Worst Since Nixon

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."

Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.

The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." Among the most shameful aspects of the Obama record:

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being 'an aider, abettor and/or conspirator' of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."

It goes on to detail how NSA revelations have made journalists and source petrified even to speak with one another for fear they are being surveilled:


'I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,' said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. 'It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to monitor those contacts,' he said."

It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press."

Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:

The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."

And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: "Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.

The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration's attacks: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."

Back in 2006, back when Iwas writing frequently about the Bush administration's attacks on press freedom, the focus was on mere threats to take some of these actions, and that caused severe anger from vocal progressives. Now, as this new report documents, we have moved well beyond the realm of mere threats into undeniable reality, and the silence is as deafening as the danger is pronounced.

Related matter
Along with David Miranda, I testified yesterday before a Committee of the Brazilian Senate investigating NSA spying, and beyond our latest revelations about economic spying aimed at Brazil, one of the issues discussed was the war on press freedoms being waged by the US and UK governments to prevent reporting of these stories. The Guardian, via Reuters, has a two-minute video with an excerpt of my testimony on that issue.
http://www.alternet.org/media/obama-and-journalism
More...

You keep posting opinion pieces from random blogs as if the big text will somehow make them more factual....it's just annoying to have to scroll so much really.
 
Media Critic: Trump’s Attacks on the Press Are Bad, Obama’s Are Worse

As CNN’s Reliable Sources discussed Donald Trump this morning, media critic David Zurawik argued for some perspective, saying that Trump’s attacks on the press don’t really rival President Obama‘s.

Remember, over the past seven years, more and more reporters have expressed frustrations with the lack of transparency and horrible record on press freedom from the Obama administration.

Zurawik said it’s necessary, in order to make the case against Trump more palatable to conservatives, for media observers to openly say that as bad as Trump is on the press, “so far nothing rivals what President Obama did to James Risen, did to James Rosen, and did to the AP, trying to criminalize reporting.”

He said that Obama is only being nice to the press now “because of legacy” and “what happened to the press under Obama was really deadly.”














Katrina vanden Heuvel agreed, also pointing to how the Obama administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers has been “a threat to our democracy.”

Watch above, via CNN.

 
Here4money said:
You keep posting opinion pieces from random blogs as if the big text will somehow make them more factual....it's just annoying to have to scroll so much really.
More...


Yours isnt an opinion piece? i keep posting opinion pieces from left wing sources, lol.
 
"Katrina vanden Heuvel agreed, also pointing to how the Obama administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers has been “a threat to our democracy.”

I guess you think katrina vanen heuvel is a conservative, lol.
 
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