The thin-skinned Obama White House has once again retaliated against an news source for not being sufficiently supportive of President Obama. This time, it’s the Boston Herald. Their offense: Running a Mitt Romney op-ed on their front page. Their punishment: Barred from being part of the White House Pool of Reporters during Obama’s fundraising visit to Boston yesterday.
Is the Herald’s banishment a punishment ; a time-out for bad behavior? Punishment by the Obama White House isn’t new – remember the reporter at a fund-raiser headlined by Joe Biden who was held in a utility closet for more than an hour to keep him away from the donors?
Whatever the reason, using the White House press pool to punish or reward media based on what the White House considers “fair” coverage is either paranoia, petty behavior, or both, but it really doesn’t matter: It’s censorship, Mr. President. Plain and simple.
Boston Herald
White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.”
“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit.
“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 US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits,”
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom defended Romney’s March 8 opinion piece:
“That op-ed was about jobs, which apparently is a sensitive subject for the thin-skinned people around the president. The White House may be able to manipulate pool coverage, but they can’t manipulate the fact that millions of Americans are out of work because of President Obama’s failure to create jobs and get our economy moving,” Fehrnstrom said in a statement yesterday.
The administration has a history of controversial clashes with the press.
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Wild Thing’s comment……..
Pair this with other actions and efforts to stifle opposition and with efforts to force potential government contractors to disclose their political contributions and forbidding Boeing from setting up a new plan in NC and what you have is the normal mode of operation of all fascist dictators and their government. All of this has to be seen as a war to restore and perserve the Constitution, the Republic and the freedoms we derived from the Constitution.
The democrat party is an enemy to the Constitution, and always has been; there can be no “bipartisanship”, they are not our friends and they need to be politically discredited, destroyed and wiped from our political system.
That’s Chicago politics in action.
Bob, your right, and he sure has that down pat too. augh!