ABC News’s retired reporter Ann Compton said in an interview with C-Span that she saw Barack Obama “really angry twice” and it was over media coverage. It’s ironic since he had the most favorable coverage of any president in decades.
Compton said:
Both were off-the-record times. One, profanity-laced where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he did not think were scandals. Another where he took us to task for not understanding the limits he has with foreign policy and the way he’s dealing with the Middle East and Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I don’t find him apologetic. But I find him willing to stand up to the press and look them in the eye, even though it was off the record and just give us hell.
She also said there was no transparency when it came to Obama. It was “more opaque” than any she had covered.
“Before I walked out the door on September 10, I was a strong voice for complaining that this particular administration has been more opaque than any I have covered … I think most presidents have been far more forthcoming than the second Obama term, in terms of what the president is doing every day,” she said.
She also said Obama was the first president with his “own journalistic tools”. Her problem with it is the blocking of the White House press corps.
Obama was the one who threatened democracy
For all the rage exhibited by the media over Donald Trump’s tweet calling the press the enemy of the people, which some often are, President Obama is the one who persecuted the press. Obama is the one who called for control over the flow of free information. He is the one who tells the media what to print. Obama threatened reporters.
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Trump wants them to be honest and give him a fair shot. Obama wanted them to be dishonest and only give him positive coverage.
James Rosen himself was spied on by the Obama administration.
James Rosen told Jesse Waters on his Fox show a while back that nothing the President has done approaches what Obama did to the press.
“Certainly nothing that the Trump administration has done with or to the news media approaches in seriousness and nature the conduct of the Obama Administration towards the press.
And especially Fox News and me, but not just Fox News and me. There was also an issue with the Associated Press and others.
I think that what we are seeing here in all these clashes with President Trump and the news media that you were playing those clips of is a mix of things.
On the one hand you have a simple institutional biological reflective response on the part of an organism, the news media beltway journalism crowd against someone who made it a chief campaign platform to call them out for their dishonesty, so they are pushing back.
Part of it is kinds of a shock to the system for the news media that things are being done differently at all than the way they have always been done here in the news media. What, you are giving questions to a town hall at a press conference? It’s never been done.”The case against James Rosen endangered our First Amendment right to freedom of the press. It risked criminalizing journalism and was led by Barack Obama.
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