March 29, 2016
Spare Me Your Hypocritical Journalism Lecture, Mr. President
At an awards ceremony, Obama praises journalists. Back in the White House, he blocks honest press queries with all his power.
By Jack Shafer
Politico.com
The last person in the world who should be lecturing journalists on how to do journalism is President Barack Obama. Yet there Obama was Monday night at a journalism award ceremony, yodeling banalities about the role of a press in a free society, moaning over the dangers posed by “he said/she said” reporting, and—to the delight of the assembled audience—attacking Donald Trump in every way but name. The press-heavy crowd, convened by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to give the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting to Alec MacGillis, clapped at Obama’s 30-minute address, encouraging his best Trump-baiting lines about “free media” and the dangers of “false equivalence.”
What they should have done is bombard Obama with rotten fruit or ripped him with raspberries for his hypocrisy.
How do we hate Obama’s treatment of the press? Let me count the ways. Under his administration, the U.S. government has set a new record for withholding Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a recent Associated Press investigation. FOIA gives the public and press an irreplaceable view into the workings of the executive branch. Without timely release of government documents and data, vital questions can’t be answered and stories can’t be written.
Obama’s “Insider Threat Program” has turned employees across the government—from the Peace Corps to the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture—into information-squelching snitches. If this isn’t Trumpian behavior, I don’t know what is.
“Obama hates the press,” New York Times national security reporter James Risen said not long ago, “and he hates leaks.” AP Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee has decried the “day-to-day intimidation of sources” by the Obama administration, judging it worse than the Bush administration on that score. And in a 2013 piece, POLITICO’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen documented Obama’s mastery of “limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.”
As ProPublica has reported, at the same the Obama administration has been paying lip service to protecting whistleblowers, it has pursued national security leaks to the press with a vehemence unmatched by any previous administration, using the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers who leak to journalists more times than all previous administrations combined. Obama holds infrequent news conferences, and he wastes reporters’ time by refraining from answering questions with any candor. He claims to helm “the most transparent administration in history,” while bending government policies and practices toward secrecy.
“The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” wrote Leonard Downie Jr. in a Committee to Protect Journalists report. And it’s not just Downie complaining. You could break Google by asking it to list all the top journalists who regard the Obama administration as Press Enemy No. 1.
The deeper you study Obama’s relationship with the press, the more you want to ask what business he has giving out a press award. Was Trump himself busy that night?
Obama didn’t invent the White House’s in-house media shop, which produces videos and other media to disseminate approved “news” to the public and the press. As long ago as the early 1930s, H.L. Mencken was complaining about how the Roosevelt administration’s press agents choked the information pipeline with mimeographed handouts that lazy reporters would then repurpose as news. But Obama’s White House has perfected the practice, with a 14-member operation called the White House Office of Digital Strategy that bypasses the press corps with tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook postings and more.
The press doesn’t like that, arguing that it stiff-arms open discourse. Obama thinks it’s funny. At the 2013 Gridiron Dinner, he said, “Some of you have said that I’m ignoring the Washington press corps—that we’re too controlling. You know what, you were right. I was wrong, and I want to apologize in a video you can watch exclusively at Whitehouse.gov.” While it’s Obama’s political prerogative to appear when and where he wants to, to fuel his own media operation, and do so on his own terms, it’s duplicitous of him to operate his own propagandistic operation and then judge the real press for its alleged failings.
What makes Obama’s speech so unstomachable is the way he praises reporters at an award ceremony by calling their work “indispensable,” “incredible,” “worth honoring” and essential to democracy while simultaneously blocking honest press queries with all the formidable energies of his office. You’d expect this sort of contradictory behavior from Trump, whom Obama savaged (by implication) repeatedly in the speech. At one point, Obama complains about an unnamed politician (I think you can guess who) receiving billions in free media, and bemoans the fact that no “serious accountability” comes with it. But hasn’t Obama been doing the same grift from a different location for the past seven to arrange the same deal for himself?
Elsewhere in the talk, Obama sought honesty’s high ground by denouncing unnamed candidates for having become “untethered to reason and facts and analysis.” Obviously he meant Trump. But who is Obama to talk? He may not be as accomplished a liar as Trump. Nobody is. But he carries the very same contagion: The Washington Post Fact Checker’s Obama rap sheet is well stocked with “Pinocchios” for the lies and mistruths he has advanced over his White House years.
Shame on Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications for allowing Obama—a documented opponent of the press—to pontificate on journalistic practice. The only press award he has any business awarding is a special commendation to Trump, thanking him for making Obama look like a free-speech radical by comparison.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/obama-hypocritical-journalism-lecture-213775
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