Obama: I Can Dish It, But I Can’t Take It!

The Boston Herald made a grave mistake this week by daring to post a somewhat positive piece on Romney on their front pages.  It took a moment away from their worship of everything Obama and liberalism and dared to feature a story on someone else.  This decision got them banned from the White House and accused of…bias.

The 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,” Lehrich wrote.

We’ve always known this is a thin-skinned president-one that doesn’t receive criticism well and instead retaliates in some of the most immature ways possible.  But, this seems to be a new low even for this administration.

We lived through eight very rough years with the Bush Administration being crucified day and night among the media.  Disagree with Bush where you will, as I certainly have on many occasions, but his administration kept themselves classy and stayed on the high road even in the face of tortuous accusations by every key player in the mainstream media.

Via Human Events:

So it’s now apparently the job of the White House to decide story placement in newspapers. And they wonder why they’re considered so juvenile. This comes on the heels of their spat with the San Francisco Chronicle after one of their reporters posted video of protesters heckling Obama. Which followed two years of open warfare on Fox News. One observer says it’s all about controlling the message.

Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed White House-press relations at right-leaning Instapundit.com, said a pattern appears to be developing.

“It’s all about control,” Reynolds said. “At some point this will blow back on them. Most presidents behave in a more refined fashion. Experience has shown that acting presidential is good politics and to their advantage.”

It seems to many that his scrutiny of the media, securing and filtering the press that comes out of his fundraisers and press conferences is far greater and more important than the attention he gives to the nation’s borders that he was sworn to protect and defend.

Perhaps our Fearless Leaders isn’t quite so fearless.  One writer had this to say:

Several veteran and prize-winning journalists who covered presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush say that the current crop of White House correspondents are too timid and deferential and have played a role in killing the impact of presidential news conferences.

“If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president,” says Sid Davis, the former NBC Washington bureau chief who covered nine presidents. “It looks like they are watching a funeral service at [Washington funeral firm] Joseph Gawler’s and it shouldn’t be that way.”

I think this piece nails the problem right on the head.  The bottom line is this.  It is hard to be a genuine reporter who investigates and reports the news and ask the tough questions, when your access is at stake and when you are really nothing more than an arm of the DNC responsible for getting this man elected and re-elected.

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