It's not a 100% precise match, but I'd look dimly on anyone trying to argue it's completely different somehow. Reverse the affiliations and you'd almost think it was written today. (Almost.)
I know many won't actually click through to read the linked article, so I think it's important to cite this here in the comments:
> The effort hasn’t been a total blackout; White House press secretary Robert Gibbs still calls on Fox News reporter Major Garrett at press briefings, but the Obama White House is clearly targeting the network that it believes is biased.
> In a weekend interview with The New York Times, White House spokeswoman Anita Dunn said the administration would “treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”
A similar situation, and not "completely different", but not exactly the same, either.
It's not that similar. Fox wasn't barred from the briefings. It's just that folks weren't willing to be personally interviewed by them or go on their panel shows. The latter requires active engagement from the establishment, as people have to do a lot of prep work for interviews; the former is just another reporter in the scrum.
Wow. I would have read that in 2009 and thought that it was totally fine. Reading it now I see quotes like "calling them out is the only way to delegitimize them as political propaganda" and I'm extremely against the notion.
That article was a great dose of perspective, thanks for digging it out.
The Obama administration attempted to freeze out Fox News, although it wasn't so explicit. To the credit of the rest of the press, they revolted enough that they backed down.
They did bar them from attending some press briefings. Again, it wasn't as explicit, and it didn't come on the heels of such explicit aggression towards the media in general, but it very much was in the same ballpark.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement.
> Barack Obama's campaign has booted from its airplane three reporters who work for newspapers that have endorsed John McCain.
> The campaign says that a limited number of seats forced it to make the tough decision of which journalists would be permitted to follow the Democratic presidential candidate in the last four days of the campaign, but the papers are calling foul, claiming they were targeted for their editorial-page positions and kicked off while nonpolitical publications like Glamour and Jet magazines remained on board.
This action is about the press briefings. What are you talking about? Do you have something specific in mind?
Your link doesn't match your title, so what's up with that? But in any case, wasn't that wrong too—the thing you linked to about leakers and whistleblowers? I don't think I understand what you mean with how about these then. (Unless you genuinely do mean it as whataboutism, in which case it doesn't seem to me like a valid point.)
Keep in mind that the 24-hour news cycle is a relatively new 21st century thing, so comparisons about information control to earlier times isn't straightforward. Monitoring every action of a politician is much more intense than previously.
It doesn't make the actions in the link right, but it's important to keep that context in mind.
Obama wasn't president when this happened. This wasn't Air Force One they couldn't fly on. Limited space without the logistical capacity to bring in another plane seems a perfectly valid excuse to me.
