Guest Post By C.L. Smith
C.L. Smith aka “Leonidas” is a frequent, right of center commenter on The Moderate Voice and has been invited as a Guest Voice.
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Well President Obama tried to muzzle Fox News yet again but this time as the Red State blog puts it, “White house tries to muzzle media; draws back bloody stump“.
So this administration had what passes for a brainstorm among that group: now that they’ve made it clear that they disapprove of one particular news network, why, there would be nothing stopping them from stepping up their attempts to marginalize said network. So the White House announced today that a specific White House Press Pool access – Ken Feinberg, who is one of the myriad ‘czars’ so beloved of this administration – would explicitly exclude Fox News. Despite the fact that the Press Pool is supported in part by Fox News.
And the media refused to play along.
The New York Times adds:
In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox’s television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a “pool” camera crew shared by all the networks. That followed a pointed question at a White House briefing this week by Jake Tapper, an ABC News correspondent, about the administration’s treatment of “one of our sister organizations.”
Here is a video:
White House tries to bar Fox News from intervewing pay czar
And who did they try to keep out? It was Major Garrett whom the White House, Anita Dunn specifically, had previously commented on (h/t HotAir):
“We think Major Garrett is a legitimate reporter,”
So now the administration is hoping to keep out criticism by not allowing “legitimate reporters” from conducting interviews with its bureaucrats if they don’t work for a network that tows the administration line. Scary stuff. The other news outlets should take pride in their professional stance and telling the administration they will not go along with such efforts at media control. I guess they looked down the road and wondered what would happen if they were critical of President Obama or another future president and that President tried to ban them from interviews in the same manner.