Why Obama hates journalists

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:41:00 +0000

Barack Obama did a press conference yesterday! He hardly ever does press conferences, because he hates the press and thinks taking random open questions from them is a waste of everyone's time, and that makes the Washington press corps very unhappy. They think he is dodging their tough questions. You would think that they would be quite pleased when he decides to have a press conference, but some of them were still kind of cranky!

Like Politico's Glenn Thrush, who was mad that the press conference was announced only 90 minutes before it happened. Thrush said the whole game is rigged.

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Then he got in a funny argument with Dan Pfeiffer.

So the president, in his first term, did fewer press conferences than Bush did in his first term, and Bush was famous for not doing press conferences so that he didn't have to explain or defend himself. Obama, though, is capable of defending himself without a script, even if he frequently falls back on increasingly grating clichés. He simply skips them because they really are a waste of everyone's time.

When the White House press corps cares about transparency

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:15:00 +0000

Finally, the White House press corps is exercised by problems of transparency under the Obama administration. The issue at hand is not, however, secrecy over kill lists or the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens. No, the journalists who surround the president are up in arms over transparency because they couldn't get close to Obama and Tiger Woods playing golf.

During this President's Day weekend, Obama joined the famed golfer and philanderer for a round in Florida. As the AP noted, "The White House, which has promised to be the most open and transparent in history, has prohibited any media coverage of Obama's golf outing."

Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, released a statement Sunday expressing anger at the lack of access:

Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend... There is a very simple but important principle we will continue to fight for today and in the days ahead: transparency.

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Why Obama hates journalists

When the White House press corps cares about transparency