Is the Press Corps Finally Rebelling Against Obama's Habitual Secrecy?

The Obama administration’s now-habitual restrictions on the media and press freedom on vital but politically touchy issues are the most severe, extreme and orchestrated ever witnessed in this nation.

Reporters were shut out, for example, during Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent parley in the White House and again when when Obama signed an executive order on abortion. Those who should have been protesting the loudest, the mainstream media, typically and meekly acquiesced in these restraints on freedom.

But, after journalists’ near airtight exclusion from the president’s recent Nuclear Security Summit, at least some of them have been showing signs of having finally had enough.

Seasoned White House reporters complained to both the president and White House Correspondents’ Association. More strikingly, the Washington Post, not known for holding Obama rigorously to account, also published Dana Milbank’s hard-hitting expose of this shameful and embarrassing episode in presidential and media annals.

Milbank went so far as to opine that, in face of the repressive and militaristic environment in the Capitol at the time of the summit, world leaders could well have thought themselves “transported to Soviet-era Moscow.” The oft-invoked “this session is closed press” mantra, he said, “would have pleased China’s Central Committee.” In addition, he had the temerity to remark, here was the “‘leader of the free world – putting on a clinic for some of the world’s greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.”

The Obama tutorial consisted in making available to the public, with the exception of a shallow post-meeting news conference, his own short opening statement, which concluded by asking the press to leave. Also provided were “banal readouts” – what the White House preordained for public consumption – as opposed to freewheeling and potentially revealing Q & A.

Consequently, reporters from foreign media, allowed for the first time in the White House press corps’ sanctum sanctorum, “got the impression that the vaunted American freedoms are not all they’re cracked up to be.”

Obama’s nationally mortifying short-circuiting of the press at the summit was not lost on these reporters and the world. Among other examples:

• Saudi Press Agency: “Foreign reporters/cameramen were escorted out in under two minutes … as the leaders were about to begin, and Obama was going to make remarks … Sorry, it is what it is.”
• Arabic-language MBC TV, on Obama’s meeting with the Jordanian king: “We were there for around 30 seconds, not enough even to notice the color of tie of both presidents. I think blue for the king.”
• Press Trust of India: “In less than a minute, the pool was asked to leave.”
• Turkey’s TRT-Turk went to Obama’s meeting with the president of Armenia, noting “we had to leave the room again after less than 40 seconds.”
• And Japan’s Kyodo News wrote that the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, was more forthcoming with the press than Obama, who limited himself mostly to “say hello to the cameras.”

That the White House had demeaned our most foundational freedom – of speech – did not perturb our famously “cool” or unflappable president. During the conference he broke with years of protocol and slipped away without the “protective” pool that is always in the vicinity of the president … Obama joked about it later to Pakistan’s prime minister, saying reporters “were very upset.”

The nation, dependent as it is on the media for truthful information on crucial matters such as the growing threat of nuclear attack, needs more MSM reporters “upset” by the current administration’s fanatic and secretive attempts to control and manipulate the media.

That the Washington Post has opened a window on Obama’s scandalous drive toward secrecy is cause for at least some hope.