2009-05-07

Obama Administration Continues to Brow-beat the Media Into Submission

Baghdad Bob and Bob Gibbs, Separated at Birth?

How hard a concept is it to grasp that public officials have a responsibility to answer questions from the media and not manipulate it to their own ends like some Ba'athist mouthpiece? The US Military understands this, most law enforcement institutions understand this, and dare I say congress might even understand this. But the Obama administration, ever in permanent campaign mode, seems obsessed with getting the media to heap praise upon them and not dare criticize The One's decisions. It's not like the White House press corps has been very critical in the first 100 days, but the President is unsatisfied that every front page article doesn't read like a press release.

Fox News recently got shut out of a Q&A session with the White House because they didn't broadcast the damn thing. Robert Gibbs started heckling NBC today when a straight-forward question from Chuck Todd was asked about Obama's sorry attempt at fiscal restraint. And now, Obama is just going straight to the reporters to tell them how to phrase his monstrous budget. From CBS:
In his remarks today, the president sought to change that tenor of that coverage. He mocked the notion that smaller savings are considered "trivial" in Washington and stressed that "these savings, large and small, add up."

And he told journalists directly that they should stress the fact that the cuts are "significant" – a surprisingly direct appeal to reporters concerning which angle they should take in their coverage.

"It is important, though, for all of you, as you're writing up these stories, to recognize that $17 billion taken out of our discretionary, non-defense budget, as well as portions of our defense budget, are significant," he said. "They mean something." (Here's the White House report on the cuts.)
And you thought the term "Banana Republic" was just some right-wing meme, mwahaha.

3 comments:

ParaPacem said...

Well, I KNOW what he SAID, but I'll tell you what he MEANT to say:
"We won, so screw you losers, you military types, religious types, pro-life and gun types. Screw you all, WE won and there's nothing you can do about it."
At least, that's what Joe Bidet told me Gibbs meant!

Oldrightie said...

I suspect this is why he made friends with Jimmy Brown in order to learn about corrupting the media. The BBC is the propaganda arm of Brown's Labour Party.

Elizabeth said...

I'm pretty sure that Chuck Todd is not capable of asking an intelligent question, in a straightforward manner, or not.

After all, he is typical of the majority of the media (new, old, mainstream, or otherwise) that is literally drowning in it's own special brand of ineptitude and incompetence.