At White House Dossier, Keith Koffler writes, “President Obama’s conference on bullying Thursday was deeply ironic to some in the White House press corps:”
That’s because every reporter who regularly covers the place knows that President Obama’s staff has a policy – an actual, pre-conceived policy – of bullying.
It’s a tactic that amount to no less than suppression of speech. By the “openness” administration.
The White House bullies reporters to try to ensure favorable coverage. When White House officials, particularly members of the press office, see a story they don’t like, they often call and verbally abuse the reporter who wrote the piece.
In diatribes often peppered with obscenities, they complain of profound injustice, bias, lack of relevance – anything they can think of to get reporters to back off their story.
It’s not just a series of uncontrolled outbursts. It is a planned, methodical, and highly artificial effort to either squash a story or get inside a reporter’s head so they think twice about doing a piece next time that negatively impacts Obama.
And for everyone else, there’s Media Matters to help keep them in line.
Wonder if that will make it easier for liberal journalists to break with the administration, as some have already done in the face of the glaring evidence of his incompetence and the total absence of leadership he displays.
You can agree with a guy and still think he’s a bad President due to incompetence. I had that thought about Bush on several occasions. If any of these news organizations want to stay in business, they’ll realize that. Or if any of their journalists are interested in getting a job from Murdoch when their outfit goes down the toilet, they might find it in their interests to exhibit some intellectual honesty.
I believe it’s called “Abused Wife Syndrome”. AWS is frequently fatal.
And they are jumping all over Michelle Bachman for her Gangster Government comment, which actually originated with Michael Barone in 2009: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel.”
It’s the Chicago way, isn’t it? Sounds a lot like, “You’ve got a nice bidness here, don’t ya? Pity if anythin’ happened to it…”