The Silencing (21 page)

              
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1823

“M
aking government accountable to the people isn’t just a cause of this campaign—it’s been a cause of my life for two decades,” then-Senator Barack Obama said during his 2008 run for the White House.
²
On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly denounced the Bush administration as “one of the most secretive administrations in our history” and vowed to be a different kind of president.
³
Shortly after his inauguration, the White House announced that, “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history.”
⁴

Instead, Obama’s White House has appalled reporters with its Nixon-like secrecy, lack of transparency, and hostility to being held accountable by the media. Veteran ABC News Reporter Ann Compton told me in January 2015 that the Obama administration has “flunked” the “test of transparency.” She explained that to the Obama White House “transparency” seems to mean little more than an avalanche of administration
“photographs and videos and blogs” posted online—in other words, government created “news” that is little better than propaganda. As Compton explained, reporters “are looking for transparency about how the president comes to . . . policy decisions.” Instead transparency, to this White House, is simply another means to spin the media.

Compton has covered every president starting with Gerald R. Ford. The most open West Wing, in her experience, was Ronald Reagan’s. Reporters had easy access to Reagan’s top three advisors, Mike Deaver, Edwin Meese, and Jim Baker. She also thought the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were often open with reporters. The George W. Bush administration, by comparison, tightly controlled its media message and limited the press corps’ access. The Obama administration, however, took that several steps farther. “Obama is the first [president] to have his own videographer. His shop goes out aggressively with a message. Much more so than Bush,” Compton noted. “But [when it comes to] the thought process, the consultations that go into making domestic policy, I felt I had better access with policy teams under Bush than under Obama. When it comes to what I thought mattered most . . . hearing what was happening with policy creation, I felt I had it in the [George W.] Bush years.”

At the end of Obama’s first term, presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar crunched the numbers.
⁵
She found that over four years, President Obama held a total of 79 press conferences. The “most transparent administration in history” was beat out by George W. Bush’s 89, Bill Clinton’s 133, and George H. W. Bush’s 143 press conferences in their first terms. As for short question and answer sessions with reporters, it was even worse. President Obama opened himself up to such questioning only 107 times in four years, compared to George W. Bush’s 354 and Clinton’s 612.

Moreover, the president avoids serious journalists. In 2013,
Politico
noted that “The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most
likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.”
⁶
The president would rather appear on the
View
.

While the Obama administration’s top strategy team held briefings every few weeks where a senior administration official would meet with selected reporters, the briefings soon became essentially useless because they were off the record and the officials spoke in generalities, leaving reporters feeling, as Ann Compton said, that “they had learned nothing.” The briefers said “all the same things they said on the morning talk shows.”

Politico
further reported in “Obama: The Puppet Master,” that, “President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.” Calling it a “dangerous development,” veteran reporters Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei noted that, “the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government.” One troubling development that differed from past White Houses was “extensive government creation of content (photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press.” Brooks Kraft, a contributing photographer to
Time
magazine added, “White House handout photos used to be reserved for historically important events—9/11, or deliberations about war. This White House regularly releases [day-in-the-life] images of the president . . . a nice picture of the president looking pensive . . . from events that could have been covered by the press pool.”
⁷

By the end of 2013, dozens of America’s leading news organizations had become so frustrated they signed a letter hand-delivered to then-Press Secretary Jay Carney to complain about “limits on press access” so pervasive as to “raise constitutional concerns.” The letter, signed by outlets such as ABC, CBS, NBC, Bloomberg, CNN, Fox News, Reuters, and thirty others, said in part, “Journalists are routinely being denied the right to photograph or videotape the president while he is performing his official duties. As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera
lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government. . . . You are, in effect, replacing independent photojournalism with visual press releases.”
⁸

Put another way: the Obama administration is staffed with masters of creating government propaganda and making sure there is nothing to compete with it. When Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, she gave one interview—to the Orwellian-sounding “White House TV.” Guess who produces that? Obama aides.
⁹
When questioned about reporters’ lack of access to the president, Jen Psaki, the Obama campaign’s traveling press secretary, told
Politico
’s Allen and VandeHei: “The goal is not to satisfy the requester, but doing what is necessary to get into people’s homes and communicate your agenda to the American people.”

Bill Clinton’s former White House press secretary, Mike McCurry, told me in a 2015 interview, “What has defined so much of Obama strategy is to self publish, to create content to deliver to people they are trying to reach. It is aimed at a base they are trying keep strong, not the middle.”

While the administration disdains on-the-record interviews with actual journalists, Obama regularly grants them to people like Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Steve Harvey, and even an online satirical interview with goofball Zach Galifianakis and meet-ups with such YouTube video blog sensations as comic GloZell Green (3.4 million YouTube subscribers), movie and music commentator Hank Green (2 million subscribers), and makeup and home decorating advice teen Bethany Mota (8 million subscribers). There is nothing wrong with the president trying to reach different audiences. But no one should confuse chats with these entertainers as being held accountable by the Fourth Estate.

In early 2013, Paul Farhi of the
Washington Post
decided to investigate just whom the White House deemed deserving of an interview with the president of the United States. Wrote Farhi: “
Entertainment Tonight
scored [an interview with the president] last year
. The New York Times
did not.
The View
has gotten several.
The Washington Post
hasn’t had one in years.
Albuquerque radio station KOB-FM’s
Morning Mayhem
crew interviewed [President Obama] in August. The last time the
Wall Street Journal
did so was in 2009.”
¹⁰

Farhi concluded: “Obama may be the least newspaper-friendly president in a generation.” Jackie Calmes, a White House reporter for the
New York Times
told Farhi, “It used to be taken as a matter of course that the major newspapers would get an annual interview. Now I take it for granted that it’s not going to happen.” How can there be transparency and accountability if the president refuses to speak to the country’s most influential dailies?

While the White House prefers to line up the president with fanzines and their equivalent, when the doors finally do open to serious journalists, the Press Office selects reporters who, though not fanzine fawners, are prepared to play them on TV. In January 2013,
60 Minutes
embarrassed itself in service of the White House propaganda machine, running a fluff piece featuring outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president that mined such fascinating and critically important topics as how the two get along. The facilitator of this love fest was Steve Kroft who informed Piers Morgan in an interview that President Obama liked to do
60 Minutes
because “I think he knows that we’re not going to play gotcha with him, that we’re not going to go out of our way to make him look bad or stupid and we’ll let him answer the questions.”
¹¹
60 Minutes
was once famous for asking hard questions. Now, at least if you’re President Obama, an interview with
60 Minutes
looks more like a campaign promo.

National Journal
Reporter Ron Fournier, a former Associated Press Washington bureau chief, told me that President Obama “is an incredibly thin-skinned man. He likes the idea of transparency, but not if it makes him look bad.” And as a result, the Obama administration is the most hostile to journalists and transparency that he’s seen.

He continued, “[Obama] is so sure that he knows what is right for the country that anything that makes him look bad is therefore evil. So a whistleblower is ‘anti-Obama’ and ‘anti-American’ because he is taking
down President Obama who [sees himself as the] epitome of America. He is incredibly self-righteous. [President Obama] is ultimately responsible for the White House being un-transparent and combative with the media and attacking the whistleblowers. . . .”

In July 2014, the Society of Professional Journalists sent President Obama a letter
¹²
complaining about his White House’s lack of transparency. In extraordinarily blunt language, the Society wrote, “You recently expressed concern that frustration in the country is breeding cynicism about democratic government. You need look no further than your own administration for a major source of that frustration—politically driven suppression of news and information about federal agencies. We call on you to take a stand to stop the spin and let the sunshine in.”

The letter blasted the president for “the stifling of free expression [that] is happening despite your pledge on your first day in office to bring ‘a new era of openness’ to federal government.” It cited a recent survey that found, “40 percent of public affairs officers [in the federal government] admitted they blocked certain reporters because they did not like what they wrote.”

The Obama administration has even taken to censoring White House “pool reports,” from the rotating “pool” of reporters covering the president’s daily activities. Though the White House Press Office distributes the pool report to news outlets, federal agencies, and others, it has always been understood that the Press Office did not determine the content of the pool reports. No longer. On a number of occasions over the last six years, reporters have been told to change the reports or the White House would not distribute them.

In one illustrative incident, then-Deputy White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest nixed a passage by a
Washington Post
reporter that “contained a comment juxtaposing a speech Obama had given two days earlier lauding freedom of the press with the administration’s decision to limit access to presidential photo ops on the trip.”
¹³

Just how unprecedented and egregious is this kind of governmental interference with the media?
National Journal
’s Tom DeFrank told the
Washington Post
’s Paul Farhi that in his decades covering the White House he was only asked to alter a pool report one time. It was during the Ford administration and he refused. He said, “My view is the White House has no right to touch a pool report. It’s none of their business. If they want to challenge something by putting out a statement of their own, that’s their right. It’s also their prerogative to jawbone a reporter, which often happens. But they have no right to alter a pool report unilaterally.”

SPYING ON REPORTERS

More serious were cases of the Obama administration using the power of the federal government to harass reporters.

In 2010, the Justice Department obtained search warrants, authorized by Attorney General Eric Holder, and secretly seized phone records and e-mails of Fox News reporter James Rosen,
¹⁴
including a phone number belonging to his parents.
¹⁵
The Justice Department argued that Rosen was a co-conspirator with a contractor who had allegedly leaked information for reports Rosen filed on North Korea.
¹⁶
The investigation coincided with the White House’s increasingly vitriolic attacks on Fox News as not a real news network.
¹⁷
Attorneys for Rosen’s source argued that the government had shrugged off author Bob Woodward’s use of much more sensitive unauthorized revelations from high level administration sources in his 2010 book
Obama’s Wars
; and former Undersecretary of State John Bolton termed the material in Rosen’s reports “neither particularly sensitive nor all that surprising.”
¹⁸

In testimony before Congress in 2013, after the probe became public, Holder denied that the Justice Department had been preparing to prosecute Rosen and refused to acknowledge that he had crossed a line in authorizing the investigation.
¹⁹
Indeed, he called spying on a reporter “appropriate.” It was not until October 2014—a year after the Obama administration came under blistering criticism for its chilling overreach
²⁰
—that, after announcing his retirement, Holder conceded that “I could have been a little more
careful looking at the language that was contained in the filing that we made with the court—that he [Rosen] was labeled as a co-conspirator.”
²¹
That’s quite an understatement.