President-elect Donald Trump’s team has taken a lot of heat for threatening to kick a CNN reporter out of Trump Tower for being “rude” during Wednesday’s press conference.
The media heaped on Trump for his treatment of the nerwork, forcing incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer to say he would “absolutely not” kick out news groups for critical coverage.
But the media are conveniently forgetting that in 2008 then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign ejected three reporters from his campaign place. The three happened to work for newspapers that endorsed Arizona Republican Sen. [score]John McCain[/score] in that year’s presidential race.
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The Obama campaign did so in the final four days of the race, ABC News reported in 2008, claiming that “a limited number of seats forced it to make the tough decision of which journalists would be permitted to follow” Obama on the campaign trail.
“Unfortunately, demand for seats on the plane during this final weekend has far exceeded supply, and because of logistical issues we made the decision not to add a second plane,” former Obama campaign adviser Anita Dunn told ABC.
But that excuse didn’t pass muster at the time with serious observers, especially in light of the fact Team Obama found room on the plane for nonpolitical writers affiliated with Glamour, Jet, and Ebony magazines.
“It feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth,” John Solomon of the Washington Times, one of the ejected reporters, told ABC.
We’ve covered him since 2007 and paid our dues. By the numbers we’ve covered Obama longer and given more coverage to him than many of the other people who were given seats.
It is also worth noting that Barack Obama has given short shrift to the Fox News Channel throughout his presidency, unfairly claiming that the network’s sole mission was to “take down” his presidency. After the 2016 election ended, he blamed that network, which he said is on “in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country” dispensing “fake news.”
This report, by Michael Bastasch, was cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
