@racing_kitty - I see that you're angry as shit at the current Pres, but you'd say that Trump has a better interaction with the press than President Obama?
You could say that I'm not enamored with him. Angry as shit is an adjective that best describes my attitude towards Congress. POTUS behaves less abrasively than Trump while in the presence of press reporters. However, his administration's track record as far as the press goes has been less than stellar. The
New York Times, as well as other news outlets, have made note that the Obama administration has been harder on whistleblowers and the reporters they talk to than any other administration up to this point. I'm not talking about perennial conservative talking heads like Megyn Kelly or some blonde fuckwit named Doocey. I'm talking about the likes of Bob Schieffer, Jill Abramson, and Susan Page. Care to guess who they voted for in '08 and again in '12?
You don't have to like the press, or trust them any further than you can throw your truck, but you must admit that as long as they are impartial (I know, impartial reporters are extinct these days), the light that they shed on their subjects is vital to the public knowing what their elected officials are up to. Just like the old saw about good fences make good neighbors, good reporting makes for an informed populace which one hopes would lead to good governance. Deep Throat talking to the press led to the downfall of Nixon. Would the shenanigans of the Nixon administration ever have fully come to light if that hadn't happened? Would he have stepped down if the reporter that broke Watergate got hauled in on charges of violating the Espionage Act (1917)?
It's not just the government, either. When you were younger, did you ever watch the crew from 60 Minutes pop up with cameras in tow to call to task some executive that got caught doing what he shouldn't have been? For every one crooked bastard that got caught, there were several more who were discouraged from doing what they shouldn't have been doing just because of the fear of seeing Morley Safer or Ed Bradley on their doorsteps.
There's a reason that the press enjoys the protection of the First Amendment like it does. That's a lot of power in their collective hands. Love or hate them, the press have a purpose. For Obama's supporters to be this worried about press freedoms is a damning indictment of how business is being conducted. While POTUS himself is not rude or crass to the press, you damned well can't say he's not aware of how his cabinet is handling the press because there's too many staffers to keep track of (didn't someone make that argument for HRC?). He has a press secretary (Robert Gibbs) and an adviser (Valarie Jarrett) who answer directly to him and take orders directly from him (or from ValJar, depending). The press today dances uncomfortably close at times to the line between news and propoganda (although MSNBC blew past that line eons ago). Their concerns do not strike me as a collective temper tantrum over being denied access to something.
Take from that what you will.
