Fox analysts: Obama is manipulating the librul press in a 'historic' way
Liz Trotta has already wished that Obama could be assassinated along with bin Laden, so it's not difficult to work out where her political affiliations lie, but it's still a bit rich to listen to her tell us that the press are giving Obama an easy ride.
No-one who witnessed the way that the Washington press corps laid down and died in front of Bush's march to war in Iraq could take what she is saying remotely seriously.Trotta: You know, Eric, we're really witnessing something historic going on with the presidential news conference. President Obama has taken control of it like no other president I've ever seen. By eliminating, for example, the top newspapers, he's really -- which by the way, as you know, which are viewed as the intellectual muscle of the media -- he's managed to show something different. That is, he's going to tailor the questions and the answers to the way he wants them.
Now, there are competing agendas here. The press is supposed to be there to represent the people. The president is there to protect his policies and he wants to be re-elected. But here we are in the middle of a social and and economic revolution, probably the biggest we've had in the country's history, and nobody seems to be able to get a straight answer.
Instead, what we're presented with is preselected questions in a tightly controlled news conference where, at the beginning, the president reads a very self-serving statement from a large movie screen, and then he calls on people, for example, from Univision, and from Stars and Stripes, and from Ebony.
Now, this isn't to say that these people have a right to get a slice of the pie, but let's face it -- the tough questions are going to come from the big guys in media, and I'm talking about mainly newspaper people here, because the television networks certainly haven't covered themselves in glory.
Indeed, Ari Fleischer has already made it clear that Bush, contrary to what Trotta is claiming, had a list of journalists which he called upon:
Further, during the February 9 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Fleischer was asked by host Bill O'Reilly if "George Bush came in ... with a list of guys he was going to call on." Fleischer responded, "Yeah, I used to prepare it for him. I would give him a grid, show him where every reporter is seated. And there are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, as you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot-coms and other oddballs who come in there who aren't really mainstream." Fleischer added: "And I used to put them all out in one section. I would call it Siberia. And I told the president, 'Don't call on Siberia. Just stay right here and call on these people on the grid in front of you.' "This is simply a further indication of the Fox News lie machine. The people who turned themselves into cheerleaders for Bush and the Iraq war now claim that the media are being manipulated by Obama, simply because the rest of the media aren't pushing Fox's aggressive Republican agenda.
And the notion, as pushed by Trotta, that "the big guys" ask tough questions, is simply fanciful. We didn't witness any of that in the lead up to the Iraq war.
Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.
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