Media: The Obama administration has picked another fight with a dissident newspaper, kicking the Boston Herald out of the press pool on an unprecedented claim that its coverage is unfair. Who died and elected them judge?
If the mainstream media had any gumption at all, they would vigorously protest the strange, new self-appointed arbiter of "fair" press coverage as an implicit threat to their own capacity to cover the news fairly.
What the White House has done by telling the Boston Herald it can no longer send a pool reporter to cover local campaign events on behalf of the media is another baby step toward state control of the media, using the carrot of access against the stick of exile.
Outside the likes of, say, Ecuador, this is a first.
As it stands, the Boston Herald is on its own, with its media colleagues in other organizations largely silent as a vindictive White House press office gets away with determining what's "fair."
It's not as if the Herald was making up stories — as the New York Times or Washington Post have been caught doing. Its "crime" to the White House was an unrelated editorial decision to run former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's opinion piece on "the Obama misery index" on its front page two months ago.
Seems the newly self-appointed goons of "fairness" never noticed that what the former governor thinks is of particular interest to Massachusetts readers.
Nor did it notice that the Boston Herald has been unusually hard on Romney in both its news and editorial coverage in the past.
"What are you afraid of, Mr. President?" the Herald's Joe Battenfeld wrote.
It's part of an ever-widening pattern of media abuse.
Just two weeks ago, the White House duked it out with the San Francisco Chronicle, a lefty paper in a lefty town but one with an independent voice.
Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci was threatened with the same booting the Herald got because of White House displeasure at her filming of a bunch of looney left protestors improbably criticizing Obama.
"I get that all powerful people and institutions want to control their image and their message. That's part of their job, to create a mythology that allows them to continue being powerful," wrote editor Phil Bronstein. "But part of the press' job is to do the opposite, to strip away the cloaks and veneers."
Meanwhile, an Orlando Sentinel pool reporter was stuffed into a closet and held against his will on the Joe Biden campaign trail, while the Pleasanton (Calif.) Weekly was warned by the White House its coverage of first lady Michelle Obama was insufficiently flattering.
The media silence over these repeated violations of press freedom is baffling. Can the fact that 30 mainstream media outlets have been co-opted by $48 million in spending by George Soros, a top campaign ally of President Obama, have something to do with this?
Or is the urge to fawn over Obama more important than covering the news without fear or favor?
The one thing that's obvious is that the media continue to take it with little push-back. And as they do, the bouncers of the White House press office grow bolder.
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