No, that's not what she covered at all.
She essentially equated the Obama efforts to stifle dissenting voices by trying to delegitimize and destroy them with the previous administrations giving friendly news outlets greater access. Those are vastly different things.
Apparently, her effort to muddle the discussion and interject a warped moral equivalence worked, at least with you.
As stated earlier, not only is this example vastly different than what has been done in modern history (Nixon's enemies list is the closest thing in the past 50 years), but it's made all the more alarming when you identify the people who work in and around this administration, and you notice their affinity for "democratic" (small d) leaders like Hugo Chavez and what he's done.
Ah – I guess just attacking the media out front is worse than secretly going behind closed doors and playing favorites…
How about the worse of both worlds – attacking the media – secretly.
Reagan’s staff did it in the 80s. I have a friend who worked for AEI (Ailes’ PR and advertising firm, and if you don’t know who Ailes is – think head of Fox News) at the time, and they had a direct mail campaign that originated from the staff at the White House. They would send ‘loyal’ Reagan supporters a direct mail piece that included a sample of a letter. People were encouraged to copy the letter – filling in the ‘blanks’ with their personal information and mail it off to that old nasty newspaper in their town. You know, the one that was portraying Reagan in a poor light.
The letters basically said that you felt the newspaper wasn’t being fair in their portrayal of the president, and if they didn’t straighten out, not only would you drop your subscription to the newspaper, but you would start to boycott the products advertised in the newspaper and you would tell those companies just why you were going to boycott their products.
So – here, not only was an administration very pointedly attacking the media – they were doing it subversively… The letters certainly didn’t indicate that they originated in the White House – they were from a ‘concerned citizens' group’.
Once again – all administrations go after stories/media outlets that in their opinion aren’t being truthful, or portraying issues fairly. Heck, Nixon actually sent Spiro out one summer to attack the media in their home towns.
You might see it as a gray area – but administrations are allowed to attack back. If it is the White House’s opinion that misinformation is being spread by a particular media source – then they have the right to defend their policies. If they notice a pattern, then they can claim that the source might be biased.
If you notice at the end of the article posted-the White House went against a stupid article in Politico that talked about how ‘friends of Roman Polanski’ sent Obama $34,000 in campaign contributions. Wow – talk about trying to have some sort of weird 6 degrees of separation thing going on here. You know – I bet there were also descendants of men who were in the SS who sent Obama campaign contributions, heck, probably great, great, great, great nieces of the Marquis de Sade could have sent him funds, and who knows, people whose families once owned slaves probably sent him money… What an inane story line.
