Plan B Forum

Why President Obama keeps the press away – playing golf with Tiger Woods doesn’t look good with 12 million Americans out of work and a $16 trillion debt

Barack Obama has kept the press well away this President’s Day (Washington's Birthday) weekend (hat tip: Drudge Report) as he golfs with Tiger Woods in Florida. As Politico’s Dylan Byers writes:


Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, released a statement Sunday evening in which he said the press corps had been given no access to the president, who was joined on his outing by star golfer Tiger Woods, and that the WHCA would fight for greater transparency in the days ahead.

"Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend," Henry said in a statement, relayed in a White House pool report. "There is a very simple but important principle we will continue to fight for today and in the days ahead: transparency."

More details on the president’s golfing getaway at a highly exclusive club are provided by the Associated Press, which reported earlier:


President Barack Obama played golf Sunday with Tiger Woods, the White House said Sunday. Once the sport's dominant player before his career was sidetracked by scandal, Woods joined Obama at the Floridian, a secluded and exclusive yacht and golf club on Florida's Treasure Coast where Obama is spending the long Presidents Day weekend. The two had met before, but Sunday was the first time they played together.

The White House, which has promised to be the most open and transparent in history, has prohibited any media coverage of Obama's golf outing.

The foursome also included Jim Crane, a Houston businessman who owns the Floridian and baseball's Houston Astros, and outgoing US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, a former mayor of Dallas, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Crane and Kirk also were part of Obama's foursome on Saturday, the White House said.

President Obama’s latest mini-vacation follows in the wake of his lavish Christmas/ New Year holiday on Kailua Beach in Oahu, Hawaii, which cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $7 million. As veteran White House reporter Keith Koffler noted at the time:


In a move that is rich in irony, President Obama agreed Tuesday night to sign an emergency deficit reduction bill that does almost nothing to rein in spending and then jetted out to Hawaii to resume his vacation at an extra cost of more than $3 million to taxpayers.

The price tag is in addition to more than $4 million that is already being spent on the Obamas’ Hawaii idyll, bringing the total cost of the excursion to well over $7 million. The added cost was incurred because by the time the Obamas return from Hawaii – whenever that is – the president will have used Air Force One to travel to Honolulu and back twice.

According to Koffler, "the total cost to taxpayers of Obama’s vacations to Hawaii since becoming president is likely in excess of $20 million, and possibly much, much more."

It is not hard to see why Barack Obama is rather camera shy over his latest golfing outing, this time with sports superstar Tiger Woods. The optics certainly don’t look good for a president who has in the past called on Americans to make sacrifices, while blatantly refusing to do so himself. It’s certainly not an image the president wants to project to the 12.3 million Americans who are out of work, or the millions more who are also seeking full-time employment. Nor does it suggest he is serious about reining in the $16.5 trillion of debt his government owes, $6 trillion of which was racked up in his first term of office. Flying Air Force One to Florida at a cost of about $180,000 per hour hardly sends the right message to US taxpayers, who have just seen their payroll taxes go up. This is the latest demonstration of an overwhelming culture of impunity in a celebrity-obsessed Obama White House, frequently coupled with a disturbing lack of transparency that would be roundly condemned by the likes of The New York Times, NBC, or CBS if a Republican were in office. It is also a presidency that is rife with hypocrisy, as Obama’s words in Virginia in April 2011 perfectly convey:


We are going to have to ask everybody to sacrifice. And if we’re asking community colleges to sacrifice, if we’re asking people who are going to see potentially fewer services in their neighborhoods to make a little sacrifice, then we can ask millionaires and billionaires to make a little sacrifice.

President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.

Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

* * *

The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National GolfClub, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool “holding” in the clubhouse and often covering — and even questioning — the president on the first and last holes.

Obama boasted Thursday during a Google+ Hangout from the White House: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” The people who cover him day to day see it very differently.

“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”

By DONOVAN SLACK |
2/9/12 4:18 PM EST

President Obama has not held a solo press conference for nearly three months -- the second-longest stretch in his presidency. He delivered two speeches today but didn't take any questions so it seemed like a good time to crunch some numbers. Here are the longest periods between solo pressers since the president took office, according to presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar:

110 days: March 11 - June 29, 2011

88 days: Nov. 13, 2011 - present

84 days: Sept. 25 - Dec. 18, 2009

83 days: July 15 - Oct. 6, 2011

75 days: June 27 - Sept. 10, 2010

The number of times he's solo'ed in front of the press corps, which typically asks tough questions and has caught him off guard in the past, has steadily ticked downward each year -- 11 in 2009, 10 in 2010, and eight in 2011. He stopped doing prime-time conferences long ago. At his last one, in July 2009, he spoke off-the-cuff about the arrest of his friend, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates.

White House officials say Obama regularly sits for interviews and takes questions when appearing with foreign leaders. They also say the current stretch of 88 days includes his Christmas vacation in Hawaii.

Kumar, a professor at Towson University and author of “Managing the president’s message,” said that after a few years in office, it becomes more difficult for sitting presidents to field impromptu questions from the full press corps.

"As time goes on, there are unfolding events, problems and issues that at a particular time you may want to avoid discussing. You may be in the middle of delicate negotiations," Kumar said. "So it's hard to scheduled them in advance or schedule them reguarly."

President Obama's on the record Interviews since Benghazi:

• 9/11: Miami’s DJ Laz — aka “Pimp with a Limp”
• 9/13: Noticiero Telemundo
• 9/18: Late Show with David Letterman
• 9/20: Univision Town Hall
• 9/23: 60 Minutes
• 9/24: The View
• 9/25: NBC News/Education Nation
• 10/10: World News with Diane Sawyer
• 10/12: The Yo! Show (where he deftly navigated the Nicki Minaj-Mariah Carey feud)
• 10/11: Cleveland Sports Radio 92.3 FM
• 10/18: Z107.9 Hip Hop Cleveland (radio interview)
• 10/18: Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• 10/24: The Tonight Show
• 10/26: MTV
• 10/26: Us Weekly -- select questions/answers from POTUS to appear

Other on the record interviews since Obama's last White House News Conference:

• Jimmy Fallon
• Glamour Magazine
• Half-time Interview with ESPN2 (USA basketball vs. Brazil where the president declared that the Dream Team would beat our current Olympic Team)
• Entertainment Tonight
• People Magazine
• Essence Magazine
• KOB-FM, Albuquerque [talked about his favorite type of chili and “Call Me Maybe”]

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/benghazi-gate ... z2LSGOUhto

February 4, 2010
White House Memo
Few News Conferences, but Still Taking Questions
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Over the last two weeks, President Obama has taken questions from unemployed workers in Ohio, students in Florida and a cancer survivor in New Hampshire. He took questions from YouTube users, Senate Democrats and even House Republicans. Almost everyone, it seems, but the White House press corps.

After a year in office, Mr. Obama has managed to do what every modern president may have wanted to do but never did: effectively shut out the reporters who work just a few feet from the Oval Office. He has not had a full-scale White House news conference in seven months, the longest such stretch by any president in a decade. And he has made a practice of not taking reporters’ questions at day-to-day events, as other presidents did.

None of that means that Mr. Obama has shielded himself from public scrutiny. But he has fundamentally altered the way a president deals with the news media. Instead of open-ended sessions with multiple reporters, he prefers one-on-one interviews, particularly with television anchors. He gives far more interviews than his two most recent predecessors did, reflecting the conclusion that the format is a more effective means for getting his message through.

“The favorite news outlet of conservatives ranks just ninth in presser questions in President Obama’s first term, getting to ask questions at only half the rate of the ‘Big Three’ broadcast networks,” reports Eric Ostermeier, a University of Minnesota media analyst who literally counted the number of questions at White House press conferences from 2009 through Monday.

Mr. Obama generally favored the “Big Three” — ABC, CBS and NBC — and the Associated Press, the researcher found.

“As for FOX, these have been relatively lean years in terms of getting the presidential nod at news conferences,” Mr. Ostermeier says.

His analysis finds that ABC reporters have been called on the most frequently during Mr. Obama’s 36 solo news conferences; the president sought them out in 29 of them. CBS reporters made the grade in 28 conferences, followed by the Associated Press with 27, and NBC with 26. Bloomberg News is No. 5 with 20, then Reuters with 17; the New York Times and CNN each with 16.

FOX was called on in just 14 press conferences, Mr. Ostermeier notes.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/wat ... z2LSHqEdJt

Until the party which caused 8 has continued 4 years of stagnation and added ever exploding deficits followed by the worst continued and worsening collapse in 4 generations tells us what they did wrong and won't do again we should refuse to listen to them.

More statistics here:

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/newsconferences.php

I hate to spoil your bullshit party

Ronald Reagan, Isn't he the president with the fewest press conferences, ever? Only 1/4 as many as Obama?