Liz Trotta is shocked, shocked we tell you, at how the Obama White House is managing its press conferences:
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.
Trotta was promptly corrected about claiming that the questions were preselected, and she admitted this, saying the questioners were preselected instead, and "that is brand new in the history of press conferences."
Bollocks.
The Wall Street Journal tried trotting out a similar claim this week, and Media Matters promptly destroyed it:
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