Most Transparent Administration Ever Demands Edits to Reports Filed by White House Press Pool

One
of the ongoing sub-narratives of the Obama administration is how
incredibly unfriendly it has been to the press.

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson

described the Obama White House as “the most secretive White
House that I have ever been involved in covering,” specifically
noting her time covering Reagan and George W. Bush.

Times national security reporter James Risen
said earlier this year that the current administration was “the
greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at
least a generation,” and suggested that the administration
threatens reporters who do not pursue acceptable stories. 

Reporters should feel threatened by the administration’s
behavior. The administration has
captured phone logs from Associated Press reporters, and

tracked calls, emails, and location information about a senior
Fox News reporter. It’s pursued a record number of criminal leak
investigations. 

And,
according to The Washington Post, it has also sought
to edit pool reports from White House press.

Journalists who cover the White House say Obama’s press aides
have demanded — and received — changes in press-pool reports before
the reports have been disseminated to other journalists. They say
the White House has used its unusual role as the distributor of the
reports as leverage to steer coverage in a more favorable
direction.

The disputed episodes involve mostly trivial issues and minor
matters of fact. But that the White House has become involved at
all represents a troubling trend for journalists and has prompted
their main representative, the White House Correspondents’
Association, to consider revising its approach to pool
reporting.

The incidents noted in the story are generally pretty trivial:
One reporter was asked to remove a mention of Michelle Obama’s
workout, another to delete details of Obama presenting a longtime
reporter with a candle-lit dessert on her final trip with the
president, another to delete an early account of an Obama
appearance on “The Tonight Show” because the White House believed
it violated a publicity deal with the show. (Somehow I doubt the
reporter had a similar agreement.)

But even minor attempts to alter pool reports should be taken
seriously. The White House has no right to change the reports, no
right to edit or interfere with the work of independent journalists
before publication. 

And the White House has also pushed at least one reporter to
change his story in order to remove an unflattering comparison of
two Obama events. Back to the Post:

During the same trip, then-deputy press secretary Josh
Earnest flagged another of [Post reporter David]
Nakamura’s reports. This one contained a comment juxtaposing a
speech Obama had given two days earlier lauding freedom of the
press with the administration’s decision to limit access to
presidential photo ops on the trip.

Earnest, who succeeded Carney as press secretary in May,
considered Nakamura’s comparison unfair and asked him to take it
out, according to Nakamura. After an argument, the reporter
acquiesced.

It’s almost too perfect: The Obama administration doesn’t like
being portrayed as unfriendly to the press, so its press office
decides to stop a journalist from suggesting in a report that it
is.