Obama Bars Press Scrutiny and Forces the Pentagon to Do the Media’s Jobs

Original Link: http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/07/22/obama-bars-press-scrutiny-and-forces-the-pentagon-to-do-the-medias-jobs/

By SusanUnPC

If you read today’s New York Times press release article, “For Obama, a First Step Is Not a Misstep,” you’d assume the two reporters were witnesses to Obama’s meetings in Iraq. However, if you check out the gripes from reporters in Politico’s 24/7 Playbook, you’d find out that reporters didn’t accompany Obama and that the PENTAGON is taking and dispersing the photos:

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” from Baghdad, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell objects to the “message management” that resulted in three days of images of Senator Obama that were almost entirely – except for a lone Iraq interview with Terry Moran – produced and released by the Pentagon.

Andrea Mitchell, re Obama: “He didn’t have reporters with him. He didn’t have a press pool. He didn’t do a press conference while he was on the ground in either Afghanistan or Iraq. … You’re seeing selected pictures taken by the military … So, there’s a real press issue here. Politically, it’s smart as can be. But we have not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before.

“I have great respect for the military, of what they do best, which is to fight war, keep the peace, do all sorts of economic and civil reconstruction here in Iraq. I don’t think journalism is the prime thing that we recruit them and pay them for.”

As I reported yesterday, the press plane didn’t depart from Chicago until July 20th:

[N]one of the press was allowed to go with Obama to Iraq or Afghanistan:

Obama doesn’t have press traveling on his government-arranged Iraq/Afghanistan trip. He’ll be joined in the Middle East by a plane of staff and press that took off LAST NIGHT [July 20, 2008] from Chicago.

As the Politico report above the fold indicates, Obama gave only one interview, to Terry Moran of ABC News. Watch the video (transcript included) as Obama gets testy with Moran.

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UPDATES:

Memeorandum.com has much more, including Townhall’s “No Outtakes for Obama?“:

Andrea Mitchell has made it clear that the glowing photo-ops coming from Barack’s trip aren’t the products of journalistic investigation, but rather simply selected hand-outs from either the military or the Obama campaign.

Since when did the MSM complacently and quietly (except for Mitchell, it seems) serve as nothing more than a propaganda arm for a presidential campaign — much less the military? But has any other member of the media objected to the fact that it’s quiescently beaming home simply the information that the Obama campaign wants to offer it?

Then there’s Newsbuster’s “Andrea on Obama Trip: ‘What Some Would Call Fake Interviews’“:

Andrea Mitchell might be a doyenne of the liberal media, but she has her reporter’s pride and principles, both of which have been trampled by the way the Obama campaign has managed the media during the candidate’s current trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. Mitchell let loose on this evening’s Hardball, speaking of “fake interviews” and indicating we don’t know the truth of the trip because we don’t know what was edited out of the video that’s been released.

Before Mitchell made her displeasure known, Roger Simon of Politico, Chris Matthews’s other guest during the segment, depicted the images coming out of the war zone as all Obama could have dreamed of. …