Obama, The Puppet Master

Great Excerpts that I resonate with from a great POLITICO article:

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

~Former Clinton Press Aide: “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing."

~"The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?

~"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."

~"One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White House is extensive government creation of content (photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press...But I don’t blame the White House for doing it, because networks and newspapers use them. So the White House has built its own content distribution network.”

~"His 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, was equally adept at substance-free encounters with reporters."

~"They are more disciplined about cracking down on staff that leak, or reporters who write things they don’t like."

~"Conservatives assume a cozy relationship between this White House and the reporters who cover it. Wrong. Many reporters find Obama himself strangely fearful of talking with them and often aloof and cocky when he does."

~"Obama himself sees little upside to wide-ranging interviews with the beat reporters for the big newspapers — hence, the stiffing of even The New York Times since 2010."

~"The super-safe, softball interview is an Obama specialty"

~“This administration loves to boast about how transparent they are, but they’re transparent about things they want to be transparent about,” said Mark Knoller, the veteran CBS News reporter. “He gives interviews not for our benefit, but to achieve his objective.”

~* They are also masters of scrutiny avoidance. The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.

~* While White House officials deny it is intentional, this administration —like its predecessors — does some good old-fashioned bullying of reporters: making clear there will be no interviews, or even questions at press conferences, if aides are displeased with their coverage.

~“The goal is not to satisfy the requester, but doing what is necessary to get into people’s homes and communicate your agenda to the American people.” -Jen Psaki, Former Obama Campaign Press Secretary

Obama, The Puppet Master || POLITICO

Obama No George W. Bush on Drones

President Obama is reported to have said last Tuesday during a private meeting with the Senate Democratic Conference that he is no Dick Cheney on drones -- and according to data compiled by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism he isn't quite George W. Bush either.

The London-based TBIJ reports that under President Obama CIA drones strikes in tribal parts of Pakistan have occurred at a rate six times faster than his predecessor George W. Bush in parts of Pakistan, as of December 2012. That rate was about once every five days during his first term.

From 2004 to 2013, there were 365 drone strikes. Out of those, 313 were under the Obama administration.

Under President Obama, 2,152 people were reported killed, of whom 290 were civilians. By contrast, 438 people were killed under President Bush, of whom 182 were civilians.

Under Bush, more children were killed by drone strikes (112) than under Obama (64) in his first term.

The 300th drone strike occurred under President Obama in early December 2012. The first drone strike to occur under his watch was just three days into his presidency, which is reported to have killed 12 civilians. Ironically, President Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize not long afterward. Submissions for the Nobel Peace Prize were due by Feb. 1, 2009 -- just days into the Obama first term.

The Dick Cheney reference was reportedly a reference to the the lack of oversight under his predecessor's administration.

"This is not Dick Cheney we're talking about here," according to two Senators who POLITICO reports did not want to be named. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is reportedly to have brought the issue to the President, and the President assured Democratic Senators that he's more open to transparency than Bush.

Numerous Democratic lawmakers on both the House and the Senate side of Congress have recently demanded more information from the White House on the administration's drone policy.

Last week, eight House Democrats led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) sent a letter to President Obama asking for more details on the administration's drone policy.

On the Senate side, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) voted against the confirmation of Obama's now-CIA Director John Brennan, for not releasing legal memos pertaining to drones. Rockefeller himself raised the issue in a hearing last week as well, as POLITICO reports.

And of course, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) raised the issue of drones strikes on American citizens in a historic filibuster earlier in March.