C’mon, no one’s this sensitive to bad press.
Well, almost no one.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gina Channell-Allen, president of the Pleasanton Weekly in Pleasanton, California, said that her paper “received a call from the White House asking us to take out part of the story because it reflected poorly on the First Lady.”
The story in question was a soft feature about Marine One titled, “Inside Marine One, President Obama’s helicopter,” that ran in the paper on April 20. Pleasanton staffer Amory Gutierrez “didn’t get to ride in ‘Marine One,’” she wrote in her story, “but I did get the VIP tour and took photographs of the otherwise unseen aircraft.”
She also wrote a sentence that the White House thought made FLOTUS look snooty.
“Basically the reporter said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact,” Allen wrote in her email.
The weirdest part of this, of course, is that the WH ended up increasing the odds that the story would get picked up by bigger media when it decided to contact the publisher to complain. She was probably shocked to find that someone so high up was paying attention to a small paper 3,000 miles away and was itching to tell someone about it. And in fact, according to Daily Caller reporter Mike Riggs, she volunteered the info to the DC after reading their story about the latest White House tantrum over its press coverage. So why’d they go ahead and tip her off that her paper’s story had irked them? The answer, I assume, is that they’ve become highly attuned to how modern media, especially online media, gets its content.
I was talking about this story and said the WH thought the paper made Michelle seem ”snotty.”
LOL!
I guess it was actually ”snooty.”
LOL!
Close, but no cigar!
Do First Amendment rights mean anything to anybody, anymore?
JG, under normal circumstances, yes, but we are talking about the First Family. The First Family doesn’t necessarily mean they believe in the First Amendment; after all, this is a trivial incident, if the press, especially a paper no one outside of a small farming community has ever heard of, is allowed to publish this, larger newspapers will assume they can publish more damaging rhetoric and this is precisely why the WH wants material submitted to them first or they threaten to cut off access. A simple but effective method of controlling a sycophantic press, that is normally so willing to sacrifice the First Amendment to be part of the Obamanation Press Corps and get perks like touring Mechelle’s Helio, that’s a lot different than covering a new barber shop’s grand opening.
The First Family is the Last Family when it comes to the First Amendment.
This is just another example of the incompetence of our very thin-skinned president.
@Skookum:
Thank you, Skooks, for elucidating the point I made. Despite what liberals believe about Obama, the fact is that this is an ongoing pattern, of his belief that the Constitution does not apply to him, and that he can change it, at will, to benefit himself whenever, and however, he deems necessary. And it applies to his family, his admin, and those friends he favors, such as the union bosses.
Yes, the little paper can print anything as long as it is approved by the White House first; Stalin would be proud of the progress. That is Freedom of the Press in the Obamanation. The next step will be…