The Presidency and the Press
❧ The White House distrusts the media, reporters feel persecuted. A former Obama spokesman on the history of the toxic relationship

August 4, 2014
By Reid Cherlin

Somewhere between Seoul and Kuala Lumpur, with Air Force One cruising just shy of the speed of sound, Barack Obama decided to have a word with the press.

It has been tradition for Obama to make a visit back to the press cabin during the last leg of exhausting presidential foreign trips – just a friendly off-the-record chat – but this junket, a barnburner taking the chief executive to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines this past April, wouldn't be over for three days. The president's blood was up over two analysis pieces in The New York Times. One, written by national security correspondent David Sanger and timed for Obama's arrival in Seoul, accused the administration of dangerously underestimating Kim Jong-Un. A second story, splashed on the paper's front page, had effectively declared the trip a failure while it was still in progress: "President Obama encountered setbacks to two of his most cherished foreign-policy projects on Thursday," it read, citing the inability to reach a trade deal with Japan and the breakdown of Middle East peace talks. That piece had been co-bylined by White House correspondent Mark Landler, who had been tagging along on the president's jaunt and hence was at that moment sitting in the press cabin.

Jay Carney, the press secretary, arrived to give the heads-up and secure the standard agreement from the reporters to treat Obama's visit as off the record, meaning that the contents could never be published or broadcast. Carney was followed by the president himself, who assembled his lanky eminence against the bulkhead at the fore of the cabin and proceeded to dress down Landler and his colleagues...

Read on at Rolling Stone ➝