Whatever line of work President Obama takes up after he leaves the White House Friday, we hope he quits his lectures on journalism.
We’ve covered him for eight years, and it would be perfunctory and tedious in one editorial to recap his administration. Because of this, and because Obama ended his Wednesday press conference on a personal note, we feel it fitting that our editorial on the last full day of his presidency should also sound a personal note.
It is this: Nobody in America has less credibility than Obama to tell us, the press, how to do our job.
Nevertheless, he began his final press conference explaining how a free press is essential to democracy.
“You’re supposed to be skeptics, you’re supposed to ask me tough questions,” he pontificated to the assembled reporters. “You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power and make sure that we are accountable to the people who sent us here. …” Et cetera, et cetera.
For what it’s worth (and it’s not very much), he is correct in what he said. And often through the past eight years, major news media covering this administration could have used this advice.
But it is sickening to be spoon-fed this pious rhetoric by a chief executive whose respect for the press was rhetorical and expedient — far more apparent than real. It is too rich coming from a president who has used his power to erode protections for reporters and limit access to government officials, while happily distributing falsehoods via the news media to the public.
Obama’s administration has moved to make investigative journalism a little more illegal. Obama used the Espionage Act nine times to target journalists’ sources within the federal government. That’s more than every previous president combined.
His administration named one reporter, Fox News’ James Rosen, an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a leak case.
It threatened to prosecute New York Times reporter James Risen if he didn’t disclose sources. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest wrote, “Obama’s attorney general repeatedly allowed the FBI to use intrusive measures against reporters more often than any time in recent memory.”
So, Obama was actively aggressive against a free press. But he was passively aggressive, too, taking opacity to new heights.
Ask around the Washington press corps, which is not a gang of right-wingers or birthers, and you will find broad agreement that Obama’s White House cut off day-to-day press access in an extraordinary way and to an extraordinary degree.
Obama did what he could to defang the Freedom of Information Act. He cut the workforce dedicated to fulfilling FOIA requests by nearly 10 percent. His administration responded more slowly to FOIA requests, argued before the courts for broader exemptions to FOIA, and denied more FOIA requests than any of its predecessors.
And then there were the president’s knowing and outright lies.
Obama fed falsehoods to news media and the public throughout his campaigns and his presidency. He promised not to raise taxes on the middle class, then raised taxes on the middle class and then disingenuously insisted that he’d kept his promise. He promised not to hire lobbyists, then hired lobbyists, then insisted he had kept that promise, too.
The biggest lie of the past eight years, a four Pinocchios, pants-on-fire whopper, was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Obama knew it was false but repeated it again and again until it was proven indisputably false.
A man who spends eight years deceiving the public and reporters — some of them wanted to be deceived — has no standing to lecture anyone on democratic accountability. A man who tries to outlaw some investigative journalism, keeps the press away from his policymakers, and narrows transparency laws has no standing to talk about the crucial role of the free press.
Now, as Obama becomes a private citizen, we no longer get to tell him how to do his job. He, of all people, should stop telling us how to do ours.
