For national newspapers, President Obama’s remarks on the Sony email hackings took precedence to what he had to say about the administration’s historical decision to ease up on embargoes against Cuba.
Following his nearly hour-long press conference on Friday, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today all posted stories to their front pages that focused on Obama’s Sony comments.
“President Obama on Friday said that the United States ‘will respond proportionally’ against North Korea for its cyberattacks on Sony Pictures, and criticized the studio for giving in to intimidation and pulling the satirical movie that provoked the attacks,” lead the Times.
At the Post: “President Obama said Friday that Sony Pictures ‘made a mistake’ by pulling a movie that sparked North Korea to launch a cyberattack against the company.”
USA Today and the Wall Street Journal wrote similar stories, as did the Washington Examiner.
Obama said that he disagreed with Sony’s decision to cancel the theatrical debut of “The Interview” and that the administration is deliberating how to respond to the cyberattack from North Korea.
On Cuba, Obama said, “If you’ve done the same thing for 50 years and nothing’s changed, you should try something different.”
The administration announced this week that it would begin to thaw relations with Cuba after a 50-year embargo against the communist country. The move drew some divisions within the Republican Party, with some congressional Republicans charging that it was a form of appeasement to the Castro regime.
The first question in the news conference was about the Sony mess and Obama wasted no time linking his disappointment with Sony’s decision with his concerns about the dangerous precedent of censorship that might follow.
“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like,” Obama said.
The Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Examiner all put Obama’s censorship worries in the tops of their lead stories on the news conference.
The New York Times, however, merely alluded to it in its lead story, which emphasized instead the president’s remarks about his decision to seek normalized relations with Cuba.
