Watch: CNN Host Gets Fed Up With Obama’s Lecturing, Blows Lid Off The REAL Story
When President Barack Obama lectured journalists at an awards ceremony Monday night on how to do their jobs, he may not have been able to imagine the backlash he’d receive as a result.
A slew of journalists from the mainstream media have now taken aim at Obama for his “hypocritical job lecture.” Take, for instance, Jake Tapper’s response on his show The Lead with Jake Tapper.
After acknowledging Obama made many “salient points” and admitting his message was “a good one,” Tapper rhetorically asked, “Was President Obama the right messenger?”
Tapper then assigned a new title to the leader of the executive branch of government calling him the, “Media Critic in-Chief.”
Obama said in his speech, “A job well-done is more than just handing someone a microphone. It is to probe, and to question, and to dig deeper, and to demand more.”
While Tapper admits Obama’s message is appropriate, he also acknowledged the widespread belief among journalists the task of digging deeper “has been made far more difficult by his (Obama’s) administration than any in recent decades.”
Tapper then quoted Justin Elliot’s article in The Washington Post. Elliot addressed the enormous backlog of those requesting and failing to receive information under the Freedom of Information Act from the Obama Administration. Elliot wrote, “FOIA has been a disaster under his (Obama) watch.”
Elliot even wrote the Obama Administration has been “aggressively lobbying against reforms proposed in Congress.”
Tapper also cited an Associated Press report which stated, “The Obama Administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.” The CNN anchor, likewise, referenced the Committee to Protect Journalists which reported Obama’s Justice Department sent clear signals to journalists when it has been actively seizing journalists’ “phone records and emails,” and aggressively prosecuting “whistleblowers who leak classified information to the press.”
Tapper accused the Obama administration of using The Espionage Act to go after “leakers and whistleblowers [more] than all previous administrations combined.”
Tapper concluded his criticism of Obama and his administration by saying, “Mr. President, with all due respect, when one of the Washington Post’s editors involved in the coverage of Watergate says that your administration’s attempt to fight leaks and control the media is quote, ‘the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon Administration,’ well, maybe, just maybe, your lecturing would be better delivered to your own administration.”
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