White House Alinsky-ing of media continues

The Obama WHite House kicked off its "get in line or else" campaign against the media with it's now infamous assault against Fox News Channel, a post that the WSJ's OpinionJournal picked up and ran with.

But brashness of the White House's attack on FNC was (eventually) too much even for the rest of the W.H. reporters and they started to push back, perhaps understanding, as I wrote, that FoxNews Channel was the actual target. "The bullseye target of this campaign is all the public media."

But White House's war against a free press has continued. Just last month ago there was White House retaliation against the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper because its White House pool reporter - gasp! - used her cell phone to record and post online video of "a protest at a San Francisco fundraiser" for the Obama campaign. The White House's weak excuse was that reporter Carla Marinucci was a print reporter and had no business taking video of anything. Seriously, that's what the W.H. said.

And mind you, San Francisco is perhaps the most liberal media market in the whole country.

So today it is Boston's turn.

The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.”

“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit.

Glenn Reynolds gets the last word in the column:

Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed White House-press relations at right-leaning Instapundit.com, said a pattern appears to be developing.

“It’s all about control,” Reynolds said. “At some point this will blow back on them. Most presidents behave in a more refined fashion. Experience has shown that acting presidential is good politics and to their advantage.”

But that's is all "progressivism" is about: control. And more than anything, they want to control discourse and debate. From such control, all other power can be gained.

Update: Related - "Veteran Journalists: Today's White House Reporters Are Too Timid"

And longtime NBC and ABC reporter Sander Vanocur: "You want to know what's wrong with the press? The press is what's wrong with the press.