Freedom Line Blog

With apologies to the band Buffalo Springfield, there’s something happening at the Obama White House, and it is exactly clear: the freedom of the professional press is being severely curtailed in its coverage of the president.  No less a liberal mandarin than the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank compares this week’s Obama-hosted Nuclear Summit to a May Day parade in Washington, D.C.

World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow.

They entered a capital that had become a military encampment, with camo-wearing military police in Humvees and enough Army vehicles to make it look like a May Day parade on New York Avenue, where a bicyclist was killed Monday by a National Guard truck.

In the middle of it all was Obama — occupant of an office once informally known as “leader of the free world” — putting on a clinic for some of the world’s greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.

Milbank goes on to detail reactions by members of the foreign press to the restricted access.  The most disturbing come from reporters based in Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan who chide American notions of a free press as overblown.

Though by itself, the restricted access might not cause concern, as Milbank points out, it’s just the most recent example in a well developed pattern of open secrecy cultivated by the Obama White House.  How long will it take before other members of the mainstream media take Milbank’s position?