As the media is still freaking over White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's limited press briefing on Friday, which excluded outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Politico, CNN's Jake Tapper shared this little reminder on Twitter.
Flashback to 2008: "Obama Campaign Kicks Off the Plane Reporters from Newspapers Whose Coverage it Doesn't Like" https://t.co/4j8bgkfIRJ
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 27, 2017
As the piece explains, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign told three reporters from the New York Post, the Washington Times, and the Dallas Morning News that they would not be invited on his plane. The decision was pretty suspicious at the time, considering all three had just endorsed his Republican opponent, John McCain.
Both Obama's campaign and Sean Spicer used limited space as the excuse for leaving certain media outlets off the list. Yet, it's hard to ignore the political context.
Any attempts to justify this kind of behavior are "hypocritical and corrupt," Tapper said on Twitter after his initial tweet. The reporters Obama's campaign booted off his plane were "solid," he said. At issue was the newspapers for which they wrote, Tapper insisted.
Many disagreed with Tapper's comparison, noting that it's unfair to compare Obama's campaign with Trump's White House, because the latter demands a higher level of accountability. Yet, we all know the Obama White suffered from a severe lack of transparency as well.