Columbia Journalism School held a conference to commemorate World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday. There was a special video presented by former President Barack Obama. His pre-taped video was 5 minutes 34 seconds long. Throughout it, Obama sang the praises of journalists and journalism students.

That was a bit of a surprise. Why was Barack Obama the special speaker? Obama’s relationship with the press during his presidency was sketchy. While the press basically took an eight-year nap and relentlessly turned a blind eye to any potentially unpleasant news coverage of him, Obama was busy calling for a boycott of Fox News Channel. The Department of Justice spied on journalists. They seized records of journalists.

Remember the scandal that went nowhere over the Obama administration spying on Fox reporter James Rosen? Rosen’s parents even got dragged into that one. In May 2013, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had monitored Rosen’s activities by tracking his visits to the State Department. They did so through phone traces, timing phone calls, and his personal emails in an investigation of possible news leaks of classified information. He was under suspicion of being a “co-conspirator” in a criminal spying case. Only Rosen from the conservative-leaning cable news channel was given that treatment. Obama refused to sit for an interview on Fox. It was behavior never before seen by a president against one specific network.

Obama lectured about ‘widespread disinformation’.

This World Press Freedom Day, take a look at @BarackObama's remarks at the @ColumbiaJourn Faultlines: Democracy conference, and why the free press is vital for democracy to survive and thrive. pic.twitter.com/k7UHOsvWkh

— The Obama Foundation (@ObamaFoundation) May 3, 2023

It’s just a bit much. He acts like we’ve forgotten how he deliberately divided Americans against each other according to political party, race, and class. Obama was concerned about saving democracy during his administration.

Though Obama praised journalists for their impact on democracy, his administration was criticized for an “unprecedented” number of prosecutions of government sources as well as seizures of journalists’ records.

“In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press,” former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. wrote in a 2015 report on U.S. press freedoms under the Obama administration. “The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”

After eight years of the Obama administration turning government agencies against conservatives – like the IRS and Lois Lerner targeting conservative media people for audits and the Tea Party – and Obama mocking voters in Pennsylvania who cling to their guns and God, you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t find him the best messenger of touting journalists as the protectors of democracy when he was doing what he could to keep the press under his thumb. And most of them let him.

CORRECTION:
The first sentence in the third paragraph should have read the Obama administration, not the Biden administration as originally published. I’ve corrected that. – Karen