Former President Barack Obama went after President Donald Trump on Friday over his decision to ban reporters from three news organizations — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — from the White House.
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“My imagination could not foresee some of the stuff that’s going on right now,” Obama said in a conversation with Colgate University President Brian Casey.
“I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News, you’re out of here!’ It’s unimaginable,” he continued, leading Casey to laugh and the crowd to erupt in applause. (Watch the clip below.)
Obama’s comments arrived just hours after Trump announced on Truth Social that he was barring the outlets from the White House grounds for reporting what he called “Fake News.”
Trump’s decision has sparked condemnation from across the media world as First Amendment and legal experts call the ban unconstitutional.
The outlets have since announced that they are suing the Trump administration, saying in a lawsuit that the president’s decision “could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles.”
TV networks, too, reportedly intend to skip pool coverage of daily affairs at the White House in solidarity with the impacted outlets.
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Obama’s Treasury Department once initially excluded Fox News — whose point of view Obama had called “destructive” — from a round of interviews with then-“executive-pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg that was offered to other major networks in 2009.
But his administration quickly reversed course, chalking up the matter to a miscommunication after D.C. bureau chiefs at the other major networks refused to do their interviews if Fox wasn’t included, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted at the time.
In his remarks at Colgate, Obama turned his attention to a “certain cohort” of people in the U.S. (which he estimated to be “30-35%” of Americans) who are cool with Trump’s ban.
“Well, what that means is we have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires, and we’ve got to shore that back up,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s inevitable. I don’t think all is lost on that front, but we have to roll up our sleeves and get working.”
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