White House restricting access to newspapers who don't toe the line

More of the 'Chicago Way'. After a front page op-ed from Mitt Romney on jobs, Boston Herald reporters were barred from full access to a fund raiser that the President is holding in Boston. [Link]

“Newspapers don’t have to be unbiased to get access. You can’t just let only the newspapers you want in,” said Boston University journalism professor Fred Bayles.

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom defended Romney’s March 8 opinion piece:

“That op-ed was about jobs, which apparently is a sensitive subject for the thin-skinned people around the president. The White House may be able to manipulate pool coverage, but they can’t manipulate the fact that millions of Americans are out of work because of President Obama’s failure to create jobs and get our economy moving,” Fehrnstrom said in a statement yesterday.

The administration has a history of controversial clashes with the press.

The White House was seen to be at war with Fox News early in the administration, with its communications director calling Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party, while the president avoided Fox interviews until his health reform proposal ran into trouble. Since losing control of Congress, Obama has sat down with conservative Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly.

In April 2010, Bloomberg’s Ed Chen, president of the White House Correspondent’s Association, met with then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to hash out complaints about limitations on the press, saying, “In my 10-plus years at the White House, rarely have I sensed such a level of anger ... over White House practices and attitudes toward the press.”

Last month, a San Francisco Chronicle editor reported the White House threatened to bar Hearst reporters from pool duty after a Chronicle reporter shot video of protestors mocking Obama at a fund-raiser.

If the Herald is good (only favorable coverage), they might get back in.

“As we have in the past — including the multiple occasions on which the Herald has supplied local pool reporters — we will continue to consider the Herald for local pool duty for future visits,” Lehrich wrote.