In May, a CPJ blog post looked at what had changed in the seven months since CPJ's first comprehensive report on press freedom in the United States. The answer then, as it is now, was not much.
The following is a CPJ Blog post by Sara Rafsky, CPJ Americas Program Research Associate:
After a summer plagued by war and disease abroad and partisan fighting at home, it was not hard to fathom why President Barack Obama would yearn for a retreat. But from which of the mounting crises did the president hope to escape: Ukraine? Islamic State? Ebola? The Tea Party? None of the above, according to an interview with Obama on the Sunday television news program “Meet the Press,” in early September. “What I’d love,” he said, “is a vacation from the press.”
To be fair, the president’s remarks were in connection to the media’s obsession with the “optics” of the job and the criticism he received for being photographed golfing shortly after the announcement of the beheading of American journalist James Foley by the militant group Islamic State. But it would not be a stretch to attach wider significance to the statement regarding the president’s hostile relationship with the media, as CPJ documented in its landmark report, “The Obama Administration and the Press,” published one year ago today [10 October 2014].
Read the full story on CPJ’s site.