Barack and Michelle Obama threw a
big party Saturday night—paying for it themselves—and the press is outraged, annoyed, and wounded. See, the president and first lady managed to throw a party at the White House for 500 people, with Prince and Stevie Wonder performing, without the press really knowing about it ahead of time and definitely without the press being invited. And when D.C. political reporters simultaneously feel that something has been kept from them and that they've been left out ... well, it's not pretty.
The New York Times took its Hillary Clinton-strengthened snideness out for a spin:
While the party had been rumored for days, it was not mentioned on the president’s official schedule, and it managed to come off with almost no publicity.
We missed out on rumormongering ahead of time, and we are Not Pleased.
When he came into office, Mr. Obama pledged to make his administration the most transparent in history. While he has improved access to some records, the administration has been unusually guarded about the private lives of the Obama family.
Seriously? He has declined to make his family's private life public, and the
New York Times is categorizing that as a failure of transparency?
Time:
Stevie Wonder and Prince had a jam session at the White House over the weekend, but the public and the press weren’t invited.
"The public and the press"—shall we hazard a guess at which part of that Maya Rhodan is upset about? When the White House has a big party that's open to the press but closed to the public, we don't hear a lot about how the public wasn't invited, after all.
Bloomberg:
It's not the first time the Obamas have tried to keep an exclusive event from the gaze of the press.
Ooh! More than once in six years they have had a party that the press didn't get to cover. The funny thing about all the fuss is that the same three tweets from the Rev. Al Sharpton, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, and director Ava DuVernay probably provided as much meaningful information as a pool reporter's presence would have done. I'm just disappointed the White House didn't troll the press by posting one single photograph of the event.