Barack Obama weighed in this week on the White House barring CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from its briefings, and he struck the pose he’s spent a decade perfecting: the elder statesman, wounded on democracy’s behalf. He wondered aloud what would have happened had he told Fox News to get lost.
“My imagination could not foresee some of the stuff that’s going on right now. I believe there was just an announcement that the White House decided, you know what, CNN, MS NOW, maybe the New York Times was included, you just can’t come to the White House press briefings anymore because you’re giving the current president unfavorable coverage.”
Obama continued, “I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ‘you know what, FOX News, get out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.”
WATCH:
Former President Barack Obama on President Trump's White House press ban: "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!" pic.twitter.com/R1pmoVasEz
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 20, 2026
This is classic Obama: Mock and/or feign surprise and shock over something Trump did that he actually did, too.
In October 2009, the Obama White House tried to cut Fox News out of a pool interview with pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. This wasn’t a stray staffer’s grudge. It was the culmination of a months-long campaign in which the president’s communications director publicly declared that Fox wasn’t a real news organization and the administration should stop treating it like one. The exclusion collapsed only because the other networks refused to conduct the interview without Fox. The press corps saved Obama from himself, then spent the next seven years pretending it hadn’t needed to.
And that was the gentle part of his record. The Obama Justice Department prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act than every prior administration combined. It secretly seized two months of phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors — not a single journalist, but entire bureaus.
It tracked James Rosen of Fox News through his phone logs and building-entry records, and in a warrant application described him as a possible co-conspirator for doing what reporters do, which is ask sources questions. It spent years pursuing James Risen of the New York Times, trying to force him to testify against a source or face jail.
When Bob Woodward reported that the White House itself had engineered the 2013 sequester the president was busy blaming on Republicans, a senior aide warned him in writing that he’d regret it. Woodward went public, and other reporters came forward with similar stories about how the administration handled coverage it didn’t like.
This isn’t a conservative talking point. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, hardly a right-wing shop, has said plainly that Obama’s record is marred by relentless whistleblower prosecutions, lobbying against FOIA reform, and a culture of government secrecy. The Committee to Protect Journalists said something similar while he was still in office.
So why can Obama stand at a podium in 2026 and call his own conduct unimaginable without anyone laughing? Because the same press corps he surveilled and threatened spent eight years deciding it didn’t count. Seizing AP phone records was a regrettable overreach. Labeling a Fox reporter a co-conspirator was a procedural matter. The Fox exclusion was clever message discipline. Every one of those was, by the standards now being applied to this White House, an assault on the First Amendment. None was covered as one.
The media’s selective memory isn’t a bug here. It’s the entire mechanism. Obama didn’t get away with it because his conduct was mild. He got away with it because the the vast majority of people whose job it was to object covered for him. Now he’s counting on the same courtesy one more time, but I’m not going to let him slide.
