"A small weekly paper in California claims that a White House official asked it to remove a sentence from a “benign” feature about Marine One because it reflected poorly on first lady Michelle Obama.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gina Channell-Allen, president of the Pleasanton Weekly in Pleasanton, California, said that her paper “received a call from the White House asking us to take out part of the story because it reflected poorly on the First Lady.”
The story in question was a soft feature about Marine One titled, “Inside Marine One, President Obama’s helicopter,” that ran in the paper on April 20. Pleasanton staffer Amory Gutierrez “didn’t get to ride in ‘Marine One,’” she wrote in her story, “but I did get the VIP tour and took photographs of the otherwise unseen aircraft.”
She also wrote a sentence that the White House thought made FLOTUS look snooty.
“Basically the reporter said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact,” Allen wrote in her email.
Allen says she “complied” with the White House’s request “because it was not worth making a fuss over.”
She added, “I thought it was interesting, though, that the [White House] was concerned enough about image to contact a little weekly paper in Pleasanton.”
The White House communications office did not return requests for comment.
Allen said she emailed TheDC after reading about the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent spat with the White House communications office.
Read more:The Link
The only reasons this is interesting are 1. would the WH really have done this and 2. Knowing what theWH did to the SF Chronicle makes this story relevant to WH attitude toward the press and 3. it was interesting to read something other than about osama.
Still I am having a hard time believing this. How would the WH even know what is written in such small paper and even if the WH did read it doesn't anyone know Freedom of Speech applies to the media? Good lord this is petty.
Hopefully the WH will refute this althought they got called on trying to lie about what they did to that SF Chronicle.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gina Channell-Allen, president of the Pleasanton Weekly in Pleasanton, California, said that her paper “received a call from the White House asking us to take out part of the story because it reflected poorly on the First Lady.”
The story in question was a soft feature about Marine One titled, “Inside Marine One, President Obama’s helicopter,” that ran in the paper on April 20. Pleasanton staffer Amory Gutierrez “didn’t get to ride in ‘Marine One,’” she wrote in her story, “but I did get the VIP tour and took photographs of the otherwise unseen aircraft.”
She also wrote a sentence that the White House thought made FLOTUS look snooty.
“Basically the reporter said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact,” Allen wrote in her email.
Allen says she “complied” with the White House’s request “because it was not worth making a fuss over.”
She added, “I thought it was interesting, though, that the [White House] was concerned enough about image to contact a little weekly paper in Pleasanton.”
The White House communications office did not return requests for comment.
Allen said she emailed TheDC after reading about the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent spat with the White House communications office.
Read more:The Link
The only reasons this is interesting are 1. would the WH really have done this and 2. Knowing what theWH did to the SF Chronicle makes this story relevant to WH attitude toward the press and 3. it was interesting to read something other than about osama.
Still I am having a hard time believing this. How would the WH even know what is written in such small paper and even if the WH did read it doesn't anyone know Freedom of Speech applies to the media? Good lord this is petty.
Hopefully the WH will refute this althought they got called on trying to lie about what they did to that SF Chronicle.
