For you reading pleasure, from the Archives: pRez Visit Ground Rules

[MrScorpio]

We had one in our area today.... Let's see what others had to deal with

THESE ARE ACTUAL GROUND RULES AS ESTABLISHED BY THE WHITE HOUSE:

Rule 9: "Write positive stories about Ft. Carson and the U.S. Army."
Rule 3: No talking to soldiers or their families before, during, or after the event.
Talk about un-American - the soldiers must serve their commander but not even their families can be talked to to get their opinions about how the war is going so people can do what people do in democracies, namely decide if they want to keep their leader or not.
Rule 6: "No roaming."
In other words, we want to be able to keep an eye on all of you - we are watching you - and so will not allow the free reporters of the free press in free America to so much as move out of our sight. Wow.
Rule 2: "Remain in press riser at all times; you will be escorted to the bathroom."
They wouldn't even let them go on their own to the bathroom, because they didn't want to lose sight - or control - of them for a single second.
Rule 1: "No video at Butts (the base) until the President arrives."
Again, only cover what we say to cover when we say to cover it - which is the President and his pre-written speech. Not only do they demand complete control of the text, banning interviews and demanding 'positive' coverage, but they want complete control of the images, prohibiting recording images that are not exactly what they want the people to see (God forbid a parent who lost a son in the war might be seen crying or being consoled for a second.)
And then, in true dictator style, they add a sarcastic rule number 10:
Rule 10: "Have fun."

http://www.moderateindependent.com/v1i15mediaassault.htm

Bush Administration's Prostitute Press
by William Norman Grigg
February 21, 2005

Creating "free-speech zones" to protect President Bush from critics; requiring reporters to be escorted by "minders"; lavishing tax dollars as payola on conservative commentators; entering into a tawdry press liaison with a male prostitute -- these actions and more illustrate the Bush administration's quasi-totalitarian hostility to a genuinely independent press.

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a newspaper, or a newspaper without a government," Thomas Jefferson famously observed, "I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Just as famously, George W. Bush has acknowledged that he has little use for newspapers.

In ways both subtle and vulgar, the Bush administration has sought to minimize the president’s exposure to alternative viewpoints and to potentially unsettling questions about his conduct and policies. The obvious intention is to insulate Mr. Bush from exposure to what one White House aide derisively called the "reality-based community."

For several years, as investigative author James Bovard documents in his indispensable book The Bush Betrayal, the Secret Service has worked with local police to banish peaceful protesters from any location where they might actually be seen by Mr. Bush. "I love coming outside the nation’s capital," commented Mr. Bush in April 2001, "because it gives me a chance to see Americans line the road, saluting the institution of the presidency as I drive by."

http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_623.shtml