Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.
—President Thomas Jefferson
Bob, go put on the dunce cap and stand in the corner.
—President Franklin D. Roosevelt to New York Times reporter Bob Post at a White House press conference
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would be “President Can’t Swim.”
—President Lyndon B. Johnson
I want it clearly understood that from now on, ever, no reporter from The Washington Post is ever to be in the White House.
—President Richard Nixon to his press secretary Ron Ziegler
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Boston.com ran a February 2017 piece, “Presidents vs. the press: What came before Trump’s ‘running war’ with the media.” A quote from Thomas Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School, about President Clinton and the press:
“President Clinton felt that they really mistreated him, misunderstood him, didn’t pay attention to policy accomplishments and got hung up on a dozen different kinds of scandals and whiffs of scandals and wouldn’t let go of those.”
From a December 2016 story in The Hill about President Barack Obama and the press:
Ann Compton, ABC News called Obama “the least transparent of the seven presidents I’ve covered.”
David Sanger of The New York Times added bluntly, “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered.”
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