Noah Rothman
The “credentials” part here is doing a lot of work. He didn’t bar access to the briefing room, but he made a policy of boycotting it’s programs, had a comms director who declared them illegitimate, called the network “destructive,” and presided over a DOJ that branded a Fox reporter a conspirator. The effort to delegitimize Fox was so deliberate that the Left was annoyed by the refusal of the rest of the mainstream press to play along (https://www.salon.com/2009/10/29/fox_versus_obama_2/). We might call this tame compared with how Trump and Biden have sought to manipulate and anathematize media they didn’t like, but that’s how precedents work; bad precedents beget worse precedents. Weird time to indulge in self-pity.
Acyn
Obama: Imagine if I had done any of this. Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White House press corps. Imagine if I had said to law firms that were representing parties that were upset with policies my administration had initiated, that you will not be allowed into government buildings. We will punish you economically for dissenting from the Affordable Care Act or the Iran deal. We will ferret out students who protest against my policies. It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me, or a whole bunch of my predecessors.