Slate’s Jack Shafer is a media critic I’ve respected for a very long time, but this piece is just nuts. It’s obviously and shamelessly perverse on the North Korea comparisons, especially after our elections, the Afghanistan elections, the Iraqi elections. Bush is not “fortressing” himself from the press just now, considering a boomlet of inauguration interviews and the January 26 press conference, after which the WashPost’s snarky Bush-hater Dana Milbank was declaring his love for new Bush press hander Nicole Devenish. Just because Ed Chen of the Los Angeles Times can’t get a Bush interview doesn’t mean Bush is a dictator. Just because a reporter gets taken off Cheney’s plane doesn’t make America like North Korea.

The elementary problem with Shafer’s complaint — which disappoints with its tinny echo of the hard-left Bill Moyers line in general — is that it never considers the media policies of the Clinton White House by comparison. Did they always charm the press? My friend downstairs at CNSNews.com, Marc Morano, has as part of his biography he “holds the distinction of being the first journalist in history to have his video camera seized by the Clinton White House while on assignment.”

Shafer links to a new article by the American Journalism Review on the same subject, but AJR’s Lori Robertson had the decency to consider the Clinton era, including an episode when Clinton press secretary Mike Mc Curry “told Deborah Orin of the New York Post that he wasn’t going to check out an allegation in former FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s book ‘Unlimited Access’ when Orin broached the subject in a press conference. After a testy exchange in which McCurry said the book was ‘filled with lies’ and criticized the New York Post for reprinting portions of it, he asked if any other news organization wanted to ask the question. He looked around the room. No one took the bait.” By Shafer’s standard, that makes Clinton a North Korean dictator.