The NY Times has a piece up today on the growing friction between team Obama and the press. An excerpt:

Strategists for Mr. Obama, the country’s first black nominee, have made it clear that they believe they need to take extra steps to control his image and protect against attack. But such efforts at times appear to conflict with the candidate’s stated desire to be unusually transparent and open, and they have already occasionally put him at loggerheads with news organizations pushing for greater access to him now that he is the presumptive nominee. In spirited discussions with reporters barred from Monday’s meeting with African-American civic leaders, aides said that no cameras were allowed because the participants wanted the meeting to be private, even though it was announced on the daily hotel roster of events. Later, other aides said the lighting was not properly set up for television quality. When Mr. Obama met with religious leaders last week, his campaign kept out photographers and reporters and refused to share a full list of participants. Professor Douglas W. Kmiec, a conservative constitutional scholar at Pepperdine Law School, said Mr. Obama told him and others in attendance that he was keeping the meeting private so everyone could speak without fear of public judgment.

“Spirited?” Odd that none of that spirtness made it into reporting after the event to let readers know how spirited reporters were in getting denied access. For any reporters not counting, the Times has quoted three different reasons why reporters were barred from the event. I believe the word used is “lie,” but from what I understand that word isn’t allowed to be used while covering the Obama campaign.

Later on in the Times piece:

Mr. Obama’s aides say his campaign has stayed true to his promise of transparency. They point to his decision to open fund-raisers to reporters, the first candidate this year to do so. But Mr. Obama is taking a more strategic approach to granting interviews. This week, he has focused on talking about the economy with reporters from The Wall Street Journal and Fortune.

They must mean this Fortune interview where Obama basically admits he lied to Democratic voters in the primaries about NAFTA:

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

So you mighty, spirited MSM reporters, why don’t you ask the Senator what other rhetoric got “overheated” and “amplified” during the primary?