Nothing like giving a talk on free speech, while denying Press coverage at the same time:
First lady Michelle Obama told students that freedom of speech should be a universal right during her extravagant, no-press-allowed tour of China — a hypocritical move that will surely draw the ire of critics, according to an expert.
“That is troublesome. That goes beyond hypocritical, and I think the American media and the international media has every right to call her and the Obama administration on that — that they permitted that to happen,” said Tom Whalen, a political history professor at Boston University. “It makes you shake your head, albeit sadly.”
The first lady stopped at Peking University in Beijing yesterday during a weeklong trip that was billed as cultural rather than political. She told students, accustomed to China’s tight Internet restrictions, that the free flow of information is crucial “because that’s how we discover truth, that’s how we learn what’s really happening in our communities and our country and our world.”
Meanwhile, the first lady’s camp has kept the press away from her vacation, a potential public relations misstep.
“You see that this administration is tone deaf when it comes to politics. They do not understand the political sentiment,” Whalen said. “It seems like it’s one disaster after another when it comes to PR. You don’t want to do this right now.”