In 2013, The New York Times Scalded Obama for his Attacks on a Free Press

Public Editor Margaret Sullivan pointed out that Obama didn't just criticize the press, he used the instruments of government attack the press. 

[I]t’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press. I wrote about the chilling effect of the Obama administration’s leak investigations – including the ramped-up criminal prosecution of those who provide information to the press — in a Sunday column in March. 

Now that situation, already bad, has taken a major turn for the worse with revelations that the Obama Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records of a large number of journalists for The Associated Press, as part of a leak investigation.