Donald Trump is a fascist. He loves dictators. He hates freedom of the press. How many times have you heard those refrains from the mainstream media? I’ve lost count, personally. It’s always been a total crock, and now a new admission from an unlikely source puts it in perspective.

The Washington Examiner reports that Doug Mills, a photographer with the Ne York Times, recently acknowledged to C-SPAN that the current president has been far more generous with access for press photographers than his predecessor was.

“We’re getting a lot more, I mean from a photographer’s standpoint, we get a lot more access to the president. I see him more on a daily basis than we did with Barack Obama,” Mills said.

The veteran photographer said more access to the president and the Oval Office allows them to be creative and give people a better idea of what’s happening in the room.

The full interview in which Mills makes this narrative-busting claim will air this weekend:

.@DougMillsnyt on the White House & President Trump: “We’re getting a lot more, I mean from a photographer’s standpoint, we get a lot more access to the president. I see him more on a daily basis than we did with @BarackObama.”

Full Q&A airs Sunday (2/11) at 8pm ET on C-SPAN. pic.twitter.com/rJN9PbHDuO

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 9, 2018

This is not the first time we’ve heard this sort of thing. Last April, in a speech whining about Trump saying mean things about biased reporters, White House Correspondents’ Association president Jeff Mason nevertheless admitted to attendees of the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner that press access to the Trump White House was “very good.”

By contrast, back in 2016 Politico’s Jack Shafer excoriated Obama for “block[ing] honest press queries with all his power”:

Under his administration, the U.S. government has set a new record for withholding Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a recent Associated Press investigation. FOIA gives the public and press an irreplaceable view into the workings of the executive branch. Without timely release of government documents and data, vital questions can’t be answered and stories can’t be written.

Obama’s “Insider Threat Program” has turned employees across the government—from the Peace Corps to the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture—into information-squelching snitches. If this isn’t Trumpian behavior, I don’t know what is.

“Obama hates the press,” New York Times national security reporter James Risen said not long ago, “and he hates leaks.” AP Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee has decried the “day-to-day intimidation of sources” by the Obama administration, judging it worse than the Bush administration on that score. And in a 2013 piece, POLITICO’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen documented Obama’s mastery of “limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.”

Gee, it’s almost as if all the stuff about Donald Trump being a speech-squelching tyrant was nothing more than a temper tantrum from an industry offended by the fact that he dared to call out their dishonesty…