Does journalism face an “existential crisis” in the Trump era, as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour put it this week in a pearl-clutching speech before the Committee to Protect Journalists? I don’t think so.

The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency may be unprecedented in many ways, but it’s deeply precedented in at least one way: Trump’s attempts to outflank the media. They’re straight out of President Obama’s playbook.

Presidential hostility to the media didn’t begin Nov. 9. The Obama administration has denied or withheld more Freedom of Information requests than any administration in history. It is “the most secretive White House I have ever been involved in covering” according to former New York Times editor Jill Abramson.

Faking out the press pool as president-elect? Obama did that on Dec. 26, 2008, when he took his daughters to a marine amusement park in Hawaii. Calling in media bigwigs for off-the-record chats in order to steer more favorable coverage without being held accountable for any flubs that might emerge if exact quotation were allowed? Obama did so many times, usually with left-leaning columnists but sometimes with conservative ones as well (as a Jan. 3, 2016 New York Times report detailed).

Trump on Nov. 16 inspired a complaint from the White House Correspondents’ Association that his behavior toward the media was “unacceptable” after he went out for a steak without telling reporters. That same WHCA complained about being cut off from Obama’s leisure time, too. Following an Obama golfing trip to Florida in February of 2013, The Washington Post reported: “The White House Correspondents’ Association lodged a formal protest with White House officials . . . after reporters were barred from seeing any part of Obama’s activities, including a round of golf with Tiger Woods.”

That same year the WHCA and 37 news organizations submitted a letter to the White House complaining about an ongoing process by the Obama administration to lock out news photographers from key events and instead distribute its own propaganda-style photos directly to the public. That, the photographers said, “amounted to the establishment of the White House’s own Soviet-style news service, which gets privileged access to Mr. Obama at the expense of journalists,” reported The New York Times.

If Trump were to adopt a policy of playing favorites with right-leaning outlets, Obama fans should be the last ones to complain. “When it comes to granting interviews,” The Washington Post wrote of the current president, “he very often favors media that target particular slices of the electorate that are largely aligned with him already: left-leaning comedians, bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters. He is more reluctant to submit to questioning by mainstream news outlets and conservative publications that would push back harder on issues on which his opponents disagree with him.”

Obama held fewer press conferences in his first term than either of the two Presidents Bush or President Clinton. He helped get Americans used to the idea that the president wouldn’t regularly field questions he might not feel like answering, and Trump has taken that to an extreme: zero formal press conferences since being elected president. (Yet his on-the-record meeting with New York Times editors and writers on Tuesday was effectively a press conference.)

When Trump borrows Obama tactics, though, the media can be counted on to react completely differently. After Trump blasted several media organizations at a supposedly off-the-record meeting at Trump Tower, the journalists present immediately whined about getting dressed down to The New Yorker editor David Remnick.

“I have to tell you, I am emotionally f—ing pissed,” said one participant, promising to retaliate by adding, “How can this not influence coverage?” and “F— him! I know I am being emotional about it . . . But I really am offended. This was unprecedented. Outrageous!”

Yet Obama complained about the media in general, and one outlet in particular — Fox News — on many occasions. He blasted coverage of himself, Hillary Clinton, Trump, the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, the NSA spying program, the Baltimore riots, the IRS scandal and other topics. Former ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb in 2014 that she had been present as Obama went off the record to deliver an angry, profanity-laced diatribe to members of the media about their coverage of his administration. Did reporters get offended and promise to strike back at Obama then? Not that I recall.

Donald Trump keeps getting asked to disavow his racist supporters, as though he’s to blame for every gathering of dingbats held in the United States. Did reporters badger Hillary Clinton with questions about the cheerleading she got from the Communist Party of the USA? Not that I recall. Did they demand President Obama denounce the New Black Panther Party? Not that I recall. When President Obama declined to tell mobs of Hillary Clinton supporters, some of them violent, to get off the street, did the major media get outraged? Not that I recall.

I guess I’m well qualified to be a journalist in the Trump era. Because the most vital quality when it comes to covering Trump right now is this one: a short memory.