The White House Press Corp. has been having a rough ride of late. The other week The Daily Beast published a long article about why they were (once again) irrelevant, and just this weekend President Obama forgot about them…literally.

No one’s laughing now, Robert Gibbs! Or at least they’re laughing a lot less. According to a report, the number of “(Laughter)” that show up in the official transcripts of White House press room briefings and in the last six months they have dropped by almost half. What is behind this sinister seriousness?

President Obama, and the press corp. traveling with him, landed in China Sunday and are scheduled to depart Tuesday. The Chinese has strict Internet rules and many sites we take for granted here are banned there, for example, Twitter — something the President has apparently never used, but which the press corp traveling with him is desperate to access.

On Thursday night, Fox News reported that the “Obama administration” had taken its “first concrete step” in treating Fox News Channel like it’s not a real news organization, excluding them from a press event. Through our own reporting, Mediaite has learned that Fox News’ report of this incident was, at best, incomplete and self-serving, and serves as a neat encapsulation of what Robert Gibbs told us the first time we asked him if the White House was “bullying” Fox News.

We reported earlier that when Fox News was banned from a round-robin interview with Obama administration “Pay Czar” Kenneth Feinberg, the bureau chiefs of the other major networks banded together to thwart the White House.

Now, Mediaite has learned exclusively that the Treasury Department, who set up the interviews, denies the story.