31 March 2010 >>
Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.
It’s true!
But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.
Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.
If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.
What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.
Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?
One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.
Don’t believe me?
Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane...
Video >>
25 March 2010 >>
When Barack Obama decided to launch his political career in the living room of unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, he tacitly endorsed using violence as a political tactic.
Implicitly, Obama was using the threat of violence to get the bankers to acquiesce.
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama didn’t shy away from confrontation. In fact, he encouraged it by telling supporters to “argue with” opponents and to “get in their face[s].”
The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against opponents.
Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, “What kind of nigger are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?”
The union thugs then beat him so badly he required overnight hospitalization.
Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly.
Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters “punch back twice as hard,” there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.
Today, however, the Democratic politicians who rammed through ObamaCare over the wishes of the American public are worried about the ugly environment that the Obama Administration spent over a year stoking. And if Obama and the Democrats truly believe that words lead to violence, then they should accept responsibility for the beating of Kenneth Gladney.
I’m certainly not condoning political violence, and would condemn any that actually happens. But there has been no reported violence against any Congressman, Senator or government official, despite the media frenzy of stories describing a crazed American public ready to terrorize politicians.
All politicians receive threats; any moderately trafficked blogger receives threats. So while I would hate for there to be any actual violence, excuse me if I chuckle at the chatter of the chickens in the media and our political class. This media-driven national freakout is a diversion, designed to de-legitimize opposition to ObamaCare and to take your attention away from the illegitimate and unprecedented usurpation of power by the Democrats in Congress and President Obama. They’re banking on you forgetting by November.
If the media is going to report on this atmosphere without discussing the Obama Administration’s words or the SEIU beat-down of Kenneth Gladney, if they are going to spend time breathlessly reporting rumored threats that have not been carried out while ignoring violence that actually occurred but didn’t fit their narrative, then it is yet more proof of the media’s patent bias.
25 January 2010 @ 8:40AM >>The New York Times is on the receiving end of a very good point:
To the Editor:
In “The Court’s Blow to Democracy” (editorial, Jan. 22), you strenuously disagree with the proposition that “corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.”
Every day, The New York Times Company exercises its First Amendment right to engage in political speech. Today, it expresses its desire to deny that right to most other corporations.
The Constitution does not permit the government to criminalize speech based on the identity of the speaker. If any corporation has First Amendment rights, all corporations must have First Amendment rights.
An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We’d like to compare this dispatch to the AP’s dispatch earlier this week “fact checking” Sarah Palin’s new book. Here goes:
Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
ObamaCare bills: 2
Palin book: 11
Number of pages in document being covered:
ObamaCare bills: 4,064
Palin book: 432
Number of pages per AP reporter:
ObamaCare bill: 2,032
Palin book: 39.3
On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That’s what they call accountability journalism.
30 September 2009 >>
Daniel Okrent, the former public editor of the New York Times, recently made some interesting comments on his old employer and the media in general. Some highlights:
[T]here is a shortage of conservatives working in the news media — or, I should say, an imbalance between liberals and conservatives. The last survey I saw was on the ‘04 election - I don’t know what it was in ‘08 - but in ‘04 something like 75 percent of working journalists at daily newspapers voted for the Democrat. I mean, you can’t deny this. It’s a reality.
[...]
When I was at the Times - my term there ended four years ago - everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?” Now, Gail knows a lot better than I the dynamics of coming to an editorial position, but it would seem to me that, if for no other reason than to challenge the conventional thinking that may - and I stress the may - dominate the conversation on the editorial board, it’d be nice to have somebody else there who might say, “Well, here’s another point of view.”
[...]
If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.
[...]
When I was at the paper I criticized it pretty strongly for not having ideological diversity or religious diversity on the staff. The same reason we would want racial diversity, to provide different perspectives on the world, would suggest that we want the same thing religiously and ideologically and philosophically. And I was very roundly criticized by some people on the left about that, people who thought it was an outrage that I was suggesting that the Times hire more conservatives. Why is that an outrage? Why is it an outrage to get a more varied view of the world? We want a varied view if we’re going to be good citizens, if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. We must have a varied view.
Daniel Okrent was an honest broker during his tenure as the Times’s public editor, and the paper would be better off if it paid closer attention to his advice.
Results from a national Sacred Heart University survey released today reveal that many news consumers believe the media played a significant role in electing President Barack Obama and that the media continue to promote his presidency.
[...]
“A large majority, 89.3 percent, suggested the national media played a very or somewhat strong role in helping to elect President Obama,” according to a summary of the findings. “Just 10.0 percent suggested the national media played little or no role. Further, 69.9 percent agreed the national news media are intent on promoting the Obama presidency while 26.5 percent disagreed. Some, 3.6 percent, were unsure.”
And 86.6 percent said they believe the news media try to influence public opinion and that they have their own public policy and political positions. This compares to 87.6 percent in 2008 and 70.3 percent in 2003.
[...]
The study did not indicate which medium the respondents turn to for news, but it did indicate that about 38 percent say they read newspapers less frequently than they did five years ago. Nearly 68 percent said they agreed with the statement: “Old-style, traditionally objective and fair journalism is dead.”
20 August 2009 >>
Not too long ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets with signs comparing our president to Adolf Hitler, painting him as “the world’s biggest terrorist,” even calling outright for his killing. Here in New York City, posters of a cartoon George W. Bush replete with simulated bullet holes began springing up around town.
It was a time when Democratic politicians complained loudly whenever they felt their patriotism was being impugned. In those days, bumper stickers reminded us that “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, declared that disruptive protests were “very American and very important.” Now that protests are directed against a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, Nancy Pelosi thinks such disruptions are “un-American.”
During the Bush era, the media looked the other way at the extremist element in the protest movement; the large number of protest signs bearing swastikas and mathematical formulae like “Bush=Hitler” just didn’t interest them. But it did interest me, and because the media didn’t want to report it, I did some reporting of my own. The videos I posted online inadvertently launched me on a second career as a documentary filmmaker.
I recently dug through my old footage and found many examples of the same kind of inflammatory speech that the media and the Democratic Party—forgive the redundancy—now decry. What follows are just a few examples.
More >>
7 August 2009 @ 9:06PM >>
Does someone at London’s Telegraph newspaper believe that Barack Obama is a country? Or do they just think that he’s so amazingly awesome that he deserves to be only human listed alongside the countries and continents in the World section on their website?
Notice how there was no “antiwar” movement during the ’90s, even though we were at war the entire time in Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, a dab here and there in Afghanistan and Sudan. Then, after 9/11, it was the “Next Vietnam” with a passionate “antiwar” movement with the [New York Times]’s full treasonous participation, just like the good old days. And now, even though the daily death count has matched the highest daily rate we ever saw in Iraq, there is no “antiwar” movement or daily casualty count in all the newspapers. It’s like the “antiwar” movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.
23 June 2009 @ 8:23AM >>
Blogger Shannon Love argues a point about media transparency and bias disclosure that I’ve been making for years:
Obama’s Federal Trade Commission have decided to regulate blogs based on the premise that undisclosed financial relationships between bloggers and businesses could lead bloggers to deceive their readers as to the value of products they blog about. [h/t Instapundit]
If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?
Politics is more important than money. If you buy a toaster based on a biased recommendation, you’re only out the cost of a toaster. If you vote based on a biased political recommendation, you could lose your freedom. If the government has both the duty and the ability to protect you against bias in product recommendations on blogs, why doesn’t it have the same duty and ability to protect you against biased reporting on political matters?
Political beliefs matter. Soldiers fight and die for their political beliefs, not their paltry pay. Our political beliefs are closely tied to our moral sense of right and wrong and our sense of the just order of society. Political beliefs influence us on an unconscious level. Political beliefs do, without doubt, bias people even more strongly than money does.
This Wednesday, ABC is turning an entire day of news programing over to the Democrats’ health care plan. Wouldn’t viewers alter their judgment of the accuracy and objectivity of ABC’s reporting on the subject if they knew that the ABC employees donated to Democrats 80 times as much as they did to Republicans? Certainly, I can’t help but note that if the circumstances were reversed, most people who see nothing wrong in ABC’s actions now would suddenly see ABC’s donations as profoundly undermining the integrity of ABC’s reporting.
I’m not arguing for the government to mandate such disclosure, merely that if the government is going to be in the business of forcing disclosures of some types of information—which is what the Obama Administration is pushing—why not be consistent and thorough about it?
(Of course, I think we already know the answer, considering the “80 times” figure cited above.)
13 June 2009 @ 4:34PM >>
Received in an e-mail forward recently:
Sam, a U.S. Naval Officer, visits New York City for Fleet Week.
With the afternoon off, he decides to see the Bronx Zoo. Dressing in civilian clothes so as not to attract attention, he blends in well with the other tourists.
As Sam strolls by the lion’s cage, he notices a little girl leaning into the bars, grabbing towards the lion to try to pet it.
Suddenly, the lion snatches the girl by the cuff of her jacket and yanks her against the bars, trying to pull her inside. As the girl cries out in fear, her parents stand by helpless, screaming.
Sam runs to the cage and stuns the lion with a powerful punch square on the nose. The lion jumps back, whimpering, and lets go of the girl. Sam brings her to her terrified parents, who gush an endless stream of thanks.
“Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I saw a man do in my whole life,” the girls’ father says.
“Why, it was nothing, really,” Sam replies. “The lion was behind bars. I just saw a little girl in danger and I acted.”
The girl’s father thanks Sam again and says, “I’m a journalist with the New York Times. I’ll make sure your heroics will be on the front page in tomorrow’s paper. So, give me a little background about yourself. What does a hero like you do for a living?”
“Well,” Sam says, “I’m in the Navy, and I’m visiting the city as part of Fleet Week.” He spends the next hour answering the reporter’s questions before they finally part ways.
The next morning, Sam wakes up and rushes out to buy a copy of the Times. The headline on the front page says:
“MILITARY THUG TORTURES AFRICAN IMMIGRANT — AND STEALS HIS LUNCH”
4 May 2009 >>New York Post columnist Irwin M. Stelzer notes that President Obama “said last week that he’d override the contractual and legal rights of Chrysler’s senior lenders and carve up the company between the government and the United Auto Workers.”
Stelzer continues:
Obama forced the senior lenders to take something like 30 cents for every dollar they’d lent Chrysler. Many lenders — the big banks who’d taken federal bailout money — rolled over. But some hedge-fund managers pointed out that they have a legal, fiduciary responsibility to do the best they can for their investors (which include pension funds) and decided to take their chances with a bankruptcy judge.
Never mind that this is their long-established legal right. Obama is furious with these “speculators,” and hinted that he knows where they live and will get even when the new financial-industry regulations are drafted.
This continued antagonism towards America’s business community may not be in the country’s best long-term interests, Stelzer points out:
[T]he president is counting on some of these “speculators” to partner with the Treasury and take a big stake in the toxic assets that are preventing the big banks from resuming normal lending. Unprotected by a rule of law, these investors will sit on their assets, rather than partner with a government that might some day decide, after the fact, that they made too much money, or should bear a larger portion of any losses than they had signed on to do.
Meanwhile, a prominent bankruptcy attorney, White & Case’s Tom Lauria, alleges White House threats against an opponent of the government’s Chrysler takeover plan:
One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.
The most interesting thing about Lauria’s claim is that the Obama official threated to sic the White House Press Corps on offending “speculators.”
In theory, the White House Press Corps is an independent body, an arm of the press and not the Obama Administration. What would give this official the idea that the press corps would blindly do the administration’s bidding?
Perhaps the press could prove its independence by digging into this story a little bit deeper. (The White House has issued a blanket denial, but the varying accounts don’t add up.)
1 May 2009 @ 9:04AM >>
Just because the media is trying to convince everyone that Barack Obama is the most popular president in American history doesn’t make it true:
Gallup reports that 56% of the public believes that Obama is doing an excellent/good job. Gallup reported 62% approved of George W. Bush’s job performance after the first 100 days.
I don’t put much stock in polls; careful tweaking of words and phrasing are well-known ways to produce whatever outcome you might want to see. The media seem to be obsessed with polling, though, so we should at least be aware of the games they’re playing.
And if Obama’s about as popular as Bush was at the same point in is presidency, how popular with Obama be by the time he leaves office?
29 April 2009 @ 9:01AM >>The Washington Times on the media’s construction of Obama’s popularity myth:
President Obama’s media cheerleaders are hailing how loved he is. But at the 100-day mark of his presidency, Mr. Obama is the second-least-popular president in 40 years.
According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.
It reminds me of a point I made in The Clinton Legacy: during the Clinton presidency, a 5.6% unemployment rate was a sign that the economy was doing well, while under Bush, the exact same unemployment rate was portrayed negatively.
The question is, how many people fall for it? Do we believe Obama is popular just because the media keeps insisting that he is?
22 April 2009 @ 8:13AM >>
Michael Barone, now of the Washington Examiner, makes a good point:
[T]he idolators who attended Obama events last year seemed entranced by the candidate’s persona, while the tea party participants seemed preoccupied with serious issues of long-term public policy. Which side was more intellectually serious?
When the media covered the crowds that came to see then-candidate Barack Obama speak, it was a sign that average Americans were getting engaged in the political process, a positive thing.
When, during the Bush presidency, protesters called the president a terrorist and compared him to Hitler, even accusing him of staging the September 11th attacks, the media took the protesters seriously and certainly never challenged or denigrated them or their cause.
Of course, now that Barack Obama is in office, protesting is not only unhealthy, it’s unpatriotic. And it seems the media will do everything in its power to diminish and demean anyone who dares disagree with our saintly president.
20 April 2009 @ 9:10AM >>
When it comes to the media’s obsequious fawning over President Barack Obama, The Onion gets it, imagining how the media would cover this hypothetical scenario:
More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.
“I know there’s a story in there somewhere,” said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama’s home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8. “Right now though, it’s probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation.”
Added Meacham, “It’s not so cut and dried.”
[...]
Since the killings took place, reporters across the country have struggled to come up with an appropriate take on the ruthless crime, with some wondering whether it warrants front-page coverage, and others questioning its relevance in a fast-changing media landscape.
“What exactly is the news hook here?” asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a ‘day in the life’ of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama’s unusual upbringing in Hawaii helped to shape the way he would one day viciously butcher two helpless citizens in their own home?”
“Or maybe the story is just that murder is cool now,” Kaplan continued. “I don’t know. There are a million different angles on this one.”
So far, the president’s double-homicide has not been covered by any major news outlets. The only two mentions of the heinous tragedy have been a 100-word blurb on the Associated Press wire and an obituary on page E7 of this week’s edition of the Lake County Examiner.
[...]
“There’s been some debate around the office about whether we should report on this at all,” Washington Post senior reporter Bill Tracy said while on assignment at a local dog show.
A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”
Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”
Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.
During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.
Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”
Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:
“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”‘
Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story - on Oct. 21, 2008.
October 21st was exactly two weeks before the election.
20 March 2009 @ 9:08AM >>
A television producer recently asked me for my reel. It had been quite a while since I updated it, so I put together a new one:
18 March 2009 >>
Bill Steigerwald is leaving his position as associate editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review after accepting a buy-out offer from the struggling newspaper. Here’s a revealing little tidbit about the news business from his farewell column:
[E]very journalist and every editor I have ever worked with was helplessly subjective in their politics and in their definition of what news and bias were and were not.
Trust me, big-city daily newspapers don’t go out of their way to achieve ideological diversity. About 90 percent of my work mates over the years were either avowed liberal Democrats or didn’t know it. Reagan Republicans were virtually nonexistent. Until I got to the Trib, I was always the staff’s lonely libertarian.
19 February 2009 @ 9:05AM >>
More reporters than usual are going into politics and government these days, and—surprise, surprise—they usually end up serving Democrats. But of course, this has nothing at all to do with the reporters’ ideology:
In three months since Election Day, at least a half-dozen prominent journalists have taken jobs working for the federal government.
Journalists, including some of those who’ve jumped ship, say it’s better to have a solid job in government than a shaky job - or none at all - in an industry that’s fading fast.
But conservative critics answer with a question: Would journalists be making the same career choices if John McCain had beaten Barack Obama in November?
“Obama bails out more media water-carriers,” conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote upon hearing that the Chicago Tribune’s Jill Zuckman is taking a job with the Obama administration.
[...]
As for other reporters making similar moves, Zuckman said that she didn’t think there would be so many “if the industry were stable.”
But it isn’t, and there are.
On Tuesday, Cox’s Scott Shepard joined Sen. John Kerry’s office as a speechwriter, becoming the second journalist this year to take a job under the Massachusetts Democrat. Investigative reporter Doug Frantz is now chief investigator under the Kerry-helmed Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A week before Zuckman announced that she’s headed for Obama’s Transportation Department, her Tribune colleague Peter Gosselin signed on as speechwriter for Obama’s treasury secretary, Tim Geithner.
In December, Jay Carney relinquished his perch as Time’s Washington bureau chief to become Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director. Warren Bass left the Washington Post’s Outlook section to write speeches and advise Dr. Susan Rice at the United Nations. Daniel W. Reilly left Politico to become communications director for Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) Linda Douglass left the National Journal for the Obama campaign back in May and is expected to become assistant secretary for public affairs in the department of Health and Human Services.
[...]
“I didn’t leave journalism easily and I’ll always think of myself as a reporter, with a notepad tucked in his back pocket and a lot of unanswered questions,” Frantz told Politico last month.
But even if Frantz views himself as a reporter, he’s no longer working for the Newhouse, Sulzberger or Chandler families. Instead, a Democratic politician signs the paychecks.
Frantz isn’t alone in downplaying the partisan aspect of his new job. Maybe it’s based on a lifetime of nonpartisan conditioning, but many of the reporters who’ve made the leap to government seem hesitant to admit that they’re no longer impartial observers.
“This is a Democratic administration; we’re obviously on that side of the aisle, but I don’t see this as a partisan job at all,” Carney told the Times a couple weeks back.
13 February 2009 @ 9:32AM >>
Stephen Bates at Slatesuggests a new business model for the faltering newspaper industry: declare itself a religion. Although he refers to this idea as “a modest proposal,” it is far less obviously satirical than the Jonathan Swift essay those words reference.
The media covers politics with all the objectivity of a missionary describing his faith, and they treated the election and inauguration of President Obama with the sort of dispassion you’d expect of disciples who just witnessed someone rise from the dead.
Our press has been a religion for years. They might as well admit it now so they can claim the tax breaks.
10 February 2009 @ 9:09AM >>
Being a member of the media isn’t much different from being an Obama campaign worker. The International Herald Tribunereports:
Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism, especially from those on the losing end of an election.
But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.
An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.
I know it’s unfair to characterize the entire media as Obama sycophants. There are still some hard-nosed journalists out there, bravely speaking truth to power. For example, there’s Judith Warner of the “All The News That’s Fit to Print” New York Times:
The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.
The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes - because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”
[...]
Many women - not too surprisingly - were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.
Now that the Obama presidency has transformed venerable news outlets like the New York Times into a poor imitations of Teen Beat, and with a former SportsCenter newscaster now Obama’s main cheerleader on the cable outlet of NBC News, I guess it’s not that bizarre to discover the Washington Post has transformed itself into a sports publication.
Why else, during President Obama’s press conference on the economy, would the Post’s White House reporter waste a question by asking:
What is your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?
I’ve seen more serious reporting from Perez Hilton.
I don’t know why news outlets still bother employing political reporters. I guess the only reason is that there are still a handful of people in Washington who need oversight. They’re called Republicans, and they ain’t gonna bash themselves.
2 February 2009 @ 8:58AM >>
During the Superbowl last night, NBC News was running ads for the Today Show touting an interview with President Obama. The ads contained a revealing line saying that Obama would enjoy “home field advantage” during the interview. In other words, NBC News has finally admitting to being nothing more than Obama cheerleaders.
They are not alone.
On the night of the Inauguration, The New York Times did its part to rally the true believers by handing out buttons with its logo prominently displayed beneath the profile of the new president.
Not to be outdone, CNN is selling t-shirts with the caption, “Obama raises hand, lifts a nation.”
And the Detroit Free Press is asking you to “see Obama in yourself” and send them a picture of your face behind a half-cutout Obama mask.
Perhaps the editors of the Free Press were worried that Obama worship wasn’t quite cult-like enough.
I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. As Helen Thomas—a White House reporter since the 1950s—recently said, “I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, I’ll be one ‘til I die, what else should a reporter be when you see so much and when we have such great privilege and access to the truth?”
No surprise. Reporters are liberal, so they’ll favor a liberal president. But given the financial state of the news industry, perhaps political reporters can be laid off for the next for years, and the media can simply re-print White House press releases.
It would save a lot of money, and the resulting press coverage wouldn’t be any different.
1 February 2009 >>
Here’s a TV report from 1981 predicting the future of newspapers. What’s interesting is how much of it misses the mark...and how much of it doesn’t.
31 January 2009 @ 10:59AM >>
Any time Democrats in Congress opposed one of President George W. Bush’s initiatives, it was taken as evidence that Bush was a divisive president.
Now we’re in an Obama administration, and our new president was unable to persuade a single Republican in the House of Representatives to support the pork-laden sham of an economic stimulus package that he wants passed.
Suddenly, it isn’t the president who’s divisive, it’s his angry opposition in Congress.
It’s nice to have the media in your corner. Probably makes governing a little easier.
28 January 2009 @ 9:01AM >>The View’s Joy Behar, who considers herself a comedian, was asked by Larry King about the possibilities presented by the Age of Obama:
King: [I]s this administration going to be hard for the comics to have fun with?
Behar: Yes. And all I can say is thank you for Joe Biden, because he is going to always give us some laughs. He’ll say something crazy and out there, and it will be fun. And Sarah Palin, you know, we can always rely on her to come back and give us some material. But it is really not easy to make fun of the Obamas, because they’re really — they’re kind of really perfect, aren’t they?
Perhaps our new president really is too perfect for mockery. Obama’s disciples, however, are another story.
[L]et me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s “Today” show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz.—Camille Paglia
