[Apologetics] FW: The Media and Obama

Tue Nov 11 13:11:26 EST 2008

________________________________

From: nrlc at nrlc.org [mailto:nrlc at nrlc.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 8:26 AM
To: Art Kelly
Subject: The Media and Obama

 <http://www.nrlc.org/images/nrlogo2.gif> 	National 
Right to Life	       Today's 
News & Views

Today's News & Views
November 11, 2008

The Media and Obama: the Past as Prologue?

Editor's note. I'd very much appreciate your input at
daveandrusko at gmail.com.

When I ran across Deborah Howell's not me[a] culpa in the Washington
Post Sunday, I had just finished reading a collection of post-election
profiles of pro-abortion President-elect Barack Obama so sugary sweet
you gained pounds just by eye-balling them. Whether they appeared in the
same Sunday "Outlook" section that Howell's Ombudsman column ran in or
the major news magazines that ran rivers of mushy/gushy stories about
Obama, they represented a kind of exclamation point on Howell's
conclusion that the Post's campaign coverage had demonstrated a "tilt"
toward Obama.

Let's look both at Howell's column and briefly at a wonderful piece in
Monday's Washington Times written by Jennifer Harper that places
Howell's "Hey, don't blame me!" column in a larger context. The point of
Howell's analysis was to concede the obvious-the Post did everything but
carpet bomb the McCain campaign while throwing flower pedals in the
direction of Obama--but not at the expense of suggesting her colleagues
had any ulterior motives. 

For those of us old enough to remember Watergate, her unintentionally
amusing musings bring to mind John Ehrlichman's infamous "modified
limited hangout." For those who don't immediately get the reference, it
became a derisive, all-purpose putdown for years afterwards.

The gist is that you know your cover story is no longer operative. What
to do? Volunteer part of the truth in the hope that the audience will be
satisfied (or so surprised) that you never have to own up to the far
more damaging truth safely tucked away.

So, Howell tells us that the Post editorial page ran two and a half
times as many laudatory opinion pieces on Obama as McCain and that
"Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those
devoted to McCain." That quantitative measure does not begin to measure
the impact of the layers of praise heaped on Obama in the stories and
opinion pieces or the vitriolic and dismissive tone of so much Post
coverage of Sen. McCain. 

In places like the Project for Excellent in Journalism, they also
quantify the negative stories. And, of course, there were far more
negative stories about McCain than Obama. But mere numbers hardly do
justice to the intensity of the assault. If 10 firecrackers are dropped
on Obama and 15 nuclear weapons on McCain, are you conveying the full
impact when you merely say McCain was on the receiving end of more
attacks?

And at the same time the Post did its best to eviscerate Gov. Sarah
Palin, there were so few mentions of Obama's vice president, Sen. Joseph
Biden, we almost forgot he was still on the campaign trail. Look at the
contrast.

As Howell writes, as soon as McCain chose Palin as his running mate,
reporters were booking their flights. No one suspected they did so in
order to write puff pieces about the first female governor in Alaska's
history, an intuition richly borne out by experience.

Biden's first presidential campaigns in 1988 had exposed him as, shall
we say, ethically challenged. Virtually nothing was mentioned about how
that pattern of behavior had extended long past that first disastrous
run. More important, neither did the Post see fit to highlight the
seemingly limitless string of gaffes and (to be polite) erroneous
statements that flowed from Biden's lips these last few months. 

And then there's this "no-kidding" observation that came near the end:
Howell acknowledges as how the Obama "deserved tougher scrutiny" about
his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago, and his controversial
associations. 

What a coincidence. The same week Obama is safely elected you discover
your paper had kowtowed to Obama, so inadequately covering him that he
is still largely a blank slate the day he is elected our 44th President.

Harper's Washington Times piece notes that the public understood
perfectly well that the media was tilted. "A Pew Research Center survey
released in late October found, for example, that 70 percent of voters
agreed that the press wanted Mr. Obama to win the White House; the
figure was 62 percent even among Democratic respondents," Harper writes.
On the general topic of bias, "A current Harvard University analysis
revealed that 77 percent of Americans say the press in politically
biased; of that group, 5 percent said it skewed conservative," Harper
added.

One other thought. There is considerable discussion just how long and
how harmonious the honeymoon will be. Consider these two factors.

1. On the one hand, the mainstream media has an enormous investment in
Obama. On the other hand, when reporters, as inevitably they will, come
down from their self-induced euphoria, they will have intermittent pangs
of guilt for having sold their integrity for a mess of pottage. The
former will win out over the latter for sometime. But at the same
time...

2. You don't have to be a pro-lifer, a Republican, or even a skeptic to
realize that Obama possesses a very healthy ego and has not shown
particularly patience with the institutional media, otherwise known as
the dinosaur media. He benefited enormously from the Old Guard--the hit
pieces on Palin, the recycled stories about McCain from decades ago-but
Obama readily circumvented them whenever it served his purposes, which
was most of the time. As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post discussed
yesterday, Obama built up a formidable digital outreach, choosing
bloggers and places like politico.com to announce breaking news.

So, I ask you, when, as President, Obama continues that pattern, only
more so, does the "mainstream media" ask for its ring back?

Please send your thoughts to daveandrusko at gmail.com. 

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