Omitting for Obama:
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The saccharine sea of sweet media accolades for the inauguration of
President Obama signaled one thing clearly at the beginning of 2009:
this new administration was not going to be eyed suspiciously by the
press as a potential rogues’ gallery of scandal figures, incompetents,
and extremists, which was the way they greeted the incoming Bush
administration in 2001. Back then, the staunch opposition of liberal
interest groups and activists against Bush and his policies drove the
news agenda. Today, the "mainstream media" lament the sad fact that
there is any opposition to the Obama agenda.
In 2009, the Old
Media left a void where Obama would have been held accountable. This
was especially true of traditional broadcast TV news, which covered the
Obamas not merely as heads of state, but as global celebrities dazzling
the world with their vigor and panache. Into that void stepped members
of the New Media, eager to point out Team Obama’s troubling
associations, political missteps, and ideological extremists.
While
Fox News and the conservatives on talk radio and the Internet broke and
developed these stories, Americans following only "mainstream" media
outlets like the broadcast TV networks never would have heard these
reports. Instead of acting as government watchdogs holding the
government accountable, the nation's broadcast news networks
deliberately suppressed and de facto censored embarrassing scoops – at least until President Obama or Democrats in Congress made them impossible to ignore.
In many cases, this resistance to real news extended even to newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times,
which are supposed to be more substantive and thorough than highly-paid
TV news talking heads or unpaid bloggers. A Media Research Center study
of four such stories highlighted by the New Media in 2009 that were
damaging or embarrassing to the Obama "brand" found that stories were
not only slow in arriving, they were fast in disappearing.
