Obama vs. the Darned Media

One of the recurring themes here at The Central Standard Times — we were grousing about it again just yesterday, as a matter of fact — is the exasperatingly liberal bias of the national media. The leftward leanings of most of the old-line newspapers and all the broadcasters save one are widely known, and rarely denied, but we nonetheless find it useful to occasionally examine the latest of the abundant examples of press malfeasance and search for whatever truth they are trying to obscure.

You can imagine our annoyance, then, to see that Barack Obama is now muscling in on our media criticism turf. The president has lately been disparaging the media with a gusto that even we cannot bring to the effort, and making a complaint that cannot be heard elsewhere. Obama now asserts, and seems to truly believe, that the media are out to get him. The accusation will surely sound absurd to anyone who has read a newspaper or watched a network news broadcast during the past four years or so, but Obama and his spokespeople have hurled it twice in just the past week.

Obama’s first salvo came on Monday, during a commencement address at Barnard College in New York City. The all-woman college had originally scheduled a commencement address by Jill Abramson, the first woman to be named executive editor of the New York Times, but Obama personally requested that she be bumped so he could demonstrate that he is more friendly to womankind than the Republicans, who of course are currently at war with women. The speech included the usual commencement address balderdash about stepping forward boldly into the future and all that, some Oprah-esque advice that “You can be stylish and powerful, too,” and an unexpected warning to not listen to the media.

“No wonder that faith in our institutions has never been lower, particularly when good news doesn’t get the same kind of ratings as bad news anymore,” the president said. “Every day you receive a steady stream of sensationalism and scandal, and stories with a message that suggests change isn’t possible, that you can’t make a difference, that you won’t be able to close that gap between life as it is and life as it should be.”

The Barnard graduates seemed to fall for it, which suggests that perhaps we’ve been hitting on the wrong college girls, but inhabitants of the so-called real world will be left wondering what Obama could possibly be talking about. There are indeed a surfeit of stories out there about high unemployment, sluggish economic growth, rising deficits, botched gun-running schemes, and other revelations that might tend to undermine faith in institutions such as the presidency, but Obama must understand that they cannot be ignored without destroying the last vestiges of faith in the press, and it’s clear that most reporters and editors would much rather be writing about the Republicans’ war on women or Mitt Romney’s high school days or whatever other cheerier topic they might come up with.

The administration lodged a more specific complaint on Tuesday after The New York Times released a poll indicating that 67 percent of the public believes Obama’s much-ballyhooed statement in favor of same-sex marriage was made for political rather than personal reasons. Stephanie Cutter, a deputy manager for the Obama campaign, went to the friendly confines of MSNBC to say that the poll was methodologically biased against her boss. Although the poll did require that respondents call back to the pollsters, an unusual and questionable feature, it nonetheless demonstrates where the most motivated respondents stand. Had the pollsters used the same method back in 2008, when Obama’s supporters were chanting his name and swelled pride with about being the ones they’d been waiting for, he likely would have gotten more favorable results.

Besides, it’s impossible to believe that The New York Times is deliberately trying to cook up poll results hurtful to Obama. We’ve known several Timesmen and Timeswomen over the years, journalism being such a small pond, and we’re quite sure that all of them voted for Obama and plan to do so again. Even the putative conservatives at the paper voted for Obama. Given the paper’s personnel and readership, Obama should be able to count on the continued support of The New York Times.

Unless the new executive editor is sufficiently miffed about the cancelled speaking engagement at Barnard College, that is, or the reporters and editors decide they don’t like being the target of a president’s rhetoric as if they were oil producers or corporate jet owners. That probably won’t happen, but it’s a nice pipe dream.

— Bud Norman