Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: "President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House."My question: Is it going to go on and on like this, or will we all wake up one day to discover that someone has flipped a switch, turning all that media love into media hate? If that happens -- when it happens -- who makes the decision to flip that switch?
The study examined 1,261 stories by The Post, The New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, NEWSWEEK magazine and the NewsHour on PBS. Favorable articles (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent), while the rest were "neutral" or "mixed." Obama's treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent) presidencies.
Unlike George Bush and Bill Clinton, Obama received favorable coverage in both news columns and opinion pages. The nature of stories also changed. "Roughly twice as much of the coverage of Obama (44 percent) has concerned his personal and leadership qualities than was the case for Bush (22 percent) or Clinton (26 percent)," the report said. "Less of the coverage, meanwhile, has focused on his policy agenda."
Monday, June 01, 2009
Robert Samuelson, racist
As we learned during the 2008 primaries, anyone who questions the Lightbringer must be a racist. It is my sad duty to report that Robert Samuelson has succumbed to the scourge of bigotry:
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6 comments:
Does this mean we're not getting a pony?
Oh yes. What leadership Brand Zero shows. Such as his silence on Prop 8. And his watered down, tortured statement on the assassination of Dr. Tiller.
I do believe the switch will come. It will take a national awakening such as happened during Katrina. But even then, as it happened with Bush, no apologies, no soul-searching, simply a mass passive acknowledgment that the suit never did have an emperor in it.
The race-baiting was so bad that no one wants to be subjected to a repeat, let alone be the focus. They're going out of their way to appear enlightened and thus completely ignoring their responsibility to an open society.
"Is it going to go on and on like this, or will we all wake up one day to discover that someone has flipped a switch, turning all that media love into media hate? If that happens -- when it happens -- who makes the decision to flip that switch?"It's gonna go on and on until someone else other than the MSM flips the switch. Rachel Maddow is already making some noise, but I just found a video from one of the KoolAId Kidz raising hell about Gitmo, and the lack of bi-partisanship that was promised.
This should be interesting to watch - I just hope their revenge is served cold. it'll be better than Christmas. (was that racist?)
Even though the "Great Awakening" is, at least for now, a tiny little wakey-wakey for a small number of Obamacrats I am not enjoying the Schedenfreude like I thought I would.
Even yelling "we told you so you pinhead" isn't making me feel better. Perhaps having to live in the world they created is one of the reasons.
I suspect that when not if the switch is flipped I will be too goshwoggled to say much of anything. (that won't last long)
The hypocrisy of the MSM has been so blatant and so repulsive that I can find little to say about it. And if "Rachel Maddow" is trying to regain some semblance of legitimacy, in my case at least, it's waaaay to late lady. Once a lying piece of crap, in my book, always a lying piece of crap.
These kinds of favorable/unfavorable coverage metrics are meaningless without adequate (or ANY, in this case) context.
Bush's early months in the WH came after the taint of the election tussle that found him losing the popular vote, and to many eyes (probably half the country!), illegitimately gaining the electoral vote margin he was awarded by the SCOTUS for Florida.
Clinton's mere plurality win at at a low 43% in the 3-way race, after 12 years in a row of GOP control of the WH had wired the town for Republicans, emboldened his critics so much that then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole immediately announced that he was going to represent the 57% who had voted against Clinton. Then Clinton's inexperience and indiscipline created multiple targets of legitimate criticism throughout the beginning months of his term.
By contrast, Obama won a majority of the popular vote and over a 2-1 electoral college margin, picking up regions of the country that hadn't gone for a Democrat in decades, AND his win represented an historic advance for African-Americans.
So, he was not weakened by the nature of his win, but instead greatly empowered by the strength of that victory, and his natural foes across the political party divide were gravely weakened by the unpopularity of their prior president and party, quite before the additional issue of racial politics' creation of its own Claymore mine field.
Besides all the above, the country is in a crisis that doesn't remotely compare to the beginning of the other two presidencies. It is natural for the country to rally around a new leader facing such crises, just as a president's approval rating skies to the 80-90% level at the beginning of war breaking out.
The press is cautious and usually does not go against a strong national consensus, the kind of strong national consensus that did not apply in the former two presidencies, but does in this case.
Comparing coverages might be a useful metric if all things were substantially the same. They are not the same, and not even close.
XI
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