So apparently the President who has received the most laudatory and fawning press coverage of any President in the modern era has decided to go to war on one of the few media outlets that does not genuflect before daring to ask his administration non-deferential questions. This week, Obama apparently went so far as to take the insane step of trying to remove FoxNews reporters from a pool interview. The basis for Obama’s war on FoxNews is that FoxNews isn’t really “news,” because it represents and is pushing a point of view. So, to review the world as it appears through the lenses of Barack Obama, the Huffington Post and Tommy Christopher are objective “news” organizations that get called on respectfully at White House press conferences, and FoxNews isn’t “news” because they’re pushing a point of view. Great.
Many people seem to be genuinely upset by this development. I’m not; in fact, I welcome it. After this week, no Republican administration will be so foolish as to replicate the mistakes of the past Republican administrations who felt like they had to treat DNC propaganda mouthpieces like the NYT and MSNBC like objective news organizations. Remember when the NYT leaked the highly classified program the Bush Administration had to track the funds being used to support terrorism, even though their own legal department told them the program was almost certainly legal? Remember how Bush took the extraordinary step of begging them not to run the story because it would shut down a completely legal program that had been very effective in combating terrorism, and they basically told him to get lost and ran it anyway, just because it would cause him political damage? I think it was a mistake for Bush to ever allow a NYT reporter back in the White House press room again, but he clearly felt that Presidential precedent and decorum demanded it.
Now that Obama has shown the way; to wit, that a President is perfectly free to blackball any news organization that says anything he doesn’t like, the next Republican President will have a much easier time kicking MSNBC off Air Force One. In fact, I wish we could just speed up this entire kabuki dance and develop a set of permanent political blacklists; Republicans refuse to go on MSNBC and CNN, Democrats refuse to go on FoxNews, etc. etc. At long last the media will have shed the last vestiges of being the objective arbiters of truth and reporting and it will be evident to the whole world which side a given “news” organization is a mouthpiece for based on which politicians will grant them interviews. When that day comes, everyone will look at all news reports examining them for agendas and biases with a critical eye that has been deserved for decades. And since the media is still overwhelmingly left-wing, the aggregate result of their collective defrocking will be a bonus for our side.
I’d like to thank President Obama for starting this process, and encourage him to see it through to its conclusion.
haha! love it!
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