Yup, a story about media bias redolent with...media bias. It's like biting into a puffy white donut only to find another donut stuffed inside instead of custard or causing a rift between dimensions and see yourself peering back at you...or, um, something like that. Maybe not quite that dramatic. Any way you slice it, the continuing inability of the media to recognize its own bias, even when trying to discern it in others, is laughable.
What if Bush had done that? from Politico
A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.
Snubbing the Dalai Lama.
Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.
Freezing out a TV network.
Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.
President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.
What’s remarkable is what hasn’t happened. These episodes haven’t become metaphors for Obama’s personal and political character — or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda.
It’s a sign that the media’s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news judgment, and an illustration that, in politics, context is everything.
A funny thing? No. Not even in the sense that they're using it. It was a funny thing when the press couldn't figure out how a republican got elected when 'no one they knew voted for him'. It's a funny thing when the press bands together to try to bring down a president. It's not a funny thing when the press in America has become no more than a mouthpiece and water carrier for a charismatic leader who speaks well but does most of his work in secret, his aides admitting that they tell the press what to cover, how to cover it, and what not to cover, proudly trumpeting their "control" of the news. There is absolutely nothing funny about that, not here, not in the USSR, not in Venezuela, not in Nazi Germany...it is most decidedly
not funny. Only if you're
in said "echo chamber" do you find it 'funny', yes, even in the way they meant the term.
Conservatives look on with a mix of indignation and amazement and ask: Imagine the fuss if George W. Bush had done these things?
And quickly add, with a hint of jealousy: How does Obama get away with it?...
*sigh*. Yeah, right. Us conservatives, deep down, really just want to be loved by liberal elitists. Uh huh. Yup, nailed that one on the head. Frustration, yes. Indignation, yes. Fear, yes. Jealousy, uh, no. Conservatives don't want to be treated with kid gloves the way Obey-Won demands to be treated. They don't even want Obey-Won to be treated like a child-molester in the general prison population the way the press treated Bush. All we ever ask is for
fair, equal treatment. That's all. Jealousy? Yeah, right. Only someone that cannot even begin to imagine what a conservative actually is and stands for would mistake a desire for equality for a desire for superiority. (TANGENT ALERT!) I know what might creep into your head - the argument that 'gay rights' are just 'equal rights' when conservatives complain that they want 'special rights'. This isn't the same thing. Everyone has the right to marry. Giving someone a right to an entirely NEW form of 'marriage' is 'special', it is not the same. Protecting one group of people with thought crime laws is not the same as punishing all criminals equally under the same laws. It is 'special' to add additional punishments to someone that punches a gay, but does not equally protect someone that is punched
by a gay. Those are 'special rights', awarded only to a certain group, not available equally to everyone. And (ARGH! MORE TANGENT-ING AHEAD!), by the way, how on earth does a judge not find that a law that punishes someone for refusing to hire someone in a wheelchair but not someone in a wheelchair that refuses to hire someone
not in a wheelchair does not violate the equal protection clause? And now back to our story...
But others say there’s a larger phenomenon at work — in the story line the media wrote about Obama’s presidency. For Bush, the theme was that of a Big Business Republican who rode the family name to the White House, so stories about secret energy meetings and a certain laziness, intellectual and otherwise, fit neatly into the theme, to be replayed over and over again.
Obama’s story line was more positive from the start: historic newcomer coming to shake up Washington. So the negatives that sprung up around Obama — like a sense that he was more flash than substance — track what negative coverage he’s received, captured in a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit that made fun of his lack of accomplishments in office.
*sigh* Of course the writer here fails to capture the most ridiculously sublime aspect of a specific incident that they take pains to recount...that the media went so far as to not only notice this 'insult', but actually
fact check a comedy routine to defend Obey-Won! Because we all recall with fondness the time CNN "fact checked" SNL when they lied about Gov. Palin, right? Right? (crickets)
“There may well be almost an unconscious effort on the part of the media to give Obama a bit more slack because he is more likable, because he is the first African-American president. That plays into it,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California.
More likable? Really? When did Bush snap about "I won" at Democrats? He invited them over for dinner and let them help write legislation. After his infamous Super Bowl cookie party where Obama invited over a few Republicans, they've been shut out and insulted, told they're "dirt" that must be "cleaned up", and brushed aside for having the temerity to ask that egregious tax cheats not be running the committee that writes tax law! More likable? Which decades did Bush spend in a racist, white-orthodoxy church? When did Bush snarl at reporters to let him 'eat his waffle'? Only the clueless see Obey-Won as "more likable" as a reason for the Debt-i Knights getting a pass in the press. If, however, you say that a hardcore socialist activist is "more likable"
to the press...then you might be on to something...after all, I don't recall the ladies in the press pool swooning over the sight of Bush in a pair of jeans or drooling because he worked out - actually Bush's working out was considered just another form of mental illness by the press. As for the rest - if they want to accuse the press of pandering to a black man because he is black and refusing to treat him as they would a white, orange, yellow, brown, or blue man and going easy on him just because he's black...well, that's their business.
Democrats find the complaints of Obama “getting a pass” hard to stomach in light of the way the press treated Bush — particularly on the single biggest mistake of his presidency, relying on the faulty intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. Now, Obama’s aides say, the positive coverage simply reflects the fact that their efforts are succeeding.
Ummm...HUH?? What the fudge does this even
mean? Are they implying that they think Bush
got it easy over
Iraq? Are you effing HIGH? As for the rest, you effing MUST be high if you think that the fawning coverage of the press that has gone on for YEARS is because they're "succeeding". Why? Because they haven't effing DONE ANYTHING! That's as squirrel poop nutty as when I read a letter to the editor that said that reporters were all Democrats because they had access to 'more information' than the common person and so they
knew that the Democrats were right. Uh huh. It says so on my secret decoder ring. And now for something completely different...an NFL metaphor:
“As our administration makes progress on the agenda that Washington has ignored for too long, we expect we’ll get some news coverage of that progress that we like and some tough coverage that we don’t,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “It’s not unlike the New Orleans Saints, who are getting lots of good coverage of their perfect record so far — certainly better coverage than the [2-5] Redskins — but it doesn’t mean the Saints have liked every story that’s been written about them since training camp. It goes with the territory.”
Bat spit crazy, I tell ya.
There are signs the friendly tone toward Obama is ebbing. Case in point: a front-page story in The New York Times noting that Obama’s all-male basketball games drew fire from the head of the National Organization for Women, who called the games “troubling.”
There's that ugly bias rearing its head again. They think that a group of radical feminists whining that Obama doesn't play basketball with women and the press having the nerve to write about it is on a par with the press making up carp about Bush and running with it for days...for making up lies about Gov. Palin and running with it for months...for accusing the Vice President of shooting a friend intentionally during a hunting trip...for accusing the President of willfully murdering blacks
with a hurricane! They think that is on a par with the Bush coverage despite noticeably ignoring his plummeting approval figures, ignoring his administrations illegal attempts to ouster Attorneys General and then smearing them, ignoring his lies about 'negotiating health care on C-SPAN' while he is actually cutting secret deals with insurers and drug makers behind closed doors, ignoring his lies about not raising taxes, oh, cripes, do I need to go on? The bubble boy manages to find a few on his own:
But here are other stories in which Obama seems to have gotten a pass:
New Orleans
As a candidate, Obama railed against the Bush administration for abandoning and then neglecting the people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He made five campaign trips to the city.
But as president, Obama waited almost nine months before visiting the Big Easy, spent less than four hours on the ground there and then jetted to San Francisco for a $3 million Democratic fundraiser.
“Don’t judge anybody on the amount of time that they’ve spent there. Judge only what this administration promised that they would do, what they’ve done every day and what they’re continuing to work on,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said, pointing to positive reviews of the federal government’s efforts under Obama.
For their part, Democrats can’t see how Bush officials can muster much umbrage over anything related to New Orleans, given how the Republican administration handled the initial response to Katrina.
*sigh* They stiff can't let this one go, can they? All these years later, still lying about the response to a massive hurricane. All they remember is their own (disproven) spin. You might even say they're still "stuck on stupid".
Managing the press
When the Obama administration moved in recent weeks to isolate and disparage Fox News as a wing of the Republican Party, there were few immediate howls of outrage — even from Fox’s fellow journalists in the media.
Press defenders and First Amendment advocates who jumped on the Bush administration for using military analysts to shape war coverage reacted with a yawn to the White House’s announcement that it had deemed Fox to be not a “legitimate news organization.”
“Had I said about MSNBC what the Obama White House said about Fox, the media uproar would still be going on,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as Bush’s press secretary until 2003. “I instinctively would have known ... the media would have leapt to their feet to defend them. I’m shocked it’s not happening now.”
One press veteran agreed. “If George Bush had taken on MSNBC, what would have happened?” said Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large of the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s one place you can point to a real difference in how I’d imagine Bush would be treated.”
Politicizing the White House
Throughout the Bush administration, liberal critics warned that the hand of Bush political adviser Karl Rove was spreading politics into all corners of government. Reporters were on alert for any sign that politics was infecting the work of federal agencies. One top appointee got in hot water for allegedly asking agency officials to work to “help our candidates” across the country.
So some Bush aides went nearly apoplectic earlier this month when they spotted Gibbs and Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, in photos of a Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan policy.
“Oh, the howling and screaming that would have happened if Karl Rove was sitting in on even a deputies-level meeting where strategy was being hammered out. People would have just gone ballistic,” said Peter Feaver, a former White House aide for both Bush and Bill Clinton.
No, you see it's only Republicans and/or conservatives that go "apoplectic". Liberals just "warn" when they see something they disagree with. Reporters are just "on alert". See how that bias just creeps in there? It's subtle, but only until you get used to noticing it. And, again, it's real. And why can't this guy ask the obvious question...Why aren't reporters "on alert" against this administration that is trying to control
their industry, has already shown a penchant for secret deals (including the one where an unelected, unconfirmed "czar" was allowed to conduct backroom, secret meetings about emissions and then brag about how they 'didn't write anything down' and how nobody 'talked'?
Also, in about nine months, Obama has already attended more than two dozen fundraising events, while Bush did only six in his first year in office, according to a tally by CBS’s Mark Knoller...
Dealing with business, in secret
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney endured years of criticism and lawsuits that stretched all the way to the Supreme Court over secret meetings Cheney’s Energy Task Force held with oil and gas companies. When the policy emerged, critics said Cheney was carrying water for the industry.
Obama pledged to hash out health care reform live on C-SPAN and excoriated Bush for kowtowing to the drug industry. But aides signed off on the drug industry’s agreement to find $80 billion in savings to support reform. However, Obama aides didn’t disclose that the agreement involved the White House promising that current health legislation wouldn’t include further cuts or give the government the right to negotiate over drug prices.
I see they haven't put the "criticism" (certainly not "near apoplexy") about the meetings down the memory hole...but they can't seem to find a few characters to spare to note that the administration was completely vindicated by the courts.
That seems to have escaped their attention.
Toning down human rights
During the campaign, Obama talked tough on China. While candidate Obama pushed Bush to take a hard line, President Obama hasn’t. Hoping to win China’s help on Iran and North Korea, Obama skipped a meeting with the Dalai Lama and said little when China undertook a violent crackdown in its largely Muslim Xinjiang region. The White House has pledged to meet with the Dalai Lama later.
And while candidate Obama warned Bush against a “reckless and cynical initiative [that] would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments,” President Obama’s envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, seemed to lay out a similar incentive-driven approach...
Traveling and recreating
In his campaign and as president, Bush was mocked for a lack of interest in all things foreign — seven minutes touring the Kremlin, 25 minutes at the Great Wall of China, before declaring, “Let’s go home.”
During a trip to Europe in June, Obama chastised German and French reporters for suggesting that he was snubbing those countries by making only brief stops in each. “There are only 24 hours in the day. And so there’s nothing to any of that speculation beyond us just trying to fit in what we could do on such a short trip,” he told reporters in Germany.
But after taking his wife out for an attention-grabbing date night, Obama promptly jetted back to Washington. Within about 90 minutes of arriving at the White House, the tightly scheduled president was on the move again — headed to Andrews Air Force Base to play nine holes of golf.
I guess a hint of oxygen crept through a crack into the echo chamber, but most of this is just more of the same, ping-ponging around in there.
Do you know what this
really is, though? It's CYA. That's all. They want to say, hey, look, we noticed this, we're all over it, pal! It's like when someone does an 'internal investigation' of themselves, decides a few small things are slightly akimbo and they'll take care of it in a jiffy, so go away please and stop pretending there's anything wrong...no more billions will be embezzled, so shoo! Git!
But what do I know? I'm just a jealous, apoplectic nut that doesn't find a race-baiting socialist more attractive than Bush.
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