Bozell Column: A Dreadful Media Campaign
Throughout the very long presidential election cycle, two trends remained consistent. The media lauded Obama no matter how horrendous his record, and they savaged Obama’s Republican contenders as ridiculous pretenders.
From the start of the Republican race in 2011, every candidate who took the lead then took an unfair beating. They even slimed Sarah Palin in case she decided to run. Martin Bashir announced she was “vacuous, crass, and according to almost every biographer, vindictive too.” Newsweek mocked Michele Bachmann on its cover, making her look pale, confused and nutty, with the headline “The Queen of Rage.” Politico and other media outlets tried to pin sexual harassment claims on Herman Cain without naming, or even knowing the accusers.
The Washington Post killed trees to report in earth-shaking depth how the Rick Perry family had leased a hunting property where once, the N-word was painted on a rock, and never mind it was the Rick Perry family that covered it with white paint. Chris Matthews smeared Newt Gingrich, saying "He looks like a car bomber...He looks like he loves torturing." Matthews thought Newt was also polluting the civil discourse. “Ever since he appeared on the national scene, politics has been nastier, more feral, too often uglier.”
Then late in the cycle came the dark horse, Rick Santorum. He emerged and was slaughtered. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller sneered he “sounds like he’s creeping up on a Christian version of Sharia law.”
The only one who seemed to miss his own special episode of When Journalists Attack was Mitt Romney. But when he emerged as the nominee, all bets were off. The Washington Post published a 5,400-word "expose" documenting the shocking revelation that teenaged Romney just may have pinned a boy down and cut his hair. In 1965.
To be sure, The Washington Post did publish a historical piece on Obama’s high school career, as well. Exactly a month after its Romney-Running-With-Scissors article, it devoted 5,500 words in the Sports section to an excerpt of David Maraniss's new biography with the headline “President Obama’s Love for Basketball Can be Traced Back to His High School Team.”
Despite the news media’s infatuation with him, Obama rarely reciprocated. He reduced to a trickle the media’s access by minimizing the number of White House press conferences. He hasn’t called one since June. Instead, he hop-scotched from one flippantly unserious interview to another, from Leno to Letterman, from “The View” to “Access Hollywood.” When Obama did consent to interviews with “news” shows, it was more of the same, with embarrassing fawn-a-thons from Charlie Rose at CBS and Brian Williams at NBC.
Even the September 11 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya – which resulted in the deaths of our ambassador and three others, and the subsequent, and ongoing serial dishonesty of this administration in its refusal to take a lick of blame for the scandalous lack of security, and the refusal to help the men in need -- has been brushed under the rug to help Obama. The only man hammered on that issue was Mitt Romney.
Anyone who hoped any of the liberal debate moderators would bring accountability to Obama saw his hopes eviscerated. Anyone who hoped Steve Kroft would press Obama in his September 12 “60 Minutes” interview only saw Obama insisting “Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later.”
This passage from Peter Baker of The New York Times says it all about Obama’s press avoidance all the way to Election Day: “Nor has Mr. Obama faced many tough questions lately, like those about the response to the attack in Benghazi, Libya, since he generally does not take questions from the reporters who trail him everywhere. Instead, he sticks to generally friendlier broadcast interviews, sometimes giving seven minutes to a local television station or calling in to drive-time radio disc jockeys with nicknames like Roadkill.”
How can you read that and not think journalism is roadkill?
