Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.
But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.
And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party.
This is about as close as it gets for the media to actually admit their bias.
The extraordinary coverage of Obama’s trip reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first African-American presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.
Well, not completely. If it was Hillary, or Biden, or Dodd, or any of the other myriad Democrats who were the presumptive nominee, the media would be fawning virtually the same way.
Interestingly, the International Herald Tribune discusses something most media outlets won’t: the appearance of massive bias in the media towards Barry.
So the news media can’t even claim novelty when explaining this effort. When was the last time we saw any network anchor doing a remote, let alone all three at the same time? Not even the Iraq War merited it after the first elections in 2004-5, and I don’t believe that involved all three anchors at any time. Afghanistan hasn’t merited it. This is nothing more than the media fawning over Obama, and looking to give him as much earned media as they can. Their pretense of objective reporting has been ripped away, and the media looks like little more than groupies vying for the attention of a pop star, hoping that some of his popularity rubs off on them. This should embarrass journalists, but instead they’re busy rationalizing their utter lack of self-respect.
So much for Obama’s self-proclaimed desire not to turn his trip overseas into a political stunt. All signs point to it being just that, courtesy, in part, of the intense media circus that will surround the trip.
You do realize, don’t you, that if a GOP candidate with weak foreign policy was doing the same thing - making a “world tour” with dramatic backdrops - the press would be sneering about how the whole thing is a “stunt” meant to “deflect his inexperience.” I know you know it, but I had to say it, anyway.
I think you get the picture of what I think from the roundup of reactions. Then again, the article of self admission spoke for itself as well.
