On January 20, 2009, could anyone have imagined that on January 26, 2010, it would be impossible to find a news outlet that isn't ripping President Obama to shreds?
What an astonishing turn of events. A year ago, when Obama took office, he was praised as the president who would usher in an era of new hope and promise. A nation tired of war and beaten down by a recession embraced his freshness and his youthful energy.
A year later, every story about Obama is a litany of failures, blunders, miscalculations, not enough of this, too much of that. According to virtually every major media outlet, Obama has squandered his first year and is now in full panic mode.
How much of this is true?
The spending freeze idea seems an uncharacteristically blatant gimmick intended to appeal to fiscal conservatives. Yet apparently, the idea has been in the works since the fall, far before any hint of a Democratic defeat in Massachusetts.
While the Democrats’ unexpected loss of a Massachusetts Senate seat in a special election last week gave new impetus to administration efforts to tackle the deficit, those efforts actually have been under way since last fall, when officials began early work on the 2011 budget.
Mr. Obama’s budget director, Peter R. Orszag, initially directed Cabinet secretaries and agency heads to propose alternative budgets — one with a freeze and another that cut spending by 5 percent. Months of internal arguments and appeals followed.
Is that true? Where did the reporter get that information?
The Massachusetts special election certainly was a huge surprise and got a lot of people worked up. Without question, there is a palpable loss of nerve emanating from the Democratic caucus. Obama's actions since the election, at least as they are being interpreted and analyzed in the media over the past few days, certainly suggest an administration in some degree of disarray.
Yet, as anyone who follows political news knows all too well, these stories have a way of feeding on themselves. The more reporters write about an administration in panic, the more the public begins to sense panic. The more reporters write about the Massachusetts election being a referendum on this, that or the other thing, the easier it is to believe they are right. But are they?
The conventional wisdom is that Scott Brown's victory spells doom for President Obama's agenda. In the days following his election, reporters and pundits tripped all over each other in their attempts to write the most impressive obituary for the Obama Administration.
It's quite possible they are right. It's equally possible they are wrong.
Here's an interesting article about Scott Brown, from Esquire Magazine, that paints a picture of Scott Brown different from any that I had previously seen.
...the deeper you look into Brown's official position statements, the more suspiciously liberal beliefs you find:
- He supports legal abortion: "This decision should ultimately be made by the woman in consultation with her doctor," he says.
- He's against a national law prohibiting gay marriage: "States should be free to make their own laws in this area," he says.
- He supports government investment in green programs: "I support reasonable and appropriate development of alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal and improved hydroelectric facilities."
- He's politically correct on Israel: "I support a two-state solution that reaffirms Israel's right to exist and provides the Palestinians with a place of their own where both sides can live in peace and security."
- And he doesn't even want to bomb Iran! He's backing Obama's cautious incrementalism! "I support the bipartisan Iran sanctions bill..."
Is this the truth about Scott Brown? Does anyone really know? Does Scott Brown even know? Do candidates begin to believe the things they say during a campaign, even when they are in direct opposition to public positions they've taken on their own websites? Is the writer simply cherry-picking items that fit with what he already wanted to say? How do reporters choose which details, facts, quotes and other material to include in their articles? How do they choose to frame these elements, to place them in a context?
Ken Auletta has an interesting - and, I might add, somewhat depressing - article in the January 25th New Yorker, called Non-Stop News. One of the most telling remarks, from among many in the article by White House reporters, is from Peter Baker of the New York Times:
"When do you have time to call experts? When do you have time to sort through data and information and do your own research? Even with a well-staffed news organization, we are hostages to the non-stop, never-ending file-it-now, get-on-the-Web, get-on-the-radio, get-on-TV media environment....We are, collectively, much like eight-year-olds chasing a soccer ball. Instead of finding ways of creating fresh, original, high-impact journalism, we're way too eager to chase the same story everyone else is chasing, which is too often the easy story and too often the simplistic story - and too often the story that misses what's going on."
Is it any wonder that accuracy suffers under such conditions? When reporters themselves agree that objectivity is nearly impossible to achieve in the modern media environment, what does that mean for consumers of news? If a reporter is under pressure to file something four, five, six times a day, some critical ingredient is inevitably sacrificed.
Ken Auletta describes it this way:
Instead of seeking context or disputing a claim, reporters often simply get two opposing quotes and file a he said/she said story.
This type of reporting allows distortions and downright lies to become accepted fact in the minds of many people. This type of reporting allows rumors and innuendo to become truth. If enough people say it, and enough reporters write it down, and enough people read it, then it is true, because "truth" is what people collectively believe it to be.
As Winston Churchill said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Jake Tapper of ABC News has this to say about the ubiquity of falsehoods in the media:
"Groundless accusations are not new to American politics, but this president has been forced to deal with more downright falsehoods than any president I can think of."
Then, the "story" becomes that the Obama Administration is being "reactive," and everyone writes about that for a while.
Tonight, following the president's State of the Union Address, the viewing public will be subjected to "instant analysis" of the speech by the predictable gaggle of pundits and commentators. Within seconds of Obama's final words, we will be told "what it all means" by a group of people who, by their own admission, have no idea what they're talking about a good bit of the time.
In Ken Auletta's article, David Axelrod, who for years was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, says:
"There are some really good journalists there, really superb ones. But the volume of material they have to produce just doesn't leave a whole lot of time for reflection."
As William Goldman once famously wrote about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything."
Since the public depends on the media for its information, for news that bears a passing resemblance to objective truth; since everything we see, hear or read in the media shapes our perceptions of reality, I guess we must conclude that Mr. Goldman's words now apply to us all.
For more from this writer, please visit: http://bareleft.blogspot.com