Advice for Obama

 

by Gene Lyons

One of the Republican right's most successful inventions has been liberal media bias. Even as the "mainstream" press has trended rightward, the liberal-bias trope has had two big advantages in keeping the party faithful, well, faithful. First, it allowed devotees to reject any and all information at odds with GOP dogma. Second, it preserved the sense of victimization essential to the right-wing world view. In reality, the Washington political media have been functionally pro-Republican for years. The so-called Gang of 500 long ago abandoned journalistic ethics for those of the entertainment industry. They're celebrities, and as such would-be insiders and front-runners. Liberal media ? During the Clinton administration, this cohort flogged the make-believe Whitewater scandal for years. They went hysterical over Bill Clinton's sexual sins and sustained false derogatory stories about Al Gore during the 2000 election (invented the Internet, "Love Story," etc. ). After that, the nation's premier newspapers, specifically The New York Times and The Washington Post, got suckered into running single-source, frontpage propaganda about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The embedded mainstream media treated the subsequent invasion of Iraq as the world's biggest Boy Scout jamboree until chaos in Baghdad became impossible to ignore.

So was it shocking after Barack Obama's election to find pundits on TV with warnings such as that America remains a conservative country and he must "discipline" the "ardent activists" who elected him by engaging "interests that usually ally with Republicans" ? That was the estimable Ron Brownstein's advice on MSNBC.

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham cautioned that despite Obama's win, "we're still a center-right nation." On CNN, the network that conservatives view with horror, correspondent John King allowed that "the electorate voted for Barack Obama, but still perceives him to be a liberal." Having made "inroads in communities that not too long ago voted Republican," King said, "the last thing you want to do if you want to keep them four years from now is to alienate them with a liberal agenda." Did Obama get largely favorable press coverage during the campaign ? He did. Largely, I think, because he was so clearly winning. Undying Clinton hatred also played a part during the primaries. My friend Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler Web site is only half-joking when he says the Gang of 500 finally found something they cared about: their own shrinking 401 (k ) s.

So should Obama heed them now ? Not if he wants to be a successful president.

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/244005