Has the Media Been a Lapdog With Obama?

Canadian columnist Rex Murphy thinks so:

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since…

The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jermiah Wright. In the midst of the brief stormlet over the issue, one CNN host — inexplicably — decided that CNN was going to be a “Wright-free zone.” He could have hung out a sign: “No bad news about Obama here.”

The media trashed Hillary. They burned Republicans. They ransacked Sarah Palin and her family. But Obama, the cool, the detached, the oracular Obama — he strolled to the presidency.

Palin, in particular, stands out as Obama’s opposite in the media’s eyes. As much as they genuflected to the one, they felt the need to turn rotweiler toward the other. If Obama was sacred , classy, intellectual and cosmopolitan, why then Palin must be malevolent, trashy, dumb and pure backwoods-ignorant.

I think an argument can be made that the media has given the President the kid glove treatment.  That said, one could also say that the press also treated President George W. Bush lightly in the run up to the Iraq War.  In both cases, the media hasn’t always asked the hard questions.  With Obama, there was a certain love affair; with Bush it was the fear of appearing unpatriotic in light of September 11.

Does this make the mainstream media guilty of “liberal media bias?”  Well, while I think that most journalists do lean towards the left, I don’t think that’s the problem here.  The problem is that the media is made up of very fallible humans.

American journalists like to live up to an almost machine-like objectivity.  I think its good to be fair and to listen to all sides, but we are human.  We have biases.  The media wants to pretend its above the fray and kind of god-like, but they are human and they play to favorites or try to get on someone’s good side.

I don’t know if there is a solution here other than having people like Murphy call the media on their mess and get them to face their shortcomings.