Obama - the media love affair

19/03/2009

His victory was greeted with global good cheer and an excited press. Is it time the honeymoon ended?

By Adam Forrest


What happens when the euphoria wears off? More than 50 days into his Presidency, Barack Obama needn't worry about the answer just yet. He continues to enjoy high personal approval ratings, the lickspittle sycophancy of world leaders and favourable press coverage.

The obstacles his administration faces are huge, but each policy initiative and public appearance is met, largely, with the good will of a news media keen for the country to find its way again.

When rabidly right-wing talk shot host Rush Limbaugh suggested he wanted the new president to fail, he was roundly condemned by pundits across the spectrum. At a recent impromptu visit to the press corps office of the West Wing, Obama was smothered like Jesus entering Jerusalem.

Still, Limbaugh himself is enjoying a spell in the limelight and his daily rants about the liberal media elite's "love affair" with Obama are beginning to pick up steam. As the ageing ideologue sees it, the press follow Obama with "their tongues dragging along the concrete... Lenin, Stalin never got this kind of coverage from their media".

Time magazine's Mark Halperin deems the coverage during the election campaign as "the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war. It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage".

A Pew Research Center survey suggests Halperin and Limbaugh aren't so far out of step with public perception, regardless of the president's popularity. It found 70 per cent of voters agreed the press had wanted Obama to win the White House.

Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News - an expose of the failures of print journalism - believes news rooms across the globe are only beginning to recover from the giddy daze of his election victory and ascendancy to the White House.

"There has been more or less a complete collapse of journalism in the coverage," he says. "It was horrifyingly evident on the day after inauguration, when newspapers published souvenir editions.

"His PR machine had used the word change, so newspapers pumped out the word change. There's also a tendency for the news media to identify and seize upon heightened emotion. With Obama, we identified a feeling of hope, so we fed that hope."

However, David Elliot Cohen, author of a new book entitled Obama: The Historic Front Pages, does not share the cynicism.
He views the enthusiastic headlines as a reflection of understandable excitement across great swathes of the United States and around the globe. 

"People were desperately looking for hope," he says. "We're wired to confer that on another human being so we conferred our hopes on Obama. The times we're in, people are scared and angry.

"Unlike [Al] Gore or [John] Kerry, who were viewed as the lesser of two evils, here was someone viewed as completely new and different. It was like a religious movement. The newspapers sensed something very big was happening. So no one was willing to print, 'Oh crap, Obama got elected'."

Very few stories in the week following election day on November 4 failed to find some elevated rhetoric about Obama becoming the first black president and the legacy of the civil rights struggle.

Cohen views the celebratory tone, his victory as a giant leap forward for race relations, as inevitable.  "One of the main themes was, 'Wow! We elected a black president - holy shit!'. Every story mentioned Martin Luther King. Suddenly, the impossible had become possible for all minorities.

"It was exciting - I don't see how they could have failed to talk about it. If they hadn't mentioned race, they would have been ignoring the 800lb elephant in the room."

Cohen  also concedes the hysteria meant leaving out a different, less palatable kind of American voice. "Everyone had similar interviews with black people saying 'my grandmother was crying' or 'now my kid can do anything'. The newspapers could have sent journalists to find people saying 'I can't believe that we have a n-word for president'. Should they have done that in the name of balance or accuracy? Well, I'm kinda glad they didn't."


John K Wilson, author of Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, is another admirer of the new president, but does not accept the idea of liberal bias among mainstream American reporters and pundits. Wilson ran a website rebuffing right-wing rumours and smears as they were thrown around during the long campaign, and was perturbed at how quickly attacks from the fringe became talking points for cable TV hosts and newspaper columnists.

"What really bothered me was the coverage of Obama as inexperienced," he recalls. "It really wasn't true if you look at the precedent, but it began to be taken for granted by the media. There was also obsessive coverage of the links with Bill Ayres [a radical who had served on a Chicago community board with Obama] and Jeremiah Wright [the president's former pastor]. Obama had to work to overcome bias and level the playing field."

This is borne out by a Center for Media and Public Affairs study at George Mason University, Virginia, which found that television networks ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than rival John McCain, with more negative statements during the general election. Nevertheless, Wilson concedes there was "coverage gap" that saw the Democrat gain more air time and column inches (according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, two-thirds of the campaign stories were about Obama). 

"He was winning the horse race in terms of fundraising and polls, so accurate reporting meant Obama was seen as a success and was worth focusing on more, whether positively or negatively," says Wilson. "He was also new and there was simply more interest in him.
"Obama was on the cover of magazines because his face sells a lot more magazines than McCain would. That's a pro-profit bias, not a liberal bias."

Wilson also credits the work of some print journalists who engaged in old-fashioned fact checking and proper scrutiny of policy which led to one conclusion about the more creditable candidate. "If anything, it was bias in favour in reality," says Wilson.

"Obama's statements were simply more accurate than McCain's and the Republicans relied on a lot of sleazy, desperate techniques. You can't present these things as if they were equal. There is a cult of objectivity, of seeming fair, but the job of the media should be truth-telling."  

So the Obama love-in was really a very rational affair, one based on circulation, ratings, a reasonable reflection of genuine excitement and a sense of accuracy about the value of Obama's plans.

Yet the perception the US media "elite" embarrassed itself with effusive praise - CNBC host Chris Matthews is now notorious for gushing about "a thrill up my leg" when listening to an Obama speech - may be difficult to overcome.

Media Matters foundation highlights a new tendency for non-partisan papers and pundits to over-correct toward the right because of fears they might be seen as "in the tank" for Obama. The group highlights the unchecked coverage of Republican voices and ideas in the ongoing fallout over the Obama's stimulus bill, and the row over AIG bonuses is proving awkward for the new administration.

"At least some of the tough questions are being asked now; everyone seems to understand that after Bush there is a need for scrutiny and scepticism," says Wilson. "It's a good thing. So long as the scrutiny continues with the next Republican president."

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