Between 2008 and 2016, the media were unapologetic about
their adoration of President Barack Obama. Now, they are energized by
their thorough loathing of President Donald Trump. In tragic fashion, the
hubris of deifying Obama has now come full circle to the nemesis of demonizing
Trump. The common denominator of the two extremes is the abandonment of
disinterested reporting.
When Obama announced his candidacy for president in 2007,
the media relinquished pretenses of objectivity. The progressive Obama,
who had the most partisan record in the U.S. Senate after less than four years
in office, appeared to progressive journalists to have come from central
casting: glib and charismatic, an Ivy-League pedigree, mixed racial ancestry, a
power marriage to a Harvard-trained black lawyer, and an exotic name resonant
of multicultural fides.
By comparison, even the would-be first female president
Hillary Clinton seemed staid. In the 2008 general election, moderate Republican
John McCain—once the darling of the liberal press during his bid to sidetrack
George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries—was reduced to a cranky spoiler
of the nation’s rare chance to be saved by the messianic Obama from the Bush
era’s legacy of war, economic crisis, and callousness.
In the 2008 campaign, reporters ignored the close and
disturbing relationships between the mostly unknown Obama and a cast of unsavory
characters: his racist and anti-Semitic pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the
neighborhood confidant and former terrorist Bill Ayers, and the wheeler-dealer
and soon-to-be felon Tony Rezko.
Instead, journalists quickly started worshipping
candidate Obama in a manner never quite seen before, not even in the days of
the iconic liberal presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F.
Kennedy. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas declared Obama to be a deity (“Obama's
standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”) His very words
were able to make the leg of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews “tingle.” His pants’ crease
proved for David Brooks a talisman of his future greatness, along with the fact
that the mellifluent Obama “talks like us.”
While a few journalists were aware of their cult-like
worship, most were hooked and competed to outdo one another with embarrassing
hagiographic praise. Upon election, Obama was summarily declared by one
presidential historian and television pundit to the smartest man with the
highest IQ ever to have been president.
Obama himself channeled the veneration, variously
promising in god-like fashion to cool the planet and lower the seas, remarking
that his own multifaceted expertise was greater than that of all of the various
specialists who ran his campaign.
For the next eight years, the media largely
ignored what might charitably be called an historic overextension of
presidential power and scandal not seen since the days of Richard Nixon’s
presidency. A clique of journalists set up a private chat group, JournoList,
through which they could channel ideas to promote the Obama progressive agenda.
Freed from most press scrutiny, the Obama administration
surveilled Associated Press reporters accused of leaks and monitored the communications
of Fox News’s White House Correspondent James Rosen. In a variety of scandals,
UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice lied repeatedly about
the Benghazi catastrophe, the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, the Iran deal, and
the supposed destruction of weapons of mass destruction by the Assad government
in Syria.
Meanwhile, Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch faced inquiries
about massaging the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Close advisors such as Rice and UN Ambassador Samantha Power faced
congressional inquiries into whether some in the administration had requested
improper surveillance reports of political opponents, unmasked their names, and
illegally leaked them to the press—a story that the media overlooked.
Most Obama foreign policy initiatives proved
disappointments: reset with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the bombing of Libya
resulting in postwar chaos, the withdrawal of all U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq,
the faux redlines with Syria, failed “strategic patience” with North Korea,
writing off the ISIS terrorist caliphate as “Jayvees,” and the expansion of
Chinese bases into the South China Sea.
At home, Obama was the first president in recent history
never to have achieved three percent economic growth, as labor
non-participation rose and median family incomes fell.
The media largely
ignored a series of scandals, as if investigating them might endanger the Obama
progressive moment: the politicization of the IRS, FBI, and Justice Department;
ICE reduced to de facto irrelevance; fraud at the VA; overreach at EPA; and
incompetence at the Secret Service and GSA.
Rather than appreciate such media obsequiousness, Obama
sometimes showed near contempt for toadyish reporters, joking about his
positive press coverage and joshing how he got the Nobel Peace Prize without
much accomplishment.
His deputy National Security Advisor and would-be novelist
Ben Rhodes contemptuously manipulated and then wrote off young foreign
correspondents as know-nothings—despite the fact they had helped the
administration obfuscate the dangerous implications of Obama’s Iran deal
through what Rhodes called an “echo chamber” of administration-fed talking
points.
Former speech writers Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett joked on
television how they had easily deluded the public on the downsides of
Obamacare. Special advisor Jonathan Gruber laughed at the “stupidity of the
American voter” who was easily deceived by the administration and media about
the nature of Obamacare. Again, the common denominator was an expectation that
the press was not a public watchdog but an enabler of the Obama agenda.
By the time of 2016 presidential race, the media had lost
their credibility as disinterested guardians of objective truth. And while
Hillary Clinton in 2016 was no Barack Obama in 2008, reporters still gave her
special privileges. CNN talking-head Donna Brazile fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign prior to a Clinton-Sanders televised debate. And the John
Podesta Wikileaks trove revealed that a number of marquee reporters were openly
colluding with Clinton to defeat Trump.
Once the media crossed the Rubicon of partisanship, there
was no turning back. The unchecked ebullience that they had showed for Obama
has now been replaced by an undisguised hatred for Donald Trump.
Just as
journalists saw no negative repercussions in their adoration of Obama, they are
now able to denigrate the conservative populist Trump without consequences.
Arrogance plays a role: the media feel that they displayed power in getting
Obama elected and now they wager that they can also ensure Trump’s defeat, or
at least derail his presidency.
The liberal Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center
on Media, Politics and Public Policy issued a report recently showing how the
media has established a “new standard” of negativity in presidential reporting.
It noted that the aggregate news stories from the first 100 days of the Trump
administration were about 80% critical. Some networks such as CNN aired 93%
negative coverage of the president.
CNN was forced to fire three reporters for creating
fictional news about the Trump administration. Some of its anchors and hosts
used scatology to denigrate the president. CNN's New Year’s host Kathy
Griffin was fired at the end of May 2017, for holding up a facsimile of
the decapitated head of Trump. Some producers were caught on tape bragging
about CNN’s biases against Trump and the stupidity of the voters who elected
him.
Media hosts and commentators have been lavish in their
coverage of progressive efforts to subvert Trump—whether it was getting the
Electoral College to deny Trump the presidency; the attempts to overturn the
voting results in three states Trump won; the move to impeach him or remove him
by the 25th Amendment; or to find him guilty of obstruction of justice or
collusion with the Russians.
Some exasperated journalists have been at least
intellectually honest enough to admit that the profession should no longer
adhere to traditional norms of disinterested presidential reporting in the
post-Obama age. According to Christiane Amanpour, Carl Bernstein, Jorge Ramos,
and Jim Rutenberg, the singular menace of the Trump presidency demands open
anti-Trump advocacy, without the veneer of unbiased reporting.
What caused the media’s Trump meltdown? There were a
variety reasons.
Trump represents everything that the media despise: a
crude reality-TV billionaire without military or political experience, whose
orange skin, combed over dyed blond hair, sharp Queens accent, and
confrontational attitude seemed vulgar and crass.
The nexus between beltway politics and the media, often
cemented through marriages and familial relationships, recoiled that an
outsider like Trump sought not just to overturn the Obama agenda but to do so
unapologetically and with the same executive orders that Obama himself had
bragged about in his “pen and phone” ultimata to make laws without the help of
the Congress.
Moreover, Trump campaigned on an us/them,
red-state/blue-state dichotomy. He smashed the proverbial Democratic blue
wall—a fact that caused great unease to liberal journalists who sensed that
half the country found their coastal progressive culture not just foreign but
apparently hypocritical and elitist.
In addition, the current generation of marquee reporters
was schooled at the major journalism schools by veterans of the 1960s, when the
“new” journalism saw progressive political activism—opposition to the Vietnam
War and the promotion of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism—as the
proper counterweight to traditional and supposedly regressive American values.
Postmodernism—the theory that there are no absolute facts
or eternal truths, only interpretations based on power machinations—seeped out
from university English departments into the larger elite culture. Such
relativism may explain the epidemic of fake news accounts and plagiarism as
alternative “narratives” rather than simple untruths.
Buzzfeed, for example,
published the infamous fake Steele file, a lurid dossier of oppositional
research against the Trump campaign, even though it admitted it could not
confirm the veracity of the salacious accusations against Trump. But who was to
say that the accusations were any more true or false than any other? In such
anything-goes fashion, Politico’s Julia Joffe channeled the vulgarity of
television celebrities like Steven Colbert and Bill Maher in suggesting an
incestuous relationship between the president and his daughter.
Trump was neither shy nor decorous in punching back,
ridiculing the appearance of on-air talking heads, relegating them to back of
the room slots at press conferences, and going over the head of the media
through often crude ad hominem tweets. Although polls (whose reliability
remains questionable after the 2016 election) rarely showed figures higher than
forty percent for Trump, the media is held in even less regard, with about
two-thirds of those polled expressing their disapproval of journalists.
If the media became unhinged in the adulatory Obama years
through hubris, it might have earned back its respect and professionalism by
covering Trump in even-handed fashion. But Nemesis does not work that way:
those it destroys, it first makes mad.
