Is President Obama's greatest sin snubbing the media?
From the outset he had the media, if we exclude talk radio, in his camp. The reporters and anchors themselves became the news for a few cycles as stories of gushing journalists filled the papers, each outlet pointing to the emotional outporings of the other. Even in those cases where journalists seemed to maintain their composure, there was a tendency to give him the benefit of the doubt in most instances, just as on the more conservative leaning radio waves, there was the default position of finding any possible fault.
So, fast forward, almost a year in there was this little media blip12 a bit back about reporters being unhappy about the level of access they had to the president and his penchant for giving lots of speeches but no conferences. In fact, President Obama has not held a press conference in over six months. That's more than half of his presidency.
"At issue is whether the president has an obligation to take questions on a regular basis from the group of reporters that cover him daily. The reporters say yes. The White House says, well, we choose to do that differently." - ABC News3
This was going to be the transparent president. He was going to give the people unrivaled access to himself and to the peoples business. In our time, why would the press expect that that access would be through any vehicle but themselves? They are, after all, the self anointed intermediary of the people.
The thing is, President Obama's administration can more tightly control their message and advance their agenda by taking it straight to the people through the White House Blogs4, Twitter5 and Facebook6 than they can through the traditional filter of the media.
There is one possible miscalculation in this idea. The press in this country either loves you or hates you. Ambivalence does not sell newspapers. The news outlets are for profit corporations and it is their business to sell their product, which just so happens to be the news. Lofty ideals like objectivity aside, lists of facts are boring, boring, boring and so subjectivity comes into the picture one way or another in how those lists are parsed and presented.
The press isn't reporting on President Obama the way they used to.
When Senator Elect, Scott Brown7 won the Massachusetts special election for the senate seat vacated by Senator Ted Kennedy8, the Democrats lost their filibusterer proof super majority. Given the start that the press gave President Obama with their coverage, one might expect the event to result in stories about how the Democrats still hold a majority position in the US Senate 9 with 59 of 100 seats held by members of the President's party. That isn't what is happening though.
Instead we are reading report after report about the administration's legislative agenda being in shreds. Some few voices in the wilderness, mostly at MSNBC10, still carry the message of hope and change, but increasingly their voices are growing fainter as the clamoring throngs of the press adopt a harsher timber and a harsher language when covering the president and his party.
I'm left wondering if these are the death rattles of the traditional media, or at least the tradition as we now know it. The subjectivity of the media is more apparent to more people than ever before, and having built their house on objectivity, they are loathe to admit the truth. This is an incongruous slap in the face to the average American delivered every day with the morning cup of coffee. People sense that the surface veneer of objective journalistic reporting is thin and fragile, and it continues to become more difficult not to look through it.
Tonight president Obama will deliver his first State of the Union speech, and the way the press covers it could be very telling. He could very well be going in to this thing under damned if you do, damned if you don't conditions. Whether he is bold and forceful as some want to see or contrite and re-conciliatory as others are hoping, the press will have their say. I will be watching to see what they press says as much as to see what the President says.
I'd love to hear back from you! Should the President court the media and grant them the access they want in order to recoup their favor? Should he continue to pursue social media as his connection of choice with the people? What do these approaches mean for those who simply aren't hooked in to social networking?
Does A Changing America Mean Changing America?
Many think that this trend favors the Democrats overall, and conventional wisdom seems to be that this would always be the case. But, in my travels I've come to understand that people is people. They have the same basic wants and fears. As other ethnic groups supplant whites as majority population groups within the US, I see no reason to expect that they will not also supplant them as a majority in middle class representation as well.
If this were the 1930's we might expect something akin to apartheid to develop, preserving the, now minority, white population's position as the representative middle class. We are not in the first half of the 20th century any longer, though, and class structures are not hereditary prisons in our political and economic model. Indeed, despite increasingly strident language of class warfare rhetoric, mobility both up and down the social and economic ladders within the US is more fluid and more common than ever before. The rich don't always get richer, and the poor enjoy a standard of living that other countries' middle classes envy.
As current minority groups increase in population and increase in middle class representation, I expect to see them adopt many of the same positions and concerns of the current middle class. People is people.
As families move through economic "classes" their political favor and their votes will undergo a shift to reflect their changing status. Over time, as the middle class becomes increasingly composed of groups who are now counted in the minorities, the simple fact of being a member of one of these groups will no longer be an invitation for the democrats to count their votes.
President Clinton and President Reagan were both able to speak to the current, largely white majority, middle class, and also speak to minority groups with great success. Future presidential hopefuls will find themselves in the new position of having to address those groups together, because they will be the same group to an ever increasing extent.
The Democrats may very well find that the lines of the old landscape are eroding beneath their feet, and if they don't address themselves to these shifts may find themselves without an audience. The Republicans may not fare any better. They seem entrenched in a position that depends on a white middle class, and while they address themselves, generally well, to middle class concerns, they are largely inept at doing so in a way that embraces encroachment on that class by non traditional members.