Is the Media Sending President Obama a Message?

Dane Morgan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:49:57 +0000

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?

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Is the Media Sending President Obama a Message?