Obama and the media

Robert Samuelson:

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: "President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House."

The study examined 1,261 stores by The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, Newsweek magazine and the "NewsHour" on PBS. Favorable stories (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent) , while the rest were "neutral" or "mixed." Obama's treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the presidencies of Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent).

Unlike Bush and Clinton, Obama received favorable coverage in both news columns and opinion pages. The nature of stories also changed. "Roughly twice as much of the coverage of Obama (44 percent) has concerned his personal and leadership qualities than was the case for Bush (22 percent) or Clinton (26 percent)," the report said. "Less of the coverage, meanwhile, has focused on his policy agenda."

All of which might explain this:

U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle made their first visit to New York City on Saturday to enjoy a Broadway play, and received standing ovation from the audience before the show started.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone started more than 45 minutes late, while employees flickered the lights on and off in an attempt to calm down the clapping audience.

‘We had no idea he was going to be here. We were really lucky to come tonight. People were standing on top of their chairs clapping for him,’ the New York Daily News quoted one Maisha McGill, 28, as saying.

Fawning media coverage serves to promote such rock star treatment of our political leaders, an incredibly unhealthy phenomenon that serves to expand an already generous ego. I fear that it leads to someone believing their own hype and abandoning the humility and humbleness that must be found in political office.

As Samuelson adds:

The infatuation matters because Obama's ambitions are so grand. He wants to expand health care subsidies, tightly control energy use and overhaul immigration. He envisions the greatest growth of government since Lyndon Johnson. The Congressional Budget Office estimates federal spending in 2019 at nearly 25 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). That's well up from the 21 percent in 2008, and far above the post-World War II average; it would also occur before many baby boomers retire.

Are his proposals practical, even if desirable? Maybe they're neither? What might be unintended consequences? All "reforms" do not succeed; some cause more problems than they solve. Johnson's economic policies, inherited from Kennedy, proved disastrous; they led to the 1970s' "stagflation." The "war on poverty" failed. The press should not be hostile; but it ought to be skeptical.

Indeed. It's amazing to watch the uncritical eye being given towards Obama's grandiose plans only short years after the press flagellated itself for being more skeptical about the Bush Administration's claims over Iraq.