Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman misrepresents the separation between the MSM and President Obama. It has little to do with Fineman and his legacy media colleagues falling out of love with Obama. It has more to do with we the people losing confidence in the integrity of Fineman et al. The MSM is the clock that stuck thirteen. We’ll never again trust its ability to tell time.
In his March 12, 2010, column, Fineman wrote:
If you are president, the only thing worse than criticism is not being covered. And the truth is, we in the press are bored with Barack. The “mainstream media” are losing patience with, and even interest in, their erstwhile hero.
Howard needs a reality therapy intervention. He needs a crucial conversation with the American citizenry. He needs the truth…one that he and those like him can’t handle.
Howard, we are the bored ones, bored with you and those like you. On the one hand, it’s nothing personal. On the other, our boredom is very personal. It borders on distain.
The reason as to why this feeling grows daily is found in your own words, Howard:
But now, finally, the MSM, which views itself as ideologically neutral, has found ideologically neutral reasons to lose patience with him: that he may be ineffectual; that he doesn’t know how to play the game; that he can’t get anything done.
That sentence would be laughable were it not so self-delusional. Of all things great and small, “ideologically neutral” is one thing that Fineman et al are not. Nor are the reasons the MSM is, allegedly, losing patience with Obama “ideologically neutral.” Howard might as well have written, “We in the mainstream media are angry because Obama isn’t getting done the things we helped him get elected to do, plus he’s ignoring us and our advice!”
The mainstream media’s infatuation with the Obama persona remains steadfast, but it’s now become an unrequited love. Barack needed their adulation to get elected. He doesn’t need it to govern in the Chicago Way.
In the last paragraph of Howard’s recent article, entitled “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: The press finally falls out of love with Obama,” Fineman drops the façade of a MSM break up with its “erstwhile hero” and writes:
To his credit, Obama is beginning to get it. The speech he gave in Missouri was the best explanation he has yet given on his health-care-reform plan. Reporters weren’t paying much attention, but, if Obama is lucky, at least some voters–a.k.a. his real-constituents–were.
Beginning to get what?
Howard is the naïve sophomore school girl, once courted and used by the more experienced upper classman, but now shunned by him. She says to friends who pretend to sympathize, “That’s it. I’m done with him. He’s such a bore.” She’s done with him…until he smiles at her in the hall a week later, and the bipolar cycle of perceived acceptance and then rejection resets.
Want evidence of Howard’s fickleness? Try this. Back on June 29, 2009, Howard’s Newsweek article was entitled “The End of the Honeymoon. Barack Obama has benefitted from good relations with the press. How will he handle it when things turn sour?” Eight months ago, Howard, the jilted sophomore girl, wrote this about her erstwhile upper class hero.
But I do sense that, after the comparatively sunny days of his first five months in office, the pattern is changing in the meteorological map of the national media–and in the president’s own comfort with his journalistic surroundings…They [Obama and his aides] assume they can manipulate, manage and guide the media flawlessly. They think they can ride the wave all the way every time. And why shouldn’t they? Obama’s presidential campaign, after all, was perhaps the shrewdest, most disciplined message machine ever assembled in modern electoral politics. And the coverage, overall, was often close to hagiographic…Obama has had such warm relations with most of the national media (he even jokes about it) that he is tempted to use them in ways that can sound like propaganda.
“Hagiographic,” literally means holy writing in Greek. It’s an interesting word for Howard to use. Fineman et al treated candidate Obama as one descended from above, and became the propaganda arm of his campaign.
In the final paragraph of that piece from last June, Howard wrote:
Obama has enjoyed a glorious ride, but the press has gotten about as much mileage as it can by writing the story of his rise and early triumph. Eventually, the only way to generate copy and ratings will be to write the story of his difficulties–the descent that follows the rise. Expect to see Obama smiling a lot.
“Glorious” – another interesting word.
It’s as though Howard wrote, “Expect to see Obama smiling at those of us in the mainstream media again in order to win back our favorable attention.”
And so she clutches her books as she walks the hall along a route she knows will take her by his last class, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, and he deliver a smile to her.