Left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh, a living legend with the American mainstream media, states the obvious in a new interview with The Guardian: When it comes to Obama, the American media’s unrequited crush on the president has turned them into useless fanboys and water carriers:
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider. …
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would” – or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,” he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.
It would be fascinating to know what Hersh is specifically referring to when he says that holding Obama accountable is something that would be “unpopular” and make a journalist an “outsider.”
It is doubtful he means that a reporter doing his or her job with respect to Obama would find themselves unpopular or an outsider among the general public. One of the few news outlets that does treat Obama like all of the rest of the media treats Republicans is Fox News, which, unlike its cable news competition, is a wild success as opposed to a ratings failure.
Also, recent polls show that Obama is more unpopular than popular with the public. So when it comes to carrying Obama’s water, and happy-talking his failures, the media is already an outsider with the public at large. And polls show that the media have been unpopular with the public for decades.
No, I think Hersh is referring to how unpopular a journalist would be within the media community were any one of them to courageously step outside the collective and treat Obama with the same skepticism the media wield mercilessly against Republicans.
Just ask Bob Woodward and the good journalists at Fox News about how quickly your media colleagues attack, ridicule, and turn you into an unpopular outsider for daring to lay a glove on any Democrat, much less Obama.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC