The quotable Evan Thomas, then and now:
- Evan Thomas, 2007, “…our job is to bash the President…”
- Evan Thomas, 2009, “…he’s sort of a God.”
And to quote from Howard Fineman, Thomas’s fellow Newsweek journalist, in early 2005:
A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don’t mean the Democrats. I’m talking about the “mainstream media,” which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush’s Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox’s canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.
Once you’ve compared the president to God, how much more frayed can they get? Meanwhile, T.K. Farrow ponders the soft bigotry of low expectations.
“…they don’t want to see the first African-American president fail…”
I think this is a really important point. For liberals, electing a black to be president is the dream of a lifetime. But it’s a risky dream, which could become their worst nightmare. If the Obama presidency is widely viewed as a terrible failure, then instead of being the first of many minority presidents he could be the last one for decades, as voters look at each successive minority candidate and think, “No, better not, he might be another Obama.”
That’s something which liberals in the media want to prevent at all costs. Combine that with their unspoken principle that “reality is what we say it is” and you get them trying to create a successful presidency in their reporting, with little or no regard to what is genuinely taking place. The hyperbole and positive spin is due to the fact that liberals in the MSM cannot and will not report anything which might convince the average voter that Obama is lousing up.
Fineman had the guts to write that piece … but doesn’t have the guts to call his colleagues to task for their actions.
And kudos to Steven … I couldn’t say what he said any better if I had a 1,000 words to work with.
The problem isn’t that the media isn’t reporting anything that would convince the average voter that Obama’s lousing up; the problem is that the average voter can’t see that Obama’s lousing up without the media to tell them.
It is still early days as far as being blatently obvious to the entire population goes. If Chance is phenomally kind to us, nothing so bad as to make that obvious quickly will happen. I am not terribly impressed, but at this stage, because the option of replacing or retaining the employee is far off, the employers do not have as much incentive to go digging very deep when time might do the job for them.
Steven,
I would have added this to your blog, I came here from there. Don’t blame you for not allowing comments though.
Anyway, as far as your, “No, better not, he might be another Obama,” comment, it made me think of what my little brother said before the elections. It was along the lines of, “The U.S. needs to have a black president, but not Obama. He’s going to set things back, not advance them.” He felt that people will end up saying exactly what you’re thinking.
And I think the media propping him up will only make it worse.