The Press and Dr. Faustus

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“In the old Dr. Faustus story, a young scholar bargains away his soul to the devil for promises of obtaining almost anything he wants,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at NRO. “The American media has done much the same thing with the Obama administration. In return for empowering a fellow liberal, the press gave up its traditional adversarial relationship with the president. But after five years of basking in a shared progressive agenda, the tab for such ecstasy has come due, and now the media is lamenting that it has lost its soul:”

Obama rightly assumed that when the Benghazi scandal surfaced during the 2012 campaign, the press would largely ignore it. Likewise, he knew that the politicization of the IRS would not warrant headline news. Ditto Fast and Furious and the NSA mess.

But then a Faustian thing happened. This year it was also revealed that the Obama administration had monitored the communications of Associated Press reporters on the suspicion that they were publishing leaks. For the first time, outrage arose: Liberal presidents were not, in Nixonian fashion, supposed to go after liberal reporters.

The Obama administration did not object to AP reporters’ leaking classified information per se. Indeed, it had leaked the most intimate details of the cyber war against Iran, the drone protocols, and the bin Laden raid to pet reporters like the New York Times’s David Sanger and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. The election-year “exclusive” revelations of both usually portrayed Obama as an underappreciated, muscular commander-in-chief.

The crime instead was that AP was freelancing and might publish leaks that were not always flattering. Since long ago the media had made a pact, it was natural that the Obama administration assumed it had a right to monitor what it had bought.

In one version of the tale, Dr. Faustus at least got 24 years of freebies before being hauled off to Hell. Our poor media did not even get five years of adulation before Obama called in their souls.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “HILARIOUS: Real Satanists Want Nothing To Do With Abortion Supporters.” I think the latter group is just a bit too messianic in their own way than those who are a trifle too satanic. And they simply can’t play the blues.