It's all downhill from here.
Interesting piece, as Slate predicts on how a President Obama will have todeal with teh press...
slate.com
The Coming Obama-Press War
It's inevitable.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Nov. 3, 2008, at 4:11 PM ET
The press corps works to hold the president accountable for what he does and extra hard to hold him accountable for what he does not do, a territory so vast and encompassing that foraging journalists assigned to the beat can never hunger for a story. Everything and nothing become fixings.
So even before Barack Obama swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution on Jan. 20, the press corps—which has failed to make anything it has thrown at him stick (Wright, Rezko,* Ayers, voting "present," his FISA, the surge, guns, capital punishment, and campaign finance flip-flops)—will finally start extracting maximum punishment.
Those who predict a three-month honeymoon between journalists and the incoming President Obama have not been reading their daily newspaper. In ordinary times, only short-term rewards can be reaped from being the president's best friend in the press corps. No president is ever as good and wise and fair and tough and patient and tactful and brave as lickspittling reporters try to make him sound, and the glorifiers tend to retreat after a bit because they know they're depleting their credibility with all the flattery.
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Presidents inexorably blame the press for their "failures." As Deakin notes, their attempts to make things secret prompts secrecy penetration by the press, and the journalistic attempts to understand presidential decision-making tends to undermine decision-making—at least in the minds running the administration, which prefers silence while it thinks. Competing journalists like nothing more than an uproar.
Obama the candidate thrived on the strategic ambiguity that made liberals think he was liberal, moderates think he was moderate, and conservatives think he was tolerable. But after the election, ambiguity must be replaced with action, and action is controversial—that is, the stuff of news.
It won't be war until Obama fights back, as he will. Everything the press does makes the job of governing more difficult, Deakin observes, even putatively sympathetic reporting. As Obama faces that reality, he'll become less and less Obama-esque, more vengeful and cloistered, and the press will have a fresh story to pursue: the decline of Obamaism and the triumph of Washington as usual. How much will pent-up antagonism at the overcontrolling Obama campaign contribute to the abrasive reports? You have to ask?
The White House will counter by serving the standard ration of seduction and hostility to the press because, as Deakin explains, it's as much in the press business as the press is. Whenever possible, it seeks to scoop the conventional press. It wants the public lapping up its "reports," not those of the press, and its credibility logically increases whenever the credibility of the conventional press falls.
Being commander in chief of the armed forces is never good enough. Presidents always want to be the nation's editor-in-chief, too. Once they assume that title, total press war is just around the corner. |
