Obama and the press
Via Newsweek, an article that itself would buck the trend:
Obama has inspired a collective fawning [in the news media]. What started in the campaign has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”…
Favorable stories (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent) , while the rest were “neutral” or “mixed.” Obama’s treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the presidencies of Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent)….
Obama’s rhetoric brims with inconsistencies. In the campaign, he claimed he would de-emphasize partisanship — and also enact a highly-partisan agenda; both couldn’t be true. He got a pass. Now, he claims he will control health care spending even though he proposes more government spending. He promotes “fiscal responsibility” when projections show huge and continuous budget deficits. Journalists seem to take his pronouncements at face value even when many are two-faced.
