Obama and the press: Is the honeymoon over?

last updated 8 January 2015

It was a love too strong to last, said Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. Ever since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president last year, the press has largely fawned over him like a herd of heartsick teenagers. They’ve marveled at his oratory, swooned over his campaign strategy, and largely spared him the “negative onslaught” of criticism and scrutiny most candidates—Hillary Clinton, certainly—must endure. But all that may finally be changing. As the Clinton camp complains bitterly of an apparent “double standard” in press coverage, reporters have started looking more closely into such matters as Obama’s ties to indicted Chicago developer Tony Rezko, his relationship with a minister who has praised Louis Farrakhan, and his one-time meeting with former members of the radical Weather Underground. The media hasn’t exactly turned against Obama just yet, but “after a year of defying the laws of journalistic gravity, he is being brought back to earth.”

Convincing the media that it’s biased against Hillary Clinton is “one of the great (and rare) successes” of her campaign, said Paul Jenkins in Huffingtonpost.com. But consider the facts. Even as Clinton lost 11 consecutive primaries after Super Tuesday—a string of defeats that would have finished off any other candidate—the media resisted the temptation to declare the race over. That restraint certainly was not a sign of anti-Clinton animus. Then there’s this matter of “scrutiny.” After Clinton lent her campaign $5 million last month, I was waiting for the press to offer a probing look into her personal finances, or perhaps into her husband’s complicated business dealings. I’m still waiting. Her complaints about the press are “classic chutzpah.”

No question Hillary has been playing up her “victimhood in order to gain some tactical advantage,” said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune. But that doesn’t mean she’s wrong about Obama’s getting off easy. By the normal rules of politics, Obama’s life really “should be getting rougher” now that he’s the front-runner. Oh, it will, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. One thing is for sure: If the media’s love affair with Obama isn’t over yet, it will be should he clinch the nomination and face John McCain. It just so happens that in McCain, Obama would be facing an opponent “whom much of the press loves as much as it hates Mrs. Clinton.” Moreover, while Obama has endured a tough primary campaign against a tough opponent, in one important respect he remains untested: “He has not yet faced the hostile media treatment doled out to every Democratic presidential candidate since 1988.”