Contentions Getting Obama Out of the Bubble

[Valin]

Contentions:

Seth Mandel

8/9/12

 

There is much to mock in the New York Times report on how President Obama’s obsession with his own press coverage has convinced him the media is not biased quite enough in his favor. But I come not to mock, but to offer some unsolicited advice to the president. The Times writes:

 

While former President George W. Bush and his aides liked to say they ignored the Fourth Estate, Mr. Obama is an avid consumer of political news and commentary. But in his informal role as news media critic in chief, he developed a detailed critique of modern news coverage that he regularly expresses to those around him….

 

Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a “false balance,” in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.

 

That, to me, contains both the diagnosis and the cure. Obama’s campaign has been constructed almost entirely around petty issues and drummed-up controversies in an attempt to win each day or week’s news cycle without any substantive debate on many of these topics. We’ve seen this with the ridiculous “war on women” to the pro-Obama super PAC’s casual accusations of murder to the president’s refusal to disown Harry Reid’s debasing both the Senate and the presidential election with McCarthy-style rumormongering that apparently had the president’s blessing.

 

(Snip)