Liberal editor emerges from trance

Phil Bronstein, an editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, appears to be regaining some sanity. In an op-ed piece yesterday, he dares to suggest that perhaps it's time for the media to do some actual reporting.

Love or lust, Obama and the fawning press need to get a room

When Barack Obama decided that questions from the German press about his trip agenda in that country were too pesky, he told the reporters, "So, stop it all of you!" He just wanted them to ask things he wanted to talk about. Well, what politico wouldn't want that?

OK, dad. We'll behave.

And according to a new Pew Research Center poll, we are behaving...like fans. On domestic press, it showed that "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" with "roughly twice as much" Obama coverage about his "personal or leadership qualities" than was the case for either previous president.

[snip]

And in Paris, Mr. Obama talked about how he'd love to take his wife for a romantic tour of the City of Lovers, but couldn't. Then he did. I'm guessing some regular-Joe freedom fries weren't on the menu.

This guy is good. Really good. And, frankly, so far, we're not.

You can't blame powerful people for wanting to play the press to peddle self-perpetuating mythology. But you can blame the press, already suffocating under a massive pile of blame, guilt, heavy debt and sinking fortunes, for being played. Some of the time, it seems we're even enthusiastically jumping into the pond without even being pushed. Is there an actual limit to the number of instances you can be the cover of Newsweek?

[snip]

The style-over-substance hit followed him from continent to continent. "While the president is popular among Europeans," the Wall Street Journal wrote, "he returned from his second trip to Europe with little more progress on key issues" than he got on his first visit. That's the Journal. But the Washington Post, where the John Kennedy myth was nurtured like a golden statue, managed a cautionary op-ed column from Robert Samuelson warning that "our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power." He meant checks from the press.

Samuelson was one of the few in the media to give some room to the Pew Research Center poll.

So far, this is all about image and character and press "opportunities." But with what CNN financial reporter Elizabeth Cohen called this morning "gazillions of dollars" of our money at stake and crazy people with nukes bristling from around the edges of the world, we can't afford not to keep a closer eye on the substance thing.

Ya think? If any major news outlet aside from Fox News had actually done their job in 2007 and 2008, we wouldn't have this moron in office today. Unemployment numbers are growing at a near record pace, we are out of money and no one wants to lend us any more, we have states and cities on the verge of bankruptcy from sea to shining sea, and all we hear when we turn on the TV is idol worship. If any industry deserves complete and utter failure, bankruptcy and complete ruin, it's the leftist media.

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823

"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786

"I deplore... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them... These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief... This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit." --Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 1814

"Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds. Indeed, the abuses of the freedom of the press here have been carried to a length never before known or borne by any civilized nation." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803

"Our people, merely for want of intelligence which they may rely on, are become lethargic and insensible of the state they are in." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1777

There is truly nothing new under the sun.