By Peter Wehner
The soft and at times obsequious interview Steve
Kroft of “60 Minutes” did with Barack Obama (and Hillary Clinton) has
received a lot of justifiable criticism. (Conor Friedersdorf demolishes
Kroft in this
piece.) Mr. Kroft didn’t help himself when he told CNN’s Piers Morgan
that one of the reasons the president turns to Kroft so often is that he
doesn’t use “gotcha questions” on Mr. Obama–the kind that “60 Minutes”
routinely used against President Bush and other Republicans like
Representative Eric Cantor.
But Mr. Kroft, as embarrassing as his interview was, is merely
symptomatic of a larger phenomenon: the unprecedented swooning and
cheerleading by the press for Barack Obama.
To say that the elite media has a liberal bias is similar to
declaring that the sun rises in the east. But it’s never been this
transparent, the infatuation never this deep, the advocacy this
passionate. We are now seeing shows like “60 Minutes”–once a fearless
giant in journalism–give interviews that you would expect to see on
Entertainment Tonight or state-run television. We’re at the point when
we have to count on tough interviews coming from news outlets like
Univision. There are of course exceptions to this–journalists who are
both tough-minded and fair-minded. But among the most significant
political developments of our time is how many members of the press have
become partisans in ways we’ve never before seen.
What explains this?
A combination of factors, I think. One is the rise of Fox News. For
decades progressives had a monopoly on news, which meant they were
content to slant the news but not routinely cross the line into
advocacy. But now that Fox News has offered not only a different
perspective, but a popular one, journalists may feel they must, in order
to compensate for their loss of influence, increase their liberal
advocacy.
A second factor is Barack Obama. He is liberal, Ivy League, and a
person of color. That is simply too powerful of a combination for the
elite media to resist. (If Obama were conservative, Ivy League, and a
person of color, he would be a marked man, as Clarence Thomas has been.)
Mr. Obama touches the media’s erogenous zone in ways that no other
president, even JFK, ever has. One gets to sense that journalists not
only like Mr. Obama; they are in awe of him. They want to impress him
and please him and are afraid of being rebuked by him. (It is very much
how my 3rd grade son views his teacher.) Being a bright fellow, Mr.
Obama understands this, which is why from time to time he transitions
from being president to being media critic. He issues marching orders to
the elite media–and a stunningly high number of journalists salute and
do as they are told.
A third factor is that more and more “objective” journalists seem to
feel that liberalism is synonymous with social justice and they want to
be in the midst of the fight to advance it. Hence we see people like Bob
Schieffer and Tom Brokaw–who once upon a time would have actually tried
to keep their biases reasonably in check–frame the issue over gun
control as if we’re in Selma in 1965. It’s all rather silly–efforts to
manufacture melodrama usually are–but I suppose there’s something
emotionally satisfying about trying to recapture, over and over again,
the moral moment that was the civil rights era.
All of this helps explain why Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high in
2012, with 60 percent saying they have little or no trust in the mass
media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.
There is some rough justice, I suppose, in members of the press being
the architects in their own profession’s destruction. It will be
interesting to see how much worse things will get, and what will finally
emerge from the wreckage.
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