Pillar of the Obama Presidency: a servile and compliant mainstream media

During his short tenure as the nation's chief executive, Barack Obama has embarked upon a remarkable and historically unprecedented expansion of both the powers of the presidency as well as the reach, intrusiveness and scope of the federal government. Obama has been aided in the pursuit of his far-reaching agenda, in part, due to the absence of a critical press. Though the press likes to flatter themselves by saying they speak "truth to power", a new template has emerged for the Obama Administration. In the lack of critical reporting on the policies of this new administration, we see a manifestation of the new model of journalism in its most extreme form: press corps as allies and facilitators of the executive in the implementation of a shared liberal political agenda.

What is occurring on the watch of the press corps during the Obama presidency is an almost deification of the individual whom, in the exercise of his powers, the press, traditionally is supposed to view with a skeptical eye. Consider the following incidents that occurred over the past few weeks. When describing his trip to the war-weary Middle East, Evan Thomas of Newsweek characterized Obama as floating above it all, a "sort of God." This is the same reporter who, when asked in 2007, if the press was unfairly bashing President Bush, was heard to proclaim, "Well, our job is to bash the president, that’s what we do..."

After spending a day with the president for his NBC puff piece "Inside the Obama White House", Brian Williams, upon his exit, was seen bowing, ever so slightly, to Obama, in much the same way a 19th century English servant might have done after bringing the Lord of the Manor his after-dinner glass of port. So sickeningly sweet was William's televised special that even uber-liberal Bill Moyers of PBS characterized the obsequious reporting as a "candygram."

As columnist Cal Thomas notes, "There are houses for worship. Newsrooms ought not to be one of them."

The Obama Presidency has offered ample subject matter for inquiring journalistic minds. Yet, the healthy and routine skepticism that is a normal part of the relationship between a free press and the president is wholly absent when it comes to a critical examination of the Obama Administration.

With few exceptions, the press doesn't feel obligated to question the direction in which Obama is trying to steer the country, particularly when it comes to the fiscal recklessness that deems the sky is the limit when it comes to deficit spending. The press corps seems utterly oblivious to signs that unmistakably forebode impending economic catastrophe: with Obama's trillion dollar deficits the order of the day, China, the nation's largest creditor, is starting to lose its appetite for the federal government's IOU's (when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told a group of Chinese university students that the U.S. assets owned by the Chinese are "very safe", the room erupted in laughter); the latest Treasury Auction met with resistance and tepid demand that resulted in higher interest rates on 10 year notes; the $787 billion spending package, fraudulently labeled as an economic stimulus has produced no new private sector jobs and the unemployment rate has hit 9.4%.

To obscure this painful reality, the White House offered for the consumption of a dutifully compliant press a meaningless economic metric against which to evaluate the "success" of the pork-laden spending bill: jobs "saved or created." Despite the patent phoniness of this indice — which by definition, is incapable of measurement — few members of the fourth estate batted an eye, nor saw fit to expose this accounting subterfuge.

Indeed, given their unwillingess to question the expansion of authority of this president, the media has unwittingly helped to define their posture towards President Obama as a vassal/serf relationship: he governs; they acquiesce.

The dirty little secret of today's press corps, an overwhelming majority of whom voted for Obama, is that they share his ideological agenda and view their role as guarantors of his success and not as a bulwark against abuse of his executive authority.