And ever since the Jeremiah Wright crisis, some critics have noted a rhythm in which an issue festers for a long time and then, finally, Obama confronts it with an extended address.
Officials assumed that the White House could take months to determine its policy in Afghanistan and that, in the end, the President could reason with the American people. Even Axelrod concedes that there are limits. Historical circumstances do not allow the luxury. Instead, the Administration has simultaneously pushed sweeping health-care legislation, a fresh offensive in Afghanistan, initiatives for climate change and peace between Palestinians and Israelis, sanctions against Iran, a new arms-control treaty with Russia, and a domestic jobs plan.
Michael McCurry is dubious that the White House can sell so many efforts at once. As newspapers have folded or contracted, new outlets have taken their place. The most prominent face of new media at the White House is Politico. This Web site, which also publishes a small daily print edition, was co-founded by two Washington Post reporters, John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, who left the paper in , after failing to sell the Post on the wisdom of starting a political site.
For reporters and the Administration, it has become an essential bulletin board of what the media is focussed on, and what is happening in Washington that day. In the hope of having a similar influence online, the White House established an Office of New Media under Macon Phillips, the deputy director of new media in the Obama campaign. A hundred thousand questions arrived, and three and a half million online votes were cast in response to the question of what mattered most to voters. Phillips has hired a team to produce videos—of Michelle Obama talking about health reform, of Presidential advisers answering policy questions—which are posted on the White House Web site, WhiteHouse.
Of course, none of this gives the White House control over the news; the traditional media does not pay much attention, Phillips says.
Dunn returned to her political-consulting firm this month, when her husband, Robert Bauer, became the new White House counsel. The ability for online to drive stories into the mainstream media is significant. After a year in office, the Obama Administration has become keenly aware of the difference between campaigning and governing. In the White House, you have to deal with the events of the day.
At a press conference in July intended to promote health-care legislation, Obama was asked about the fracas between the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Now he was perceived as taking sides. The furor consumed the better part of a week, until Obama invited Gates and the sergeant to share a beer at the White House. Though the gesture became a punch line for late-night comedians, it brought an end to the story. Obama discerned that talking about race, especially extemporaneously, was just not worth it.
The fight over health-care reform did much more harm. The site attracts some traffic, but has proved to be a tepid means of responding.
It, too, is essentially reactive; it can only chase claims and rumors, not prevent them. The White House lost control of its message, as David Axelrod acknowledges. But, three days later, thousands of tea partyers marched on Freedom Plaza, in downtown Washington, an irresistible event for the media.
Within hours, the image of Obama at the lectern was displaced by one of marchers, placards, and populist rage.
Throughout the fall, the White House fought a back-and-forth battle with the conservative media. When the mainstream press, including the Times and the three major networks, initially ignored the story, conservatives were inflamed. We should have jumped on it. He now more closely monitors cable newscasts and Web blogs. Cable has grown more partisan. Forty per cent of Americans, according to a Pew poll last July, now get their national and international news from cable; with the collapse of mass audiences for broadcast television, networks like Fox News and MSNBC have sought niche markets, in the process shedding all but the pretense of impartiality.
Data collected by TiVo, Inc. Democrats outnumber Republicans on CNN by a lesser two and a half to one. Fox News is thriving. When I asked him whether he felt torn between his journalism and Fox, he did not answer for a full twenty-seven seconds. The network obviously values what I do. Public Safety One dead after single-car wreck off I-8 in Alpine. Public Safety Police searching for attacker in College Area sexual assault. Politics Panel picks San Diego boundary map that boosts minority voting power without severe changes.
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More from this Author. Editorials Opinion: Feds finally act on Tijuana sewage mess. Editorials Opinion: U. I wrote about him here at The Atlantic on numerous occasions. The New Yorker covered the killing here. Those stories and many others from publications in the "establishment press" treated Awlaki's death far more critically than anything that I saw in any conservative outlet.
And some of the most critical pieces written about Obama killing a teenaged American citizen were published by avowedly progressive writers like Glenn Greenwald in the liberal online magazine Salon and staffers at publications like Mother Jones and The Nation , often citing left-leaning civil-libertarian organizations like the ACLU or center-left international affairs academics.
On various subjects that ought to trigger automatic scrutiny from any adversarial press outlet, like apparent violations of federal law , actions that directly contradict a campaign promise , aggressive retaliation against whistleblowers , and unprecedented assertions of secrecy , establishment outlets like The New York Times , The New Yorker , and The Washington Post , along with avowedly liberal publications like Salon , Mother Jones , and The Guardian , did far more to uncover facts, raise awareness, and publish criticism of Obama than the conservative media.
To be sure, there was a schizophrenia to the coverage in some of these publications. The New Yorker must have dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars to top-flight journalism about various Obama Administration transgressions against civil liberties, the rule of law, and good government.
Its editors presumably submitted some of those stories for National Magazine Awards. Yet pre-election editorials in those same publications didn't merely posit that Obama was the lesser of two evils -- they left painstakingly reported transgressions unmentioned, as if they weren't relevant, and issued glowing endorsements that read as if Obama is an especially noble president.
I've been an outspoken a critic of that seeming contradiction. But when it comes to holding Obama accountable for those unusually consequential, unchecked acts, the conservative media is far inferior, partly because of the time it wastes on birtherism, Kenyan anti-colonialism, and a National Review contributor's theory that Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a "grand jihad" against America; but mostly because much of the conservative movement behaves as if the War on Terrorism confers unlimited power to spy without warrants, to violate the War Powers Resolution, to extra-judicially kill American citizens, and to treat even the legal justification for executive branch actions as if they're state secrets.
On all those questions, they defer to the Obama Administration. If "liberal media bias" explains the failure to challenge Obama adequately, why do center-left publications challenge him more on a whole range of national-security topics than center-right publications? Why are avowedly leftist publications often more adversarial than center-left ones? A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photo Galleries. About Us. Get stories that empower and uplift daily.
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