I recently published a post on the media's turn away from its relatively Pro-Bama posture. The White House recently received a first-hand taste of this as revelations of government monitoring have seemingly put the media in a state of revolt. From CNN:
"Attorney General Eric Holder's plans to sit down with media representatives to discuss guidelines for handling investigations into leaks to the news media have run into trouble.
The Associated Press issued a statement Wednesday objecting to plans for the meetings to be off the record. "If it is not on the record, AP will not attend and instead will offer our views on how the regulations should be updated in an open letter," said Erin Madigan White, the AP's media relations manager.
The New York Times is taking the same position. "It isn't appropriate for us to attend an off-the-record meeting with the attorney general," executive editor Jill Abramson said in a statement.
Like the New York Times and the Associated Press, CNN will decline the invitation for an off-the-record meeting. A CNN spokesperson says if the meeting with the attorney general is on the record, CNN would plan to participate.
The Huffington Post's Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim, also said he will not attend unless the meeting is on the record. "A conversation specifically about the freedom of the press should be an open one. We have a responsibility not to betray that," Grim told CNN."
One of the keys to a strong democracy (or republic) is an independent media. It is disappointing that it has taken affronts to the sanctity of journalistic integrity to ensure that the media is looking at the current administration with a critical eye, but it is positive nonetheless...
I agree. I wonder if the NSA programs would have received as critical an eye from the media if they had not closely followed the investigations of the AP and Fox News.
ReplyDeleteExcellent question. Given the patterns of the past, I would think that it may not have received as much attention, but I may be wrong. For reference I have things like Guantanamo, abuses of the PATRIOT ACT and drone use all in mind - the types of things that were excoriated in certain quarters during the Bush years, but which have gone relatively unquestioned since.
ReplyDeleteIt all perhaps leads to a question: are the media too 'in the bag' for President Obama, or maybe for Democrats?
I am not going about to go all Rush Limbaugh on the topic, but I do think that the media treatment of domestic spying measures/counterterrorism efforts during the Bush presidency vs. the Obama presidency up to recent times has been telling.
Why are things that were 'bad' before taken for granted now? It can't just be fatigue on these topics (which I do think is a VERY strong reason why coverage on the wars in the Middle East has declined) because the spying topics are so new and developing.
A strange flip side of this is the rising approval ratings President Bush has received in polls since people started to turn against Obama. Do people really think he was better? Have people forgotten how angry they were during the Bush years? Are people angry about domestic spying naive to what was happening from 2001 - 2008?
I am not sure I have answers to all of these questions, but I do know that the media, much like a woman (and in an analogy with legs for a lot of different reasons) hath more fury than hell when scorned.
Thanks for the comment-
Josh