Perhaps Mitt Romney played it right when he was meek and
contrite in response to the Washington Post’s front-page allegations that he
bullied a kid half a century ago in high school.
Romney no doubt feels embarrassed by the charges, even if
most of us struggle to understand their relevance or gauge their veracity. But
the time is coming for Romney to get angry, very angry, with what is
increasingly, quaintly called “the mainstream media.”
The Post’s decision to play up the story as if it were
major news — front page, thousands of drably dull self-serious words piled high
to elevate and justify the one buzzy nugget — is an embarrassment. It was
clearly intended to link Romney to the new progressive cause — fighting
anti-gay bullying — in the context of President Obama’s “sudden” support for
gay marriage. It was naked advocacy gussied up as journalistic due diligence.
It was also a significant error — if you work from the
assumption (as I do) that the Post and other mainstream-media outlets are
determined to do what they can to reelect Obama — because they tipped their
hand too early.
It’s always dangerous to ascribe singular purpose to a
collective entity like “the media.” Of course, there are individual figures
who, despite whatever personal biases they may have, are trying their best to
be fair. But as a generalization, the mainstream media are so deep in the
bunker for Obama, they could ride out a nuclear war without having their Jenga
tower fall over.
In 2004, John Kerry’s war-record embellishments and
involvement with a radical group that at one time discussed a plot to
assassinate U.S. senators who supported the Vietnam War were treated as
fixations of the deranged Right. Evan Thomas, then of Newsweek, proclaimed what
pretty much everyone knew: The press “wants Kerry to win.” And that was John
Kerry, a man few in Washington like and many consider to be a pompous human
toothache.
Obama, meanwhile, is beloved. In 2008, concerns about the
man’s past were largely brushed aside, ignored, or re-spun to fit the
acceptable story line.
No doubt some believe that if a Republican candidate had
a hate-spewing pastor and associated with an admitted former domestic
terrorist, the mainstream media would be equally dismissive. After all, who
cares about that? I mean, how can that stack up news-value-wise against a
17-year-old hazing a kid at school nearly 50 years ago?
In 2008, the imperative was to clear the field for the
first black president. Now that that box has been checked, a new story line is
needed. Enter Newsweek. It features Obama with a rainbow-colored halo (because
conventional halos are so Republican!), touting him as the “First Gay
President.”
Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, may
be a genius. No doubt it has gotten boring saying Obama’s opponents are racist.
Now the press can treat his critics as homophobes, even the ones holding the
same position on gay marriage that Obama (publicly) held for the last decade —
until last week.
The Obama campaign’s rationalization for the president’s
decision to drop what most knew was a calculated political lie is that it would
“fire up” his base among rich liberal donors and college students. It did that.
But it also fired up his base in the press corps,
enabling writers to rekindle their obsession with the “historic” nature of the
Obama presidency.
As the London Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley writes,
everything the president does is cast as part of history. The president could
go “seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter
sports. ‘Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under
One Minute,’ the New York Times would proudly report.”
It’s worth noting that there’s little evidence — yet — that
Obama’s decision will actually help him with voters, voters who are
increasingly less deferential to campaigns from traditional media outlets.
(Indeed, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll has Romney gaining and shows
that two-thirds of Americans believe Obama’s gay-marriage announcement was
politically motivated.)
Still, it never hurts to have good press. In football,
they sometimes refer to the cheerleading and noise from the fans as the
“twelfth man” on the (normally eleven-man) team. The media are revving
themselves up to be Obama’s twelfth man, and the time is coming for Romney to
call them on it, with passion.
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