Seven Events That Made America America (36 page)

Not only was coverage biased when it came out of the media machine, but reporters dutifully and obediently refrained from asking Obama potentially embarrassing questions during the campaign. In May 2008, during an interview with Obama, CNN’s John Roberts referred to the brewing firestorm over Obama’s radical preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had, among other comments, stated that the United States had deserved to be struck on 9/11 and called America the “U.S. of KKK A.” Yet Roberts astoundingly declared a “Reverend Wright free zone today. So, no questions about Reverend Wright. . . . Is that okay with you?”
¹⁰²
Can anyone imagine George W. Bush being told by an interviewer during Operation Iraqi Freedom that he had entered a “WMD free zone today, so, no questions about WMDs”?

Obama made the cover of the national newspaper insert magazine
Parade
twice in five months. The second time, Father’s Day, 2009, the White House contacted the magazine and asked for space so that Obama could write an essay on fatherhood. When told it would have to be ready in two days, Obama agreed and it was. This occurred when events in Iran were exploding, and the president had yet to find time to make a statement supporting the protesters trying to overthrow the radical Islamic government there. It led liberal Fox News analyst Juan Williams to explode, “We are going towards a weekend of high tide for kowtowing to the Obama administration,” and Howard Kurtz referred to a “giddy sense of boosterism” among the reporters.
¹⁰³
A few voices on the Left began to question the media’s obsession with Obama. Phil Bronstein, writing on
sfgate.com
, lectured: “Love or lust, Obama and the fawning press need to get a room.” Powerful people like Obama always tried to “play” the press, he argued, but “you can blame the press, already suffocating under a massive pile of blame, guilt, heavy debt and sinking fortunes, for being played.”
¹⁰⁴
Radical feminist Camille Paglia, often a maverick on the Left, derided Obama’s frequent avoidance of tough questions, and limits on press-conference topics.

It was inevitable that the research organizations would study the election, and their conclusions were predictable. According to a Pew Research Center Poll, Obama enjoyed almost twice as much favorable press as George W. Bush over the first hundred days, and about 30 percent more than Bill Clinton.
¹⁰⁵
Pew described the coverage as “favorable,” but that failed to do justice to the utter homage reporters paid to the new president. During the entire campaign, the
only
challenging questions Obama got were from Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. Even foreign press were awed by Obama.

In Germany, when the press attempted to ask about tensions with German chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama cut them off, saying, “So, stop it all of you!”—and they did. Robert Samuelson (no Leftie) in
The Washington Post
likewise warned of the “Obama infatuation,” calling it the “great unreported story of our time.”
¹⁰⁶
Obama, Samuelson noted, “has inspired a collective fawning.” Unfortunately, he pointed out, the system only works when the press acts as a brake, or a check, on presidential power. A study by the Center for the Media and Public Affairs, with the highly misleading headline, “Media Boost Obama, Bash His Policies,” confirmed Pew’s research: the media gave Obama more coverage (and far more favorable coverage) than Bush and Clinton combined. Evening news shows devoted 1021 stories lasting 27 hours 44 minutes to Barack Obama’s presidency, with 58 percent of all evaluations of the president and his policies favorable, contrasted with coverage of George W. Bush, who received only 33 percent positive evaluations. Clinton was favorably covered 44 percent of the time. Among the “big three” broadcast news networks, Obama earned 57 percent positive comments on ABC, 58 percent positive on CBS, and 61 percent positive on NBC. But he fared far better in
The New York Times
, where 73 percent of the references were favorable. In contrast, once again Bush had only about one-third favorable comments from those same outlets.
¹⁰⁷

As Bernard Goldberg noted, the press’s coverage amounted to the admission that “we need the black guy to win
because he’s black
.” Why? Because “helping elect our first African-American president would make liberal journalists feel better about the most important people in their lives—
themselves.
”
¹⁰⁸
With such gushing, uncritical coverage, journalists “squandered what little credibility they had left.”
¹⁰⁹
Credibility?
The New York Times Magazine
blatantly cheered a “new generation,” “Generation O,” and
New York
magazine celebrated “OBAMAISM . . . a new kind of religion.”
¹¹⁰
Perhaps the most amazing journalistic story of the presidential campaign was that the first major penetrating story to delve into Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racially charged hate did not come from any one of the major news outlets, but from rock and roll magazine
Rolling Stone
.
¹¹¹

Increasingly, all “news” credibility disappeared. Major newspapers and especially television “news” programs had become entirely propagandistic—reverting very closely to the situation in the 1830s, without the direct connections to, and funding from, the political parties. Nor did the news organizations seem concerned about losing their audience and readers, because, as Rush Limbaugh told Bernard Goldberg, “the mainstream media’s audience is the mainstream media.”
¹¹²
Reporters wrote for each other, to impress each other, to generate prestige points at cocktail parties and social affairs, and, of course, for access to the levers of government when that government was in Democratic hands.

The Founders were adamant that, to paraphrase Jefferson, it was better to have a press without a government than a government without a press. But the press Jefferson and the other Founders championed was meant to act as a healthy, robust, and fair Fourth Estate that countered the government, investigated its abuses, and challenged its claims. Neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson enjoyed complete support from the newspapers of the day, some of which were murderously vindictive (one flatly called for Washington’s death). For all their vision, they never foresaw a time when the overwhelming number of free journalists would willingly abandon all criticism of the government. While outlets such as Fox News, the Drudge Report,
The Washington Times
, and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show provide some measure of balance, the trend is depressingly negative.

In the short term, we are much more likely to come full circle back to the Jacksonian era of competing partisan presses, where there is virtually
no
“news,” but all politics—funded, supported, and editorially controlled by the major parties. Yet while those papers originally collapsed under the weight of their own unprofitability, combined with the Civil War’s demand for “hard news,” the Brave New World might not offer such hope of righting the ship. The protections the Founders put in the Constitution for freedom of speech were meant to specifically ensure freedom of political dissent by the press—but what happens if the press, for its own purposes, refuses to serve as a check on government? In their well-deserved focus on protecting political speech, the Founders never addressed the possibility that the Fourth Estate would find itself in bed with government itself.

The free market has provided a solution in the form of the Internet, talk radio, and even a few “old-fashioned” media sources in television and newspapers, such as Fox News and
The Washington Times
. New media’s power was first demonstrated when Matt Drudge nearly single-handedly forced an investigation into Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern, arguably playing a key role in Clinton’s impeachment. More recently—while the battle has yet to be decided—it is clear that talk radio, the Internet, and “alternative” sources have at the very least badly stalled, and potentially killed, the Obama administration’s health care bill, possibly with a serious impact on Democrats in the 2010 elections. That is the value of a free press. But there already were forces working inside the Obama administration to destroy alternative sources of information: there were plans to impose new regulations on radio stations cloaked under “diversity” requirements that would force owners to abandon all political talk formats under threat of federal lawsuits; and under the guise of “Internet security,” the administration announced plans to enact an “emergency shutdown” of Internet servers and Web sites. One does not need to read Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, or any of the Founders to know what their reaction to such measures would be. One just needs to read the First Amendment to the Constitution.

W
e often forget that the Founders were living, breathing people—that they listened to music, ate and drank, suffered from physical pain and sickness, and paid bills. The genius of the Constitution they wrote, based and grounded on the Declaration of Independence, is in the framework of general order and broad principles it provides. The Founders did not want to dictate every move of the American people, and they trusted that later generations would interpret it based on common sense and, above all, religious direction guiding human virtue. Political scientists have long explained to students that the specifics within the Constitution are limited by intent, with the assumption that people did not need to be told how to conduct every aspect of their daily lives.

Yet running a government, no less than running a country, demands flexibility. Too often, mischief has arisen based on outlandish interpretations of the Founders’ desire to protect the federal government so that it could provide for the common defense or address the failings of the Articles of Confederation. There have been three chief sources of the pernicious expansion of government, all of which are loosely defined and open to future interpretation. First, the preamble itself includes the phrase “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” What did the Founders mean by promoting the general welfare? Did they mean the government should regulate what people could wear? What they could eat? What kinds of interior illumination they had in their homes? How they traveled? Certainly not. It is absurd to assert that the Founders in any way, shape, or form
ever
intended government to become involved in the personal affairs of individuals. They had plenty of examples from which to choose if they wanted to include such nonsense: some of the colonies had sumptuary laws that restricted what clothing people could wear (for example, rich people could not wear anything that flaunted their wealth). These, however, were mostly the dying (and pernicious) elements of Puritanism, and none of the Founders sought to incorporate such classism into the Constitution.

Many of the Founders, based as they were in the traditions of the English government, thought it proper to establish a national university or to allow the government to build and maintain roads. Although I would disagree, there is a case to be made for either or both as an element of national security, which is certainly the approach the Founders took. If building freeways and establishing a government-run university were all we had to fear from the government in Washington, D.C., most people would gladly accept these and move on. But if the government had ever tried to meddle in the private affairs of individuals, the Founders would have fought against it. At any rate, as some constitutional historians have observed, the preamble to
anything
does not constitute a binding law—it is merely a statement of goals and objectives, and therefore for anyone to cite the “general welfare” as a proper function of government, then manipulate that into a defense of Social Security or food stamps or housing subsidies, would demand that we establish the intentions of the Founders beyond a reasonable doubt. In such a case, the Founders would clearly have rejected federal “disaster aid,” a National Endowment for the Arts, and federal dietary guidelines.

A second way in which the Constitution opened the door for government growth came through the “necessary and proper” clause (Article I, Section 8):

This, also, has been abused beyond imagination. Note that the clause refers to the “foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution.” Therefore, the so-called elastic clause cannot apply to any powers exercised
outside
the narrow definitions of the Constitution. It was never meant as carte blanche for government to do what it wished. Unless the actions themselves are delineated in the Constitution, they are illegal. Chief Justice John Marshall and his Court, in the famous
McCulloch v. Maryland
case in 1819, validated the Bank of the United States (BUS) under this broad interpretation, and a reasonable argument can be made that while the BUS was neither necessary nor prudent, it was completely constitutional and, as an arm of the U.S. Treasury, helped execute the nation’s financial business. Subsequently, however, the “elastic clause” has been stretched further than the truth in Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky defense.