Obama's War On The Media

A year ago, I wrote a piece asking if Obama was morphing into the next Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon, but I have come to the conclusion that he was and still is both. While the media has always favored Democratic Presidents over Republican, no candidates have ever been as worshipped by the media as Barack Obama. This is one reason the failure of Obamanomics has been dismissed or ignored. Obama has managed to screw up a recovery that began some six months into his administration and turned it into the worst recovery in history. Now he faces a double dip recession. (Even though it could be argued that we never truly recovered and his recovery has been propped up by the Fed's easy.)

The real threat of Obama is his Nixon side. Obama and his team, quite frankly, are thugs when it comes to politics, and with a compliant media, he gets away with it. His most recent brush up with Bob Woodward, who has consistently called Obama out on the sequester, is only the latest example of Team Obama thug tactics.

There were a few political observers who noted this in 2008, but for the most part, this side of Obama’s campaign was ignored. In 2008, Michael Barone wrote, “Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see it’s flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.”

During the 2008 campaign, Barone detailed about how a radio station in Chicago got the Obama treatment when it featured Stanley Kurtz, who was investigating Obama's true relationship with unrepentant Bill Ayers. Barone noted, “Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg’s example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.” The lesson was clear: any radio station who dared put on Kurtz would receive similar treatment. Barone added, “Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Obama that were false.” Could you imagine if a local Republican attorney had posed similar threats how quickly the word fascist would have been stated?

The Obama war against Woodward is no different than previous wars against Fox news or Rush Limbaugh as Obama allies like Media Matters have attempted to get both Fox and Limbaugh off the air. Obama's team has declared Fox News as an illegitimate news organization as a means to isolate Fox News and make sure other news organization didn’t follow up on Fox’s scoops. (If you don’t buy into this, simply compare how much of the media covered Benghazi or didn’t cover Benghazi compared to Fox and much of the conservative media. The Benghazi tragedy was swept under the rug and much of the American public has been denied the real truth behind the attack this past September 11th.)

Never mind that MSNBC has essentially became an appendage of Team Obama and hasn’t been a serious broadcast network since the middle of the last decade, but it is Fox that the left has war with. In the case of Woodward, it is different in one respect for Woodward is considered one of the Deans of the Washington press corp. He has been one of the stars of the Washington Post since Watergate where he has broken stories in both the Democratic and Republican Administration. The attack on Woodward signals that this administration will brook no opposition, and already others within the media are taking their cue from Team Obama and attacking Woodward as opposed to examining the effect of Obama’s policy upon the rest of us. So while the Obama attack machine is now geared at one of their own, Drudge Report ran the following headline, “Biggest drop in Income in 20 years.” That headline tells the story of where we may be headed economically and Obama’s policy is the primary reason why. It is too bad that the vast majority of Americans who get their news from the established media won’t read much about the real story behind the dismal recovery of the past five years.