About that "tingling" class

My previous post (scroll down) about the media falling for the economic/employment numbers presented by President Obama has elicited a few e-mails with readers laughing at my characterization of the media. There is nothing foreign to the term the "tingling class." Just ask Chris Matthews if his leg still has a thrill running up it. Phil Bronstein's post today goes hand-in-hand with our opinion of the "tingling class":

When Barack Obama decided that questions from the German press about his trip agenda in that country were too pesky, he told the reporters, "So, stop it all of you!" He just wanted them to ask things he wanted to talk about. Well, what politico wouldn't want that?

OK, dad. We'll behave.

And according to a new Pew Research Center poll, we are behaving...like fans. On domestic press, it showed that "President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House" with "roughly twice as much" Obama coverage about his "personal or leadership qualities" than was the case for either previous president.

Back in the US, NBC's Brian Williams' two-part "Living Large With the Top Dog" feature on Mr. Obama's life included a plug for Conan O'Brien's new show and mention of cable talkies where Mr. Obama only cited MSNBC personalities. Accident? I don't think so. There were a few probing moments in there, but they were overshadowed by the flash of hanging out in the back of the Auto One limo and having burgers. A little navel-gazing among journalism standards hall monitors about whether the thing had been too soft came and went.

Then, this Sunday in the NYTimes, there was full-on chick-flick swooning over Barack and Michelle Obama's heavily scented "date night" in NY City and its high bar standard effect on our relationship culture, with just a hint of controversy over the taxpayer costs to add some spice. I swear I've seen this movie, only Michael Douglas was the President. Or Harrison Ford. Or one of those cool and languid characters you'd want to like you. George Bush needed to be beer-bar likable to get elected. His successor has managed to get a lot of people to want to be liked by him.

And in Paris, Mr. Obama talked about how he'd love to take his wife for a romantic tour of the City of Lovers, but couldn't. Then he did. I'm guessing some regular-Joe freedom fries weren't on the menu. ...

If I wanted to see highly manicured image management I'd just take some No-Doz and read Gavin Newsom's tweets. But the Obama-press dance is a more consensual seduction where, in the old-fashioned sense, we're the girl. (In California, there's no other option.)

I thought that the Maxfield Parrish, heroic days of the Kennedy Administration PR, where the press and the president were pretty much all in on the same screenplay and the same jokes, couldn't happen in our modern era, what with paparazzi and tabloids and talk shows, citizen sound-bite scavengers and voracious 24/7 news cycles. But now that the stumbling Bushes and smirking Clintons are out of the White House, time has compressed back on itself like the machine in the Denzel Washington movie, "Deja Vu." It's the early 1960s and Camelot all over again ...

The style-over-substance hit followed him from continent to continent. "While the president is popular among Europeans," the Wall Street Journal wrote, "he returned from his second trip to Europe with little more progress on key issues" than he got on his first visit. That's the Journal. But the Washington Post, where the John Kennedy myth was nurtured like a golden statue, managed a cautionary op-ed column from Robert Samuelson warning that "our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power." He meant checks from the press.

Samuelson was one of the few in the media to give some room to the Pew Research Center poll.

So far, this is all about image and character and press "opportunities." But with what CNN financial reporter Elizabeth Cohen called this morning "gazillions of dollars" of our money at stake and crazy people with nukes bristling from around the edges of the world, we can't afford not to keep a closer eye on the substance thing.

The point of this is simple: The Framers envisioned the press to be a "fourth rail" of the government. That is, they are supposed to be keeping the substantive eye on the government, but since the arrival of Barack Obama on the scene, they have chosen to be fawning groupies that are reminiscent of the old 1980s rock concerts where the girls squeal, hand out their phone numbers, or take off their undergarments to throw in Joe Cool's direction.

It is sickening that few in the press (most notably Jake Tapper) are looking at the president with a critical eye as opposed to the lustful one. At this point we question why the press today even tries to pawn off the notion they are "fair and unbiased," as Joe Klein once told Hugh Hewitt in an interview. There is nothing unbiased about the media's swooning over President Obama like he is the Second Coming. And it is simply not fair to be a willing, complicit accomplice in hood-winking the public on a bill of goods that we have no ability to pay for, or for the world to sustain.

Marcie