Jonathan Weiler: More on the Liberal Media (awesome takedown of *)

[grytpype]

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200445#1049

More on the Liberal Media

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he president’s record is so bad, on so many fronts, that that fact has taken on the status of a near-given. Most people know the war in Iraq has been a disaster, most people know that the recovery has been historically weak, most people know the president is the first with a net loss of jobs on his watch since Herbert Hoover, that millions have lost health insurance, that poverty has grown and that the federal government’s finances have deteriorated to a shocking degree since 2000. So, much of the focus of the campaign and coverage of the president’s record generally has focused on the extent to which these failures can be blamed on the president. The president, of course, denies any responsibility for what has happened since he’s been in the White House. He “inherited” a recession, the 9/11 horrors struck a mortal blow at our economy, the corporate corruption scandals long pre-dated his presidency, and whatever bad has happened in Iraq isn’t his fault because he told us all along that Iraq “is a dangerous place.” And, then there’s the catch-all defense for all his failures - “we’re at war.”

It would be unfair to say that the media, taken as a whole, have particularly bought these rationales. Instead, many have done what Thomas did this morning and deployed secondary defenses of the president – that he’s affable, that you’ve got to give him credit for standing by his convictions, that people around him, like the neo-cons and Cheney and Rumsfeld, are responsible for administration policy. Whether the question is his personal beliefs, his intelligence or his regular-guy persona, there’s always some reason why its OK for Bush to be Bush, regardless of how miserable his actual job performance is and why, if things have gone wrong, it’s probably somebody else’s fault, or at worst, attributable to some Bush character flaw which nonetheless fails to diminish the fact that he is, over all, a straight shooter and good guy.

These backdoor rationalizations, combined with the extraordinarily low expectations that the media still have for Bush leads us to a remarkable situation in which the president, the guy who’s been running the country for four years now, is held to a lesser standard of accountability, in word and deed, than his opponent or, it seems, almost any higher level official in his own administration. Given this endless excuse-making, is it any wonder that the public still believes that Bush is a “man of his word?” Or, that there’s such a disconnect between his atrocious performance in office and his highly competitive campaign? Has any president in history ever gotten such favorable treatment relative to his record?