This morning's Politico features glaring headline after headline about how 'Washington Has Turned on Obama', 'Obama's New Narrative' and 'Scandals Could Roil 2014 Elections.'
Meanwhile you had to navigate down considerably beneath all these scandal mongering big headlines to read a little headline that read 'Sequestration Gets Real For Workers.' The subtitle reports that there are now 820,000 federal workers in furlough.
What does Politico care about that? What matters is carrying the GOP water. After all, sequestration is boring. We want to talk about how Obama is damaged and the Democrats will lose big in 2014. None of this is too plausible: after all the GOP never gained anything for all their scandal mongering over Lewinsky and Whitewater, but hey, that's a fact and who cares about that?
What we care about is optics and narrative. Whatever, the facts are-boring-the GOP has the narrative on its side. Obama really is a jackbooted fascist and government is evil.
"Obama’s critics now have a narrative — a way of connecting four discrete episodes to a larger point about this president’s leadership style and values. In other words, they didn’t merely happen on his watch but were in important ways caused by his watch."
"And for the first time, this anti-Obama storyline is being presented in a way that might seem reasonable to people who are not already rabid anti-Obama partisans."
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obamas-dangerous-new-narrative-91390_Page4.html
Or more like it gives the "narrative" for media flacks to make a bunch of storm and stress signifying nothing. What's amazing about this whole piece is that there's no even attempt to look at this in anything but a wholly superficial way: the optics, the narrative sure looks bad for Obama.
Throw in some false equivalence for good measure:
"There is little doubt that Obama and Democrats would be making precisely this argument if the same set of controversies had descended on a Republican president. And the hope and expectation on the right is that the barrage of alarming headlines out of Washington will prompt Americans to make a top-to-bottom reassessment of what they thought they knew about their president.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obamas-dangerous-new-narrative-91390.html#ixzz2TMIS7W6V
Meanwhile you had to navigate down considerably beneath all these scandal mongering big headlines to read a little headline that read 'Sequestration Gets Real For Workers.' The subtitle reports that there are now 820,000 federal workers in furlough.
What does Politico care about that? What matters is carrying the GOP water. After all, sequestration is boring. We want to talk about how Obama is damaged and the Democrats will lose big in 2014. None of this is too plausible: after all the GOP never gained anything for all their scandal mongering over Lewinsky and Whitewater, but hey, that's a fact and who cares about that?
What we care about is optics and narrative. Whatever, the facts are-boring-the GOP has the narrative on its side. Obama really is a jackbooted fascist and government is evil.
"Obama’s critics now have a narrative — a way of connecting four discrete episodes to a larger point about this president’s leadership style and values. In other words, they didn’t merely happen on his watch but were in important ways caused by his watch."
"And for the first time, this anti-Obama storyline is being presented in a way that might seem reasonable to people who are not already rabid anti-Obama partisans."
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obamas-dangerous-new-narrative-91390_Page4.html
Or more like it gives the "narrative" for media flacks to make a bunch of storm and stress signifying nothing. What's amazing about this whole piece is that there's no even attempt to look at this in anything but a wholly superficial way: the optics, the narrative sure looks bad for Obama.
Throw in some false equivalence for good measure:
"There is little doubt that Obama and Democrats would be making precisely this argument if the same set of controversies had descended on a Republican president. And the hope and expectation on the right is that the barrage of alarming headlines out of Washington will prompt Americans to make a top-to-bottom reassessment of what they thought they knew about their president.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obamas-dangerous-new-narrative-91390.html#ixzz2TMIS7W6V
That's actually false. There is good reason to doubt. As Harry Reid points out liberal groups were targeted during the Bush years and it wasn't listed as an impeachable offense. The Dems definitely went after some things but they were real-not made up scandals. The outing of Valerie Plame was an outrageous abuse of power for political reasons.
Somehow in the 4 page piece, the author never gets around to even looking at any of these issues. By the way, notice that he talks of four scandals. He's actually adding in the implementation of ObamaCare as part of this narrative. Nowhere does he point out that the Benghazi scandal is as Greg Sargent puts it a joke; just yesterday it emerged that the real altering of emails came not from the White House but from the smoking gun that ABC reported last Friday. Nowhere in this piece or any of the other many headlines did you notice this.
Part of what's going on is that nature abhors es a vacuum. With Congress in deadlock thanks to GOP obstruction it might be that it's been kind of a slow news day for sometime now. Not really-we see that over 800,000 federal workers are furloughed. But this is Bob Woodward's media. What do they care about that? They want to repeat vague Republican allusions and accusations not deal in facts and issues that matter for the American people.
If this "unbiased person" is now convinced that the GOP is right about Obama, it's certainly with the help of Politico's page today. Nowhere could you get any context. Like how the AP subpoena information was something the GOP had long demanded, and that the GOP had no problem with Bush's illegal wire-tapping.. It also ignored that the IRS also targeted liberal groups in the Bush years.
As for ObamaCare, Politico has now decided it's a scandal in itself?!
Right now, I recommend you go to a couple of sources to cut through the media filter. Media Matters, Guns and Money, and of course, Diary of a Republican Hater. Because right now we are officially in feeding frenzy mode.
No comments:
Post a Comment