Back Talk

For years, the press has fawned over the Clintons (CNN is jokingly called Clinton News Network,) soft-pedaled damaging information, and provided plenty of favorable publicity but now have dropped them like a hot rock and have been swooning over Barack Obama. The media tends to run in a herd so the mid-campaign switch to Obama was blatantly obvious. Slap Maxwell is dead; today’s journalists attend the same cocktail partys, share the same views, discourage any dissenters, and are an inbred gaggle of political groupies. Frankly, the press’s glorification of Obama and poor treatment of Hillary has been unfair to her and is primarily responsible for her 13 straight primary losses. Then an odd thing happened on the way to the nomination. Saturday Night Live did a funny sketch lampooning the media’s bias and that short little sketch either embarrassed or reminded the press that it is not supposed to be a political advocate and changed the entire nature of the campaign. Interviewers actually started asking real questions of Obama, not just softball generalities and stopped allowing him to get by with glib generalities and platitudes. The herd has lurched off into a new direction and probably is responsible for swinging voter thinking somewhat away for Obama and Hillary’s 3 big primary wins. Hillary’s problem is that the media’s new pang of journalistic contriteness is too little and too late.