Obey: Obama still not satisfied with the lapdog pr

Obey: Obama still not satisfied with the lapdog press


President Obama is trying to impose ideological conformity on the press. He is demanding that the media more favorably report his positions and present him as a pragmatic centrist. During a recent speech to journalists, he denounced their supposed equivalence on the burning issues of the day. Instead, Mr. Obama insisted that they portray his leadership in a more glowing light. He brazenly violated media independence, putting government pressure on journalists akin to that in authoritarian socialist states.

“This bears on your reporting,” Mr. Obama said to the Associated Press. “I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented which I think reinforces peoples’ cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalency.”

In particular, Mr. Obama argued that on spending, the budget and cap-and-trade legislation the media is not correctly reflecting the administration’s central narrative: Extremist Republicans are blocking the sensible policies of a middle-of-the-road Democratic president. “As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues,” he told journalists, “if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago … would’ve been considered squarely centrist positions.”

According to Mr. Obama, it is the GOP which has “moved its center” to the “far right.” In other words, the president claims that Republicans are wedded to a radical agenda. For example, he said that in the early 1990s conservatives pushed for a health insurance individual mandate — the centerpiece of Obamacare. He also stressed that, again, it was the right that championed market-based carbon credits to combat global warming. Hence, the press must not just report the facts and the raging debate inside the Beltway. It must go one step further: defend Mr. Obama as a besieged moderate, who is battling the crazed right-wingers that have supposedly hijacked the Republican Party. In short, he wants journalists to act as cheap propagandists.