Time for Obama to Beat (Back) the Press?

When he was president, Bill Clinton was hounded by the press, as news reporters were eager to investigate any possible scandal they could twist and poke in order to manufacture public concern about Clinton.

Yet throughout nearly eight years of George W. Bush in the White House, the press willingly passed along whatever stupid talking points they were fed by a manipulative and blatantly scandalous administration, without blinking. In fact, it got so bad during the Bush years that an entirely new industry – citizen journalism - moved in to fill the void created by the suddenly compliant media, leading toward the path of possible demise for the entire newspaper industry.

Now that another Democrat is ready to take over the reigns of power, the press appears to be back in attack mode, as they seem willing to sidetrack the intended purpose of any press avail to drill into Obama’s possible connection to scandals like those involving Rod Blagojevich, and likely any future potential scandal they will be able to dredge up.

The signs are already popping up that the same tenacity and skepticism that was applied to Clinton’s every move will be applied to Obama. Never mind that few of these same reporters even cared that Bush was illegally wiretapping Americans, torturing “enemy combatants” without trial; or that he lied the country into a war that killed thousands of U.S. soldiers and probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

If this continues, it may become necessary for Obama to raise the same response that he used to shut down what he called the “phony outrage” of media criticism about his “lipstick on a pig” comment during the general election when he forcefully cried “Enough!”

If reporters in the press are going to repeatedly ignore Obama’s message in favor of picking at scandals, perhaps Obama should let them know that he could choose to use some of his political capital to draw attention to the scandals they deliberately ignored during the Bush administration!