The press and Obama
Jack Shafer has a typically cutting piece about the press and how it will deal with an Obama victory:
“But if Obama wins, these scribes know that they'll be facing the toughest assignment of their careers. They've all oversubscribed to the notion that Obama's candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can't file garden-variety pieces about the "winds of change" blowing through Washington. They're convinced that not only the whole world will be reading but that historians will be drawing on their words. Will what I write be worthy of this moment in time? they're asking themselves. It's a perfect prescription for performance anxiety.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that the press corps is in the tank for Obama even if they're voting for him in overwhelming numbers. Obama irritates many of the reporters who cover him because he's so controlling and inaccessible. So they're not as much in love with Obama as they're in love with the idea of Obama, of the "meaning" of his run for the presidency, of the redemption he offers a sinful nation that scratched slavery into its liberty-loving Constitution."
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Ganpat Ram
October 28th, 2008 9:41amWill they write anything worthy of the time?
Of course they can, easily - by telling the truth.
Like Orwell.
Will they?
No.
They are brainless. Even the better ones, like Hitchens, are feeble opportunists.
William Norton
October 28th, 2008 11:12amWhatever happens historians will cite page after page of what today's journalists write about Obama. Because whatever happens next week there are going to be a lot of books studying either (a) how did the press get the election result so wrong? or (b) the great disappointment of the Obama presidency.
Dixon
October 29th, 2008 2:38pmIf Obama does not get elected, we will never hear an end to his sanctification by the journalists who failed to sway the electorate.A new round of mythologising about a "stolen election" and self-hating attacks on the democratic process itself.
In some ways, it may be for the best if he does get elected and then dissapoints everyone who supported him, either being insufficiently "radical", too "radical" or in any other way exhibiting feet of the proverbial clay.