(HOST) The relationship between an incoming President and the reporters who cover him is of great importance to the Presidency – and ultimately to the country itself. This morning commentator Barrie Dunsmore, a veteran diplomatic correspondent for ABC News, looks at how relations between President-elect Obama and the news media are starting to take shape.
(DUNSMORE) During most of the primaries and the Presidential election campaign itself, there were regular complaints from his opponents – both Republicans and Democrats – that the news media were in the tank for Obama. In the early days of the transition, news coverage of the President-elect as he rolled out his cabinet appointees continued to be largely positive – right up to the moment prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced his criminal complaint against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for, among other things, putting Obama’s Senate seat up for sale.
Suddenly, every reporter with a lap-top or a microphone discovered his or her Woodward and Bernstein gene and began casting a suspicious eye on the President-elect and parsing his words – or lack of same – as possible clues to an Obama-gate scandal. When Obama asked for a few days to carefully determine exactly what contacts his large Chicago staff might have had with the governor or any of his staff, more than one television commentator charged that Obama was "refusing to come clean."
When Obama told reporters on Monday that his investigation had come up with no improprieties but that prosecutor Fitzgerald had asked him to hold off releasing details of his report for a week – because of its possible impact on the prosecution’s case against the governor – journalistic indignation rose to near fever pitch. "Where’s the proof?" demanded one reporter. "He’s leaving things to fester for a whole week," said another. And still another wrote, "He winds up looking like just another politician who plays the old Washington game." And on cable television there has been a week long crescendo on the theme of: "What about the transparency Obama promised? What is he hiding?"
All of this hyperbolic reaction flies in the face of actual evidence – that the Blagojevich tapes show the governor was very angry at Obama for not offering him anything for the Senate seat nomination – and the repeated statements by prosecutor Fitzgerald that neither Obama nor any one on his team is suspected of doing anything wrong.
I know it’s a slow news period, but, given the genuine threats to national security – and civil liberties – that went mostly unreported by the national news media for the first six years of the outgoing administration – their reaction to the Chicago scandal seems rather overblown.
What this tells me is that Obama’s honeymoon is likely to be very short, as the national news media try to prove, once again – as they did with Carter and Clinton – that they do not have a liberal bias. It also makes me think that if cable television and Internet blogs had existed when Lincoln arrived in Washington for his inauguration, he would have been met at the train by an angry mob of reporters blaming him for breaking up the Union.
But then I recall that during the Civil War, Lincoln actually was called a despot, liar, thief, monster, ignoramus, perjurer, swindler, tyrant, fiend and butcher – and that was just by newspapers in the North.