Is that a promise or a threat?
Listen to the drumbeat from media pundits about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.
The Chicago Tribune, Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd and most of the rest of the fair and balanced press corps argue that if the constant negative coverage of Obama-Wright doesn’t stop soon, Obama’s campaign is going to suffer. Is that a promise or a threat?
There is only one way to stop the attacks against Wright and Obama. It’s for the people making them to stop making them. That means you, Chicago Tribune, Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd, et al. They could end this debacle today.
But they don’t. Why? Polls suggest the public cares very little about the “controversy.”
Think about the corollary: What if these pundits said “If we ever start comparing John McCain to his controversial and unpopular supporter, George W. Bush, he’s going to be in trouble. What if we led every op-ed page, every broadcast, every letters to the editor page with constant negative coverage of this relationship? What would happen to McCain’s campaign?”
The irony is that the public, by far, considers McCain-Bush a bigger problem than Obama-Wright. There’s good reason to think that if the “liberal” media turned their attack against McCain, his campaign would be toast. But far from playing up the near mirror-image relationship between the two, the press continues to try to protect McCain with absurd articles about what a maverick he is.
Editors and publishers wonder why readers think they’re full of crap. There are many reasons we think that. The fact that they’re far to the right of mainstream thought is one big one.
