| Mr. Obama, enjoy the media adulation while you can |
EasyNews, UseNet made Ea .. |
| ::darkshadows:: (blood@thirsty.net) |
2008/11/28 00:23 |
JON FRIEDMAN'S MEDIA WEB
Mr. Obama, enjoy the media adulation while you can
Commentary: President-elect should remember that what goes up, must
come down
By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:01 a.m. EST Nov. 28, 2008Comments: 25
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- I'm starting to feel a little guilty about
the media's treatment of President-elect Barack Obama -- and I may not
be the only one.
Chalk it up to a phenomenon I'd like to call "Obama-remorse." You know
how you feel buyer's remorse after you've spent a lot of dough on some
big-ticket item, only to realize that you might have made a mistake?
Well, it's going to happen to the president-elect as well.
Perhaps this sort of recognition prompted Washington Post media writer
Howard Kurtz to do an incisive piece called "A Giddy Sense of
Boosterism" on Nov. 17. As Kurtz noted, the media have tripped over
themselves to celebrate and cash in on Obama's victory.
NBC News is preparing a DVD called "Yes, We Can: The Barack Obama
Story." ABC and USA Today are racing to publish a book on the
election. HBO is readying a documentary on the campaign, too.
As I see it, the media are having second thoughts about their
performance over the past year.
First, they gave Sen. Hillary Clinton the cold shoulder and all but
rolled out a red carpet for Obama during the Democratic primary
season. Perhaps Amy Poehler's eerily spot-on send-up of Clinton on
"Saturday Night Live" helped reduce the New York senator to a
caricature, making it even easier for the reporters to consign her to
a complementary role.
Once Clinton was dispatched, they lavished favorable attention on
Obama, as his opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain, was forced to
watch from the shadows.
Yes, I'm thrilled that he won the election, underscoring the American
ideal that we live in a foreword-thinking democracy, where any man or
woman can rise to the highest office in the land. And I'm proud that
even Obama's staunchest foes -- particularly the man he defeated, John
McCain -- seem to be willing to accept his victory and pledge to help
him turn around the economy and cure the nation's other ills.
Adulation Express
But I also feel guilty because I know that the media's Adulation
Express -- never to be confused with McCain's old Straight Talk
Express -- is going to hit a few speed bumps before it inexorably
grinds to a halt.
It's inevitable. Look at what happened to Sarah Palin, McCain's
running mate.
When McCain first nominated her, she could no wrong in the media's
eyes. She was hailed for her aw-shucks demeanor, in contrast to the
inveterate Beltway sharpies, and her unlikely ascent to such a big job
(I suspect that Tina Fey's brilliant impersonation of Palin on
"Saturday Night Live" owed as much to Palin's newness as it did to
Fey's uncanny ability to look and sound like the governor of Alaska.
Most SNL viewers had no frame of reference for Palin, other than her
speech at the Republican National Convention, so Fey didn't have to
worry about competing with a hardened image of Palin).
It's inevitable, too, that Obama will eventually have his turn under
the microscope. When the media start picking apart some of his Cabinet
choices or his pronouncements on the state of the economy or his
declarations about Iraq, he may be surprised to find that the
afterglow of his stunning victory turns sour so fast.
MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Have the media treated President-elect
Barack Obama too kindly for the past year -- and, if so, should that
kind of treatment end now that he has won the election?
|
|
|