By Stephanie Ramage
What a descent into sadness it has been since Feb. 5, when Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama had just emerged as the front-runners in the presidential race.
We’ve seen two decent men completely overshadowed by a Republican “base” that—once it had vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin on the ticket—indulged in demagoguery, refusing to silence outright racists and focusing on ridiculous, tenuous accusations against Obama, and by media so in love with Obama that they did not do their jobs, not even the most basic due diligence.
Whose reporting will you trust once Obama has taken the oath of office? You can forget CNN, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CBS, the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, to a great extent the New York Times, and a host of others. Why?
—Their reporters have refused to address Obama’s complicity in killing a bill to reform Fannie Mae in 2005, a bill that would have prevented much of our present financial agony.
—They have not examined his bellicose statements about Pakistan in the context of his stated goal of focusing on the war in Afghanistan. How does he plan to win the war in Afghanistan if he alienates Pakistan?
—They have not questioned his supporter Jesse Jackson’s friendship with Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez, or Obama’s own belligerent statements about the government of Chavez’s foe, and our ally, Colombia—whose government rescued three Americans from guerrillas last summer. Obama openly accused the Colombian government of judicial malfeasance during the final presidential debate on Oct. 15.
—They have not demanded that Obama explain exactly how a nation of 320 million people will have a government health-care program that can be competitive enough to drive down health-care costs if Obama is also, as he promises, going to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, or how he plans to keep companies in the U.S. if he penalizes them with increased taxes for outsourcing some work to countries where the labor is cheaper.
—They have not questioned him on how a stated timeline for withdrawal from Iraq might affect the stability of Iraq’s fledgling government. It may well be that even with a Republican in the White House, we would be out of Iraq within 16 months. But why would anyone with common sense announce a timeline for withdrawal? Our gains there in terms of security, stability and the attitude of the Iraqi people toward the U.S. have been so positive over the last 18 months that to announce a withdrawal date and potentially lose all we have accomplished makes no sense—except when viewed as a purely political ploy to appease the no-war-at-any-cost crowd operating out of Obama’s Senate office in Washington.
So once Obama is president, do you believe that these media organizations will suddenly change course and take the skeptical, critical approach that they should have taken throughout his campaign? Do you believe that they will report on his administration with truth, accuracy, fairness and balance? Of course not. How could they, without embarrassing themselves? The press, Benjamin Franklin’s “watchdog of democracy,” has been bought off with a juicy bone.
The truth matters. In his wonderful book “On Truth,” Princeton University philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt puts it best: “There is a dimension of reality into which even the boldest—or the laziest—indulgence of subjectivity cannot dare intrude. This is the spirit of Georges Clemenceau’s famous response, when he was asked to speculate as to what future historians would say about the First World War: ‘They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.’”
And we will not say that Obama fought to prevent the American financial meltdown, that he favored working with Pakistan to eradicate Taliban enclaves on its Afghan border, that he sought to help our ally Colombia remain stable against Chavez’s destabilizing threat, or that he believed in holding the ground we won in Iraq. SP
Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.