Obama loses mainstream media support as Benghazi, IRS, AP scandals grow

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Brushfire season has come early to Washington. The Obama administration had been trying to stamp out persistent complaints over Benghazi. On Friday, a second fire broke out as we found the IRS lied and deliberately targeted conservative groups for special investigation.

As the IRS fire burned out of control, Fire Chief Obama tried to put out the Benghazi inferno by attacking the GOP. 

It was too late. 

Then, a third blaze caught everyone – especially the media – off guard. The poorly named Justice Department “used a secret subpoena to obtain two months of phone records for Associated Press reporters and editors without notifying the news organization,” reported NBC News.

The same administration that caught heat for lying to journalists about editing the Benghazi talking points also is investigating journalists. 

That’s when it’s not investigating Tea Party groups, pro-Israel Jewish groups, businesses and just about everybody else.

The Obama administration has been at war with the media since before it was elected the first time.

The Washington Post explains such “subpoenas of records from news organizations must be approved personally by the attorney general.” In other words, this attack on press freedom goes all the way to Eric Holder.

All three networks hit hard on the IRS Monday, with NBC calling it “damage control” and “IRS firestorm.” Both NBC and CBS covered the attack on the very people who were reporting the other scandals.

Seven of the top 10 newspapers had at least one Obama disaster on their front page Tuesday. There was so much “Scandal,” you expected Kerry Washington to show up. The IRS fiasco was on all seven, with The Chicago Tribune’s headline “IRS Scandal Growing” reflecting a typical sentiment. 

The nation’s top two political papers – The Washington Post and New York Times – both had multiple stories. The Post devoted two stories to the IRS and another to the AP fiasco. The Times had one story each. The IRS stories showed the probes “reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012” – six months before the election.

Our besieged president led USA Today. The paper had a worried picture of Obama responding to both the IRS and Benghazi scandals. The headline read: “UNDER FIRE: Scrutiny of reporters adds to administration’s woes.” The paper ran two stories beneath it – a Q&A about the first two scandals and another story on the “AP phone records.”

Obama is rapidly became the butt of jokes. Big time lefty Jon Stewart devoted 10 minutes of his program to the scandals, repeatedly dropping a bleeped F-bomb in frustrated response to both the IRS scandal and the AP investigation. David Burge, the funniest man on the Internet, joked on Twitter: “And now I think we all know why Obama picked Biden as VP.” And Jay Leno led off his show with several digs at the president.

Forget Gate 1 (Benghazi – horrific and deadly), Gate 2 (Nixonian – even down to the language used) and focus on Gate 3. This one is so bad that the liberal, pro-Obama Huffington Post ran headlines like “ASSOCIATED MESS!” and my current favorite “DOJ WTF.” Since Obama is taking us back to the Nixon era, I’ll paraphrase LBJ. If Obama has lost HuffPo, he’s lost. Period.

Now, HuffPo and the rest of the media are fickle and still love Obama. But this fits a pattern of anti-media attacks and deception. 

It appears journalists have temporarily noticed. 

AP President and CEO Gary B. Pruitt wrote a scathing letter to Holder saying “there can be no possible justification” for what his department gathered. “We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” he continued.

I can see him being upset. But don’t act so surprised. The Obama administration has been at war with the media since before it was elected the first time. Obama kicked three reporters off the campaign plane in 2008 because their papers backed his opponent.

He followed that with an endless crusade against conservative media or any who criticized him. The administration went after Fox News, Drudge, Tea Party inspiration Rick Santelli and even liberal CNBC host Jim Cramer.

A full-scale spat with the press corps led sometime sane Helen Thomas to compare the administration to Nixon. (Ah, there’s that Nixon guy again.) Obama stayed aloof from the press and his agencies shut them out. 

The federal government locked out the press from the disastrous BP oil spill – so much so that CBS, Associated Press, Mother Jones and The Times-Picayune all complained. 

And that’s only the highlights.

The press can no longer say the Obama scandals are a case of smoke but no fire because they are getting burned, too. There’s a hellacious amount of fire and it’s spreading. 

If Obama can’t contain it, the fires will merge into one mighty conflagration – and light up just how awful his administration has been to the press and opponents.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

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Obama loses mainstream media support as Benghazi, IRS, AP scandals grow

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Sequester fears take mainstream media hysteria to new heights

R.E.M. sang, “It’s the end of the world as we know it.” If ever there were a theme song for the liberal media’s coverage of the sequester the band's iconic song would be it. 

The “broad and sweeping federal budget cuts” being debated on the Hill are being reported breathlessly in the news media. NBC’s Brian Williams called it “high anxiety” and a “Good Morning America” graphic sounded the alarm: “Seven Days to Fiscal Emergency.” ABC’s David Kerley said the sequester “sounds like a disaster movie.” He didn’t scream, but he still has time.

In one of the best examples of political theater, famed Washington Post editor and reporter Bob Woodward reminded the world recently that the sequester was Obama’s idea. That set in motion a bizarre circumstance where Republicans were relying on Woodward and Democrats were trying to discredit him as a tool of the right. Yes, this was the same Bob Woodward who helped destroy Republican President Richard Nixon.

Turn on almost any network newscast and there’s one theme. The federal budget might be cut! The horror!

The New York Times warned the $85 billion in budget cuts – just 2.4 percent of the budget – were ushering in an era of “federal austerity.” The story began in a typically apocalyptic manner: “Fear of U.S. Cuts Grows In States Where Aid Flows – Recovery Seen At Risk – Wide Impact Looms on Jobs, Tax Revenue, and Schools.” Even the Times’ pretend conservative David Brooks blasted Republicans as “mindless anti-government fanatics.”

The Huffington Post screamed with predictable hyperbole “AUSTERITY COUNTDOWN: 4 DAYS TIL PAIN” across its front page like Mr. T had taken over headline writing. It was followed by subtle subheads like: "'Prepare To Suffer’” and “‘The Road To A Lawless Society Is Being Paved.’”  Who knows, tomorrow’s headline may lament “dogs and cats living together.”

Every major old-school news outlet has shouted about the “worst-case scenario for government spending cuts,” as if they were deliberately doing the bidding of the liberal Democrats who couldn’t find a way to cut in a Ginsu factory. We’ve been told about cuts in research, cuts in jobs, defense-crippling cuts at the Pentagon that keep carriers in port and even vaccines that won’t ever get made.

CBS’s Wyatt Andrews warned on February 25, about NIH research that “will one day find a drug to diminish the impact of old age.” As if prescription drug firms wouldn’t pay for that research … if they thought it potentially viable. 

Yet the sad truth is that in the eyes of the news media, every government program is perfect. It’s those evil Republicans who won’t raise taxes, after just raising them only two months ago.

Turn on almost any network newscast and there’s one theme. The federal budget might be cut! The horror! By March 1, when the cuts start taking effect, the broadcast networks could well be using Hindenburg graphics with desperate government workers bailing out of jobs in mid-air to avoid the explosion.

Not all journalists have been bad on this – just most. 

Surprisingly, CNN’s presidential debate star seems to have grasped some basic economics or reporting. (Maybe even both!) Crowley called out one of the administration’s many liars, er, department heads, pretending the cuts will end the world as we know it – in this case air travel. Crowley had the audacity to tell Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that “your post-sequester total at FAA ops and facilities and equipment is going to be about $500 million more than 2008 and the planes were running just fine.”

When LaHood responded by talking about the dreaded “furlough of air traffic controllers,” Crowley came right back. “Is it true that domestic flights are down 27 percent from pre-9/11 levels and the budget at the FAA is up 41 percent?”

That is the essence of the sequester. Federal budgets seldom really drop and any cut is seen as a crime against nature. Journalists, meanwhile, regurgitate talking points from their statist buddies who think the taxes should take every dollar out of your wallet, and then sell your wallet for good measure.

Almost no one in the press is pointing out that all this budget cutting is just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s really needed to rein in trillion dollar deficits and our $16.5 trillion national debt. Any attempt to do that will require true cuts to our bloated government and its No. 1 fans in the media will again scream the sky is falling and the world is about to end.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

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