For a candidate long used to an overwhelmingly positive press, it was a jarring headline. But with Obama's new status as the Democrats' clear frontrunner, a media backlash is now showing clear signs of gathering pace.
The Politico story was not alone last week. In the New York Times, two influential columnists weighed in with brutal attacks against Obama. David Brooks called him a 'trophy messiah' and Paul Krugman claimed Obama's campaign was '...dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality'. Meanwhile, in the Boston Globe, Obama supporter Margery Eagan expressed her own doubts about her pick. 'I'm nervous because John McCain says Obama is an "eloquent but empty call for change" and in the wee, wee hours a nagging voice whispers: "Suppose McCain's right,' Eagan wrote.
So writes Paul Harris in the Sunday February 24th Guardian of London ("The week the Obama backlash started"). Apparently it was more important to Harris and The Guardian of London to float a pleasing tale than to tell the truth. Paul Krugman did not publish the column "last week" as Harris and the paper maintain. The column, "Hate Springs Eternal," ran February 11th. Do the math, 24 minus 11 is? 13. That would be two weeks ago. Things like facts fall by the way side when Harris has a narrative to sell. The Guardian of London has consistently demonstrated shoddy standards but now they're lying about when columns are published to push their lies. (For those uneducated whiners who wants to shoot back, "That paper broke the new of the Downing Street Memos!"; no, it didn't. It avoided that story. It avoided pretty much thing that made Tony Blair uncomfortable. The Times of London broke the story on the Downing Street Memos and, even after they broke it, The Guardian of London avoided it.)