Barack Obama

Writer Rebecca Traister: Obama and Hillary Represent ‘The Death Throes of Exclusive White Male Power In the United States’
By Tom Johnson | December 20, 2015 | 12:16 PM EST

The current election campaign pits the forces of backlash (“the old and angry”) against the forces of frontlash (“the new and different”), and November’s vote will be “a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men,” contended Traister in a Wednesday piece for New York magazine.

Traister posited that “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead,” but warned, “While the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat…Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned.”

CNN's Zakaria: Obama Thinks Cable News 'Massively Exaggerates' ISIS Threat
By Brad Wilmouth | December 19, 2015 | 4:26 PM EST

Appearing as a guest on Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, during a discussion of President Barack Obama's news conference, CNN's Fareed Zakaria downplayed the threat to the U.S. posed by ISIS as he forwarded the President's view that ISIS "does not pose an existential threat," noting that President Obama "often points out that gun violence takes many, many more people" in the U.S. than radical Islamic terrorism.

Networks Censor NYT Deleting Obama Quote Saying He Didn’t ‘Appreciate the Anxiety’ Post-Terror Attacks
By Curtis Houck | December 18, 2015 | 9:29 PM EST

The major broadcast networks on Friday morning and evening showed no interest in reporting to viewers that The New York Times had scrubbed from an article on its website that contained a quote from President Obama telling columnists that he did not watch enough news coverage of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks to truly grasp the anxiety of the American people. 

Matthews: Trump 'Playing to Racists,' Obama 'Not One of Us, He's Black' View
By Brad Wilmouth | December 18, 2015 | 4:55 PM EST

Appearing as a guest before MSNBC's live coverage of President Barack Obama's Friday press conference, during a discussion of Donald Trump's history of promoting birtherism against the President, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews recalled his accusation that Trump is "playing to racists" and playing to a view that President Obama is "not one of us, he's black."

NYT Flushes Obama’s Damning ‘Cable TV’ Admission From Defensive San Bernardino Story
By Clay Waters | December 18, 2015 | 12:18 PM EST

President Obama spoke off the record to news columnists, in a defensive response to Republican criticism that he has seemed passive and uninterested in the face of Islamic terror attacks against the United States. In a news story about the meeting New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris revealed this damning admission from the president: "In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments." So why was that sentence was deleted from the  version that appeared in Friday’s print edition?

Sorry, AP: Economy Is Not 'Relatively Healthy,' and Consumer Spending is Not 'Solid'
By Tom Blumer | December 17, 2015 | 4:56 PM EST

For an understanding of just how weak the business press's understanding of economic fundamentals is, look no further than Paul Wiseman's brief "coverage" at the Associated Press Wednesday of the Federal Reserve's awful Industrial Production.

The Fed reported yesterday that industrial production fell by 0.6 percent in November on top of a revised -0.4 percent (down from -0.2 percent) in October. None of the three major industrial components turned in a positive November result (Manufacturing, flat; Mining, -1.1 percent; Utilities, -4.3 percent). Additionally, industrial production in the past 12 months has fallen by 1.2 percent, an occurrence which has historically been a recessionary red flag. But that's okay, Wiseman reassured readers, because "the American economy is relatively healthy thanks to solid consumer spending."

AP: San Bernardino Terrorist Massacre Was a 'Mass Shooting'
By Tom Blumer | December 17, 2015 | 10:04 AM EST

Pity the poor folks at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press.

The Obama administration, usually hyper-reluctant to characterize a domestic terrorist attack on U.S. soil as, well, a domestic terrorist attack, has actually had to admit in the face of overwhelming evidence that the San Bernardino massacre on December 2, during which 14 were killed and two dozen injured, was indeed a terrorist attack. Failing to adapt at sufficient speed, the headline writers, tweeters and Obama fans disguised as journalists at the AP, so used to avoiding the T-word at all costs, have made fools of themselves.

Federalist's Hemingway Examines Media's Silence on Obama's Multiple Failures
By Ken Shepherd | December 16, 2015 | 5:23 PM EST

It sure "[m]ust be nice to be a Democratic president" given the media's air cover for your foreign policy/war-on-terrorism failures, The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway sighed at the end of her December 15 piece detailing all the ways in which the media are "Being Pretty Quiet About Obama’s Failures."

Hemingway – who, you may recall, won the first annual Noel Sheppard award earlier this year – began by noting how:

Bloggers: Global-Warming Deniers Are Traitors to the Planet, Paris Deal ‘One of the Great Triumphs in History’
By Tom Johnson | December 15, 2015 | 4:55 PM EST

When it comes to global warming, Esquire’s Charles Pierce implies, it’s now conservative Republicans and a few hidebound Democrats versus pretty much everyone and everything else, including the world’s non-human animals and its plant life. Meanwhile, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait opined that the Paris climate deal was “probably the [Obama] administration’s most important accomplishment."

NBC Ignores Own Poll Showing ‘Plummet’ in Obama Approval; CBS Covers
By Kyle Drennen | December 15, 2015 | 3:37 PM EST

On Tuesday, NBC left it to CBS to report its own poll showing a significant drop in President Obama’s overall approval rating and specifically regarding his handling of terrorism. CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King covered the numbers from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: “43% approve of Americans approve of the job that he's doing, and that’s the lowest number in more than a year. But 60% disapprove of the way that he’s handling the current situation with ISIS.”

Networks Omit Obama Criticism on ISIS, Tout Pentagon Visit; Forced to ‘Reassure an Anxious Nation’
By Curtis Houck | December 14, 2015 | 9:20 PM EST

The “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC all prominently touted on Monday night President Barack Obama’s visit to the Pentagon to discuss the fight against ISIS, but skimped on reporting any criticism of the administration’s strategy but instead lamenting that he’s had to try once “again to reassure an anxious nation” despite polls showing Americans are concerned about the growing threat of terrorism.

CBS’s Bouie: Trump Supporters Symbolize ‘Racial Resentment and Anti-Black Attitudes’ Toward Obama
By Curtis Houck | December 13, 2015 | 1:19 PM EST

Discussing a focus group of Trump supporters convened by Frank Luntz that aired on Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS News political analyst Jamelle Bouie promptly trashed them as representing the belief among social scientists (i.e. fellow liberals) that there’s been “a distinct rise in racial resentment and anti-black attitudes” in America resulting as a fact of the Obama presidency.