‘Ideologically Neutral’

Directions

The press has fallen “out of love” with President Obama, Howard Fineman of Newsweek declares in a highly revealing column:

The “mainstream media” are losing patience with, and even interest in, their erstwhile hero. President Barack Obama never had a chance with the [Fox News] crowd, of course, and it didn’t take the president long to offend the fierce left wing of the blogosphere. But now, finally, the MSM [main-stream media], which views itself as ideologically neutral, has found ideologically neutral reasons to lose patience with him: that he may be ineffectual; that he doesn’t know how to play the game; that he can’t get anything done. Exhibit A: the health-care bill. The [New York] Times’s Frank Rich, the astute dean of the commentariat, wrote recently that Obama has failed to “communicate a compelling narrative” in office and, as a result, “could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.”

If the “mainstream media” is “ideologically neutral,” does it ever experience “love” for a conservative politician, or view such a pol[itician] as a “hero”? But the fact that Frank Rich, a [biting/sarcastic] left-liberal former theater critic, is “Exhibit A” here rather undermines the claim of neutrality, does it not?

Read the original post at opinionjournal.com. (Scroll half-way down the page for the entry.)