If there is any clear evidence that the media in America for all practical purposes is a monolith controlled by one drumbeat it should be evident with today’s morning shows. It was evident they were all following one narrative, a narrative to bash President Obama implicitly and explicitly on competence.
Chuck Todd failed in getting Jim Webb to explicitly bash the President
The narrative today was competence. A quoted story from Politico was “Can anyone fill the competency gap.” The insinuation was clear. President Obama is not competent. They tried to create this incompetency thread by blaming the President for ISIS / ISIL, Ebola, and on many other issues that he had little control of. Where they could not blame they attempted to get surrogates to blame.
Such was the case with Chuck Todd on Meet The Press. You could see him searching former Senator Jim Webb’s words for some gotcha moment to tie some failure to the President. This exchange was classic.
Jim Webb: And in foreign policy what you are hearing from this former soldier is something we are seeing a lot of countrywide and that is we have not had a clear articulation of what American foreign policy is basically since the end of the Cold War. SO when you are looking at places like Iraq and Syria you are seeing policies that can’t be clearly articulated
Chuck Todd: You are basically saying that the President doesn’t have, you’re basically saying President Obama doesn’t have a foreign policy.
Jim Webb: I am saying that in terms of a clear doctrine we have been lacking that for a very long time.
This is the problem with the traditional news media. Chuck Todd is attempting to create news instead of report it. Jim Webb corrects Chuck Todd’s mischaracterization of solely blaming the President ad nauseum. The traditional news media continue to fail America by reporting to a narrative instead of letting the real news create the appropriate narrative.