Gas, Politics And The Media
Gary Gerard,
dumbhoosier.com
We have CNN on the newsroom every day, so I am pretty
familiar with what they cover and how they cover it.
Sometimes, If it weren’t so unsettling, it would almost be
comical.
I was noticing this week how CNN has been bending over
backwards to tell us all how President Obama really has no
control over those pesky rising gas prices.
Pretty much all other national media outlets with the obvious
exception of Fox News Channel – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC – fall
into the same category, but for the sake of this column, we’ll
stick with CNN.
For example:
President Barack Obama confronted two political realities this
week:
– Rising gas prices are bad for a politician’s poll numbers
– There is almost nothing a politician can do about it, at
least in the short run.
Obama likes to point out at his fund-raisers the unexpected
crises he’s seen since taking office. … He can add the gas
prices to the list, with no easy answers.
That’s the kind of measured reporting we’ve been getting and
you know what? I think that’s about right.
There are no easy answers. There is very little – in the short
term – that a president can do to lower gas prices.
Conversely, a president’s overall energy policy can affect gas
prices. If that policy is passed by Congress, over time –
usually a few years or so – it actually will affect prices.
For example, if President Obama would have allowed the
Keystone pipeline to be built, it would likely have had a
modest effect on gas prices several years from now.
Just as some of the policies passed by the Bush administration
in 2007 – opening up new areas to drilling and increased
approval of oil leases – are probably affecting gas prices
today.
But in the short term, it’s totally bogus to blame a president
for high gas prices.
So I want to thank CNN for pointing that out to us.
Simultaneously, I want to ask CNN why it was that back in
2008, when George Bush was president, they didn’t afford us
the same courtesy.
CNN today defends President Obana’s actions regarding oil
prices and trumpets his recent rhetoric about gas prices,
noting that these are “complex issues.”
OK. Fair enough.
But when Bush was president?
Back then, CNN was running stories like the one where House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi “blamed the ‘two oil men in the White
House,’ President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and
their Republican allies in Congress for gas prices exceeding
$4 a gallon.
“The price of oil is... is attributed to two oil men in the
White House and their protectors in the United States Senate,”
Pelosi said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Pelosi said she would continue to oppose two policy changes
that President Bush and congressional Republicans have been
advocating: lifting the ban on offshore drilling and opening
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration.
Beautiful. Not only does Pelosi hang all the blame for high
gas prices on President Bush and Vice President Cheney, she
then vows to fight it if they try to do anything about it.
And CNN is perfectly happy to pass this blather on as news.
Nothing about “political realities.” No caveat that “there is
almost nothing a politician can do about” high gas prices.
Just blame Bush.
There are tons of examples like this.
And beyond that, there’s just the sheer number of stories that
were done about the effect of high gas prices back in 2008.
Literally dozens of stories highlighted the plight of
consumers having to choose between gas and food. Or gas and
medicine.
Those were good stories. They were relevant back then.
I haven’t seen any of those stories this time around. Did I
miss them? Anybody? Did they somehow lose their relevance ?
When the unemployment numbers came out last week, they were
positive and it seems the economy is making a comeback.
CNN ran the story over and over all morning. They had panel
discussions and interviews with multiple economic experts, all
of whom told us very positive things about the economy.
Of course, the converse of this is Fox News Channel, where
they ran a small mention at the top of the hour and tersely
reminded viewers that we’re still not out of the woods because
of high fuel prices and the Eurozone crisis.
I supposed somewhere in the middle of those two extremes lies
balanced reporting.
Then there’s the ongoing craziness in Afghanistan.
Compare and contrast that to the Abu Ghraib prison troubles
during the Bush administration.
There were all kinds of calls for Bush to be held accountable.
It was called endemic or systemic in his administration. He’s
the commander in chief. The buck stops here, we were told by
sources the media chose to quote.
Now, under President Obama, we’ve got kill team videos of
marines murdering hapless travelers, prison workers burning
Qurans and rogue solders urinating on dead Afghans and
massacring civilians.
Anybody hearing news outlets quoting people calling for the
president’s head over these events?
Nah.
And there was a significant difference between these incidents
– nobody died at Abu Ghraib.
I know you can never accurately predict what would happen in
some parallel universe, but seriously. Can you imagine what
press coverage would have been like had there been “kill team”
videos when President Bush was commander in chief?
I know most CNN correspondents think George W. Bush was an
awful president and Barack Obama is a wonderful president.
(I’m not really fond of either of them.)
But even if that’s the case, these people are journalists.
Shouldn’t they just report on them fairly?
I guess that’s just too much to ask.
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