More often than not, though, the Media is only about eyeballs. Getting you to buy the paper, change the channel or sit through the ad. Never mind that skillfully doing their job will get you (the audience) to do that anyway.
You know I feel that the Mainstream Media has gotten lazy. Not biased, but trifling. They're still as good as every at who, what, where, when, but on the all important issue of why, our current batch of reporters either has no clue, takes wild-ass guesses, or worst of all sails with the conventional wisdom.
So, I'm flipping through the online Newsweek, and I come across this headline:
Barack The Untouchable
What the Blagojevich scandal might tell us about Obama's ethics.
Oh God, I say to myself. What are they going to say now?
But I always should remember one thing about reporting. The Reporters never write headlines.
In the aftermath of the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on a range of charges, including trying to sell Obama's Senate seat, and questions about whether other prominent Chicago politicians such as Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. were involved, some in the national media have begun re-examining the president-elect's ethics. Tony Rezko, for one, is back in our sights. The fact that the political fixer was a big-time crony of Blagojevich's and raised funds for Obama—despite the total lack of evidence that he ever received patronage for it—is disturbing enough. While Obama supported ethics reforms as a state senator, he still "has an ambiguous reputation among those trying to clean up Illinois politics," John Fund wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Fund went on to quote Jay Stewart, executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, as saying: "We have a sick political culture, and that's the environment Barack Obama came from ... Obama has been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state including, at this point, mostly Democratic politicians."
I may not be right about this, but I suspect that these inquisitive minds have Obama entirely wrong. It was no accident that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald went out of his way to say Obama was not implicated in any way. One of the more telling excerpts from Blagojevich's wiretapped conversations indicates the governor was "bleeping" upset that the Obama team was "not willing to give him anything but appreciation" in exchange for appointing the president-elect's preferred candidate, Valerie Jarrett. There's a pattern here. From all the available evidence we can gather from his time in Illinois politics, Barack Obama is a major goody-two-shoes. And that may tell us a lot about what kind of president he's going to be.
Michael Hirsh goes on to compare and contrast Obama to another Democratic President, but one that's been overlooked in all the Roosevelt tones being laid on. He talked about Harry Truman.
When it comes to public integrity, Obama's early experience in rising through the seemingly irremediable corruption of Illinois politics offers some interesting parallels to Truman's record. According to former Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, his biographer, Obama has consistently gone out of his way to steer clear of the Illinois taint he knew was all around him. When his wife Michelle wanted to go to work for Jarrett in City Hall, "Obama looked at her and said 'Let's slow down here.' He's heard what goes on in Chicago City Hall," Mendell told me. Eventually Obama relented after meeting Jarrett and getting her reassurances that she would look out for Michelle—they soon became good friends, and she'll be at his side in the White House—but "initially he was very hesitant about her taking that job."
Obama was so keen on escaping the miasma of corruption that surrounded him, Mendell says, that he wouldn't even joke about it. During one campaign trip, Obama bought pizza and asked his entourage of reporters to chip in five dollars apiece, Mendell recalls. "I said, as kind of joke, 'That'll be 20 bucks on my expense account.' He chuckled and said, 'You only gave me five dollars.' He didn't get it. It was like, 'How could you even think of doing that?' … The guy does have a moral streak."
And, finally, he ends on a point of fairness:
So, yes, there will be questions about Obama, and there should be. "There's something on everybody. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption," Willie Stark declared memorably in Robert Penn Warren's classic novel of political corruption, "All the King's Men" (inspired by Louisiana's Huey Long, of course). Obama may never entirely free himself of his association with the appalling Blagojevich and the state's culture of corruption.
...
But it's also clear that Obama came out of the presidential election intent on thoroughly burying these questions—on proving that, like Harry Truman, he could out-ethics everybody else. Hence, at the beginning of the transition, when questions arose about his relations with lobbyists, his campaign announced the strictest and most comprehensive ethics rules ever applied to an incoming administration. As initially drafted, they prohibited anyone who had lobbied or registered as a lobbyist in the previous 12 months even from working for the transition team in the policy areas on which they lobbied. They were so strict, in fact, that even some reform types complained they were excluding advisors who had lobbied Congress on not-for-profit issues like human rights, environment and labor.
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