OPINION:
You can bet that if George Bush were president, the media would be out for blood. You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not notice that gas is four smackers a gallon, real unemployment is still above 10 percent, America is trillions in debt with no end to annual trillion-dollar deficits in sight, we are still in two wars and itching for another one in Libya, China is poised to eclipse our economy in just a couple of years, and 25 percent of our kids do not graduate from high school.
President Obama is not blamed for any of this by his lapdog media. Giving Mr. Obama a pass on these and other issues is proof positive the president is the media darling.
It wouldn’t be the same if Mr. Bush were president. In fact, as you will recall, the media relentlessly hammered Mr. Bush on the housing collapse, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, etc. The media hated Mr. Bush, and he was hardly a hard-core conservative.
The media despise anything that smells of conservatism. Such is the reasoning they have insinuated the Tea Party is full of ignorant racists, conservatives don’t care about the elderly and that energy companies rape the environment for profit. The list goes on and on.
All of this hypocrisy and liberal slant to reporting have led to the majority of Americans not trusting the media to report objective facts. Media spin has replaced truth.
Even with all the media spin designed to prop up our rookie president, his poll numbers continue to slide south. The American people know a sham when they see one.
Interestingly, along with the president’s, the media’s poll numbers also continue to slide to the south. Corollary or coincidence?
It’s laughable how the Obama lapdog media are already discussing that the GOP has no front-runner in the 2012 presidential race even though the election is more than 18 months away. The purpose of this spin, of course, is to try to convince Americans that the GOP is rudderless and that the country will be better off with Mr. Obama for four more years.
There is no blaring trumpet from the media that Mr. Obama may possibly be in way over his head, that electing him in 2008 with such a thin resume was a mistake and that the damage his socialist policies could do to the nation over the next four years could be catastrophic and irreversible.
The real damage is what the media have done to themselves. Described as the Fourth Estate to put a blazing spotlight on our government, our news media have compromised their role and, therefore, their credibility. Media without credibility are useless and irrelevant.
Hardly anyone watches the national nightly news, and subscribers to big-time liberal newspapers are shrinking dramatically. Granted, the new digital media have made a tremendous impact on how Americans get and consume their news, but a liberal bias has not done the media any favors. The truth is, the nightly news and the liberal rags are going the way of the dodo bird.
Make no mistake, President Obama is getting a pass from the media because most of those in the dominant media are hard-core liberals. Most Americans are not.
The American public is not nearly as naive or easily manipulated as what the liberal reporters in the newsroom believe. Thanks to the new media and cable news giant Fox News, there is now competition for viewers and readers, and the believability factor at Fox is kicking major butt. The spin does indeed stop here, and I like it.
Ted Nugent is an American rock ’n’ roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is the author of “Ted, White and Blue: The “Nugent Manifesto” and “God, Guns & Rock ’N’ Roll” (Regnery Publishing).
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